Dr Mhairi-Jean Ross is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. She is a social geographer with over two decades of experience working across housing practice, research, and policy spaces. Her research is shaped by a commitment to understanding and challenging structural harm, inequality, and neglect, particularly in relation to housing, poverty, and low-income parenthood. Mhairi's Gaelic roots have influenced her ongoing interest in indigenous research methods and creative methods, including harnessing elements of Scottish traditional ceilidh (concert) culture to engage research participants through story and song.

Mhairi has extensive professional experience in housing and community learning and development in Scotland, including five years managing local authority homelessness services and over a decade managing third sector housing support services for mental health service users. Her work has included embedding social prescribing models within housing associations throughout Glasgow. She has previously lectured in Community Learning and Development at the University of the Highlands and Islands and the University of Glasgow.

Mhairi’s PhD examined the significance of women’s networks of support in navigating gender, poverty, place, and lone motherhood across the life course, based on research with lone mothers in Easterhouse, Glasgow (1980-2021) - a neighbourhood that has experienced some of the deepest and most persistent pockets of deprivation in Europe since the 1970s. Since completing her PhD, she has worked on the Changing Realities participatory research program at the University of York, where her work involved developing participatory policymaking models and contributing directly to policy-influencing work on the Child Poverty Strategy 2025. She has also worked on the Safety Nets project at the University of Glasgow, a comparative study of devolved social security systems across the UK.

Mhairi has recently been awarded funding from the British Academy to document the rent strike and subsequent community land buyout of the Carbeth Hutters in Stirlingshire, Scotland. This research situates the historical struggle for land justice within wider debates on land reform in Scotland, with a video and book output planned for 2027.

Research

• Intersections of lone parenthood and working-class life
• Gendered Inequalities and Housing Provision
• Community Learning and Development approaches
• Community Landownership
• Research Methods including Life Course research, Participatory and Indigenous Methods

To date, Mhairi's research has included PhD research on low-income lone motherhood over course 1980-2021, participatory research into low-income parenthood with Changing Realities program at University of York, Comparative Research Study Safety Nets into the devolved functions of UK social security system and most recently work on Sensory Lives project at King's exploring the lived realities of neurodivergent children and young people living in temporary homeless accommodation in the UK.

Expertise and public engagement

• Co-Host of Special Event: ‘Working-Class Feminist Knowledge(s) in the Academy: Theory, Practice and Method’ (April 2026), BSA Annual Conference, University of Manchester
• Invited Speaker: Lone Motherhood in Place and Time and the Unmaking of Home’, (February 2026) The Politics of Motherhood Conference, University of Worcester
• Co-Host of Symposium: ‘Women, Housing and Community’ (September 2025), Centre for Place and Memory, University of Stirling
• ‘Women of Easterhouse: A Celebration of Struggle and Solidarity’ (October 2024), Glasgow Women’s Library, PhD Seminar and Workshop: (Attended by over 70 Easterhouse community members and external stakeholders)
• Invited Speaker: “Exploring Lone Mother Engagement with Support Networks over Life-Course in a Multiply Deprived UK Neighbourhood Setting” (October 2024) Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence Seminar, Glasgow