Laura RobertsPhD studentEmail: l.e.v.roberts@qmul.ac.ukTelephone: +44 (0)20 7882 2744Room Number: Bancroft Building, Room 2.08ProfileProfileResearch Interests: London's waterways, Alternative acts of dwelling, Itinerancy, Hierarchies of Belonging, Community, Networks of Care and Support, Land ownership, Territoriality, Housing Design and Mononormativity, Queer Theory. PhD working title:Staying afloat? Making home and creating place on London's canals and riversMy project focuses on the lived experience of a group of people who live on boats on London's waterways without a permanent mooring, holding a low-cost Continuous Cruiser licence which means they have to move every two weeks to a new place, covering a minimum of 20 miles in one direction per year in order to meet the conditions of being on a 'bona fide journey' (CRT 2012). I am interested in the lived experience of this constantly shifting and shuffling so-called 'linear village' (Bowles, 2015). To date, Continuous Cruisers have largely be framed as a convivial, tight-knit community forced onto the waterways by the housing crisis (York 2016) with little attention to the formation of support and care that sustains this 'alterative' home-making or how this might sustain the waterways themselves. My background is in the charity sector, most recently running a charity that aims to reduce social isolation in Islington. In 2015, I returned to academia part-time where I completed an MA in Social Anthropology at SOAS and wrote about gender and anarchy on the waterways. I have since completed my MRes year at Queen Mary with a dissertation titled: A Boat of One’s Own: Queering Mononormativity Through Itinerant Live-Alone Boat-Dwelling on the Waterways in London . Academic background BA Fine Art, Falmouth University. 2006-2009 MA Social Anthropology, SOAS. 2015-2017 MRes Cities and Culture, QMUL. 2018-2019 Supervisors Professor Alastair Owens, School of Geography, QMUL Professor Geraldine Wharton, School of Geography, QMUL Funding LISS DTP Memberships The International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Research