Abbie Hardcastle

About Abbie

I'm an ESRC funded doctoral researcher in Human Geography at Newcastle University.

My research interests broadly cover the geographical (re)production of gender and sexual identities.

Project description

This research offers a critical spatial perspective focusing on the queer geographies young people in relation to UK secondary schools.

The study contributes significantly to the sub-disciplinary field of children and youth geographies, which is currently limited in its focus on sexuality.

This research will, via a multi-spatial lens, uncover the active role young people play in the queer geographies of schooling e.g., via, performing, transgressing, voicing and normalising sexual and other normativities. This will add to limited geographical understandings of how sexual and other normativities work together in school spaces to position sexuality in multifaceted constellations of power.

Through this co-productive participatory research young people will be reframed within key debates and benefit from being encouraged to exercise their agency within and beyond the structure of schooling.

Further, by listening to how CYP (re)imagine and queer both pedagogy and the spatialities of schooling —through creative arts-based methodologies — we can better understand the role of pedagogy and education in moving towards a less violent and queerer future; with young people placed as equals in this process of knowledge production and alternative ways of thinking.

Publications

• Hardcastle, A., & Loomis, J. (2025). Everyday geographies of cryptocurrency: crypto-masculinities, crypto-futures and gendered financial subjectivities in the United Kingdom. Gender, Place & Culture, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2605575

• Hardcastle, A. (2025) ‘Re-Building Education brick by brick’, Journal of Imaginary Research, 10, pp. 58-59. Available at: https://journalofimaginaryresearch.home.blog/category/volumes/ 

Presentations

• 2025: Creative Diaries for Researching Children and Young People’s Sexuality, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference - August 2025

• 2025: Education and the Imagination: Re-imagining the socio-spatialities of schooling through queer and abolitionist praxis, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference - August 2025

• 2024: ‘I came for the money but stayed for the revolution’: Crypto Visions, Crypto-Masculinities and the Gendered Geographies of Digital Finance. Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference - August 2024

• 2023: ‘It Happens Here’: Student Campaigning and Activism around Sexual Violence in the Context of the Neoliberal University. Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference - August 2023

Conference sessions hosted

• 2025: Imagining Alternative Futures through Science Fiction Writing, International Creative Research Methods Conference (Workshop)
• 2025: Thinking creatively about the (re)production of children and young people’s sexuality, Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference (Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group Sponsored Session)

Teaching

• GEO2043: Key Methods for Human Geographers
• GEO2110: Social Geographies
• GEO3153: Race and Nation
• GEO8017: Human Geography: Concepts in Action
• SOC2069: Researching Social Life

Academic qualifications, memberships and achievements

• MA in Human Geography Research, Newcastle University (2022-23)
• BA in Human Geography, Newcastle University (2019-22)
• Awards:
  • John Burgess Goddard Prize for the Best Economic Geography Themed Masters Dissertation
  • Best Overall Human Geography Undergraduate Dissertation
  • ‘Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group’ undergraduate dissertation of the year.

Contact and further information

• Email: a.hardcastle1@newcastle.ac.uk