Ann Varley

I have been enormously privileged in being able to travel widely both for my research and to share experiences with colleagues and students at universities overseas. In Scandinavia, I have enjoyed invitations to lecture or examine PhD theses at the universities of Roskilde and Copenhagen and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Like other former students of Peter Ward, I have participated in conferences at the University of Texas at Austin. I have twice been invited to urban studies events at the American University of Beirut and I have participated in several workshops at the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. Other invitations to speak have taken me to different cities in Mexico and Brazil, and to Canada, Chile, France, Lesotho, and Egypt.

I have been a senior member of the ESRC Peer Review College, a research proposal assessor for the Norwegian Research Council, and a regular advisor to the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. I was a member of the panel evaluating Geographical Research in Norway in 2018 and chaired the team undertaking the latest official evaluation of the University of Amsterdam’s MA in Latin American Studies.

I am on the editorial board of Home Cultures and, in Mexico, Investigaciones Geográficas and Revista Sociológica. My own work has been translated into Spanish, Italian, French and German.

While I have been the director of UCL Gender & Sexuality Studies, the number of students on the MA in Gender, Society and Representation has quadrupled and we have secured a permanent lecturer and a lecturer (teaching) dedicated to teaching on this MA. I have also helped a number of Gender and Sexuality Studies PhD students to obtain funding, from UCL Graduate Research Studentships, the Wolfson Foundation and UBEL.

To view Emeritus Professor Varley's publications, please visit UCL Profiles:

Publications

I have a very broad range of research and publication interests – from disasters to property titles and from ageing to family law – but my work has consistently revolved around the central theme of housing and home, with an empirical focus on urban Mexico. I have a particular interest in urban informality and in titling programmes intended to provide security of tenure in informal settlements. With the longest history of mass regularisation in Latin America, Mexico offers a unique opportunity to assess the impact of titling. I emphasise the need to listen to what residents themselves have to say – something often neglected in the international policy debates about titling programmes.

My research interests are reflected in four co-authored/edited books. These include the first book-length study of rental housing in Latin America and an edited collection on law and urban change in the global south which was translated with Swedish development cooperation funding and published in Bolivia as a resource for urban planning programmes in Latin America. Decoding Gender was published in translation by the gender studies programme of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with the support of the UN Development Fund for Women.

In recent years I have developed two research interests in South America. The first concerns industrial heritage and cultural property in the context of Britain’s historical involvement with the Atacama region of northern Chile. It focuses on railway heritage and a dispute over a locomotive built in Leeds, my hometown, for the nitrate mines of Tarapacá. The second is the recognition of same-sex marriage in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, emphasising the significance of home and inheritance in activism and legislation. I am also interested in the implications for the regulation of intimate relationships more broadly, particularly from the perspective of women in informal heterosexual unions.

I have over forty years experience of in social research in urban Mexico, with particular emphasis on housing and land tenure, using household surveys, interviews, discussion groups and life histories. On the basis of this experience, I produced a report for the OECD assessing the impact on urban housing of reforms to Mexico’s agrarian laws, to mark the country’s accession to the organisation in 1994. I also wrote an assessment of women’s role in self-help housing for UNIFEM and the Mexican government’s Social Development Secretariat and contributed to a joint report by the Mexican agency Desarrollo Integral de la Familia and the University of Texas on families in the Mexico-US border region.

My work on older people’s living arrangements led to the award of an ESRC-funded CASE studentship with HelpAge International and that on land tenure formalisation supported the case for a UCL Impact Award co-sponsored by the Cambodian Development Resource Institute (CDRI). I contributed a think piece on ‘Feminism’s pale shadows’ to a report published by the International Longevity Centre-UK to mark International Women’s Day.

The meeting of three experts with interests in Latin America at a conference on disasters I organised for the Royal Geographical Society led to the formation of La Red de Estudios Sociales en Prevención de Desastres en América Latina.

Using my language skills in outreach activities has brought me particular satisfaction. I translated a report by an international commission of experts on ‘Strategies for sustainable socio-economic development of the Doñana Region’ (Andalucía), which lead to the first Plan for Sustainable Development of the protected wetlands. I have acted as a volunteer translator for an international housing rights NGO.

A roof over their heads

The United Nations Global Campaign for Secure Tenure recognises that “securing tenure for the household does not necessarily secure tenure for women and children”. How should this insight be translated into practice?

Current Research Students

• Lourdes Toledo Tapia: Empowering enterprises? Microenterprise programmes for women in Guadalajara, Mexico. Funded by CONACYT, Lourdes did her first degree at the Tec de Monterrey, Mexico. She manages the micro and small business support programme at French NGO, the European Institute of Development and Cooperation.
• David Zarra: Leaving empty home(s) behind: the aftermath of the Spanish building boom. David’s research focuses on the meaning of ‘home’ in a country that has experienced a flood of evictions following an unprecedented building boom. He has worked with homeless charity Thames Reach.
• Fernando Gutiérrez Hernández: Attachment and memory: urban regeneration and the Alameda Central in Mexico City’s historic centre. Jointly supervised by Paulo Drinot and Ann, Fernando is based in UCL’s Institute of the Americas. He has taught in architecture and urbanism at the Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. 
• Rasa Kamarauskaitė: Daily negotiation of homosexual visibility in Lithuania. Rasa studied Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths after a first degree in Lithuania. She is supervised by Richard Mole, with Ann as her second supervisor.

Former research students

• Nina Laurie: Negotiating gender: women and emergency employment in Peru. Nina is Professor of Geography, Development and the Environment, University of St Andrews.
• José Francisco Bernardino Freitas: Townscape and local culture: the use of streets in low-income residential areas in Vitória, Brazil. Chico is an architect and lecturer in the Architecture and Urban Planning Department, Universidade Federal de Espírito Santo, Vitória.
• Liz Gooster: Gender, migration and the household: a case study of Guadalajara, Mexico. After working in publishing for ten years Liz became a business coach.
• Tanja Haque: Lived experiences of empowerment: a case study of a vocational training programme for women in Bangladesh. Tanja is a development consultant specialising in women’s rights who has worked for Christian Aid and CAFOD.
• Kuheli Mookerjee: Re-placing home: displacement and resettlement in India’s Narmada Valley Dam Project. Kuheli is Regeneration Manager at the UK’s Homes and Communities Agency.
• Emmeline Skinner: Livelihood strategies in old age: older people and poverty in urban Bolivia. The holder of an ESRC CASE award with HelpAge International, Emmy is now based in Nairobi as a Social Development Advisor with the FCDO.
• Emily Wilkinson: Decentralised disaster management: local governance, institutional learning and reducing risk from hurricanes in the Yucatán peninsula, Mexico. Emily is Senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute's Global Risks and Resilience Programme.
• Ben Flower: Donor-funded titling and urban transition: a case study of the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Ben was awarded a UCL Impact Award studentship to work with the Cambodia Development Resource Institute. He is now an urban development practitioner and researcher with UN-Habitat.
• Fatema Jahan: Gender and agency: clothing consumption practices of women factory workers in Bangladesh. Fatema was based in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, University of Dhaka when she received a Commonwealth Scholarship to study at UCL. She is a lecturer at the University of the West of Scotland’s London campus.
• Lo Marshall: Navigating gender-diverse worlds assembled upon binary expectations: investigating the experiences of trans people living in Britain. Lo's research was funded by ESRC and supervised by Ben Campkin and Ann. Lo then became a Postdoctoral Fellow in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at UCL's Institute of Advanced Studies.
• Tania Guerrero Rios: Using financialised housing as a planning instrument: the impact of urban containment policies on affordable housing in Mexico City. Tania’s PhD research was funded by CONACYT, Mexico. She is now an urban planner for the North Holland Provincial Government in the Netherlands.
• Nandita Dutta  Mapping intimacy: The South Asian beauty salon in London and the production of diasporic space. After completing her Overseas Research Scholarship-funded PhD in Gender & Sexuality Studies, Nandita is now a postdoctoral researcher with a project on climate flight at the University of Osnabrück, Germany.
• Marco Venturi: Out of Soho, back into the closet: re-thinking London’s gay community. Marco completed his PhD as a UCL Gender & Sexuality Studies postgraduate researcher, supervised by James Agar, with Ann as his second supervisor. He works in Student Services at the University of Greenwich.
• Aydan Greatrick: Identities in conflict: responses to and experiences of queer refugees from Syria in Lebanon and Germany. Aydan completed a UCL Gender & Sexuality Studies PhD funded by ESRC and supervised by Richard Mole. Ann was his second supervisor.
• Marcela López Mares: Where policy, planning and everyday practices meet: governmentality and facility provision in Ciudad Satélite. Marcela completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Ann was on her committee of thesis advisers. Marcela is a lecturer at the Universidad Autónoma de San Luís Potosí, Mexico.

• 1985-1987: Housing Tenure and the Urban Poor in Third World Cities Overseas Development Administration (with Alan Gilbert)
• 1997-2000: Gendered Housing: Identity and Independence in Urban Mexico ESRC  Evaluation: ‘outstanding’

Prizes and awards

• 1985: British-Mexican Society Postgraduate Prize for best doctoral thesis on Mexico 
• 2003 Christensen Fellowship, St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford 
• 2003: Individual residency, Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy
• 2007: University of London Research Fellow, Institute for the Study of the Americas
• 2010: Busk Medal, Royal Geographical Society
• 2014: Nominated for UCLU Student Choice Teaching Awards: Outstanding Teacher