![]() Meek’s Cutoff is at its 10th anniversary this year. An incursion into the very many universes that a costume designer’s work is paramount in creating. We have touched on other films as well, from the realistic contemporary design for Night Moves (2013), to cross-dressing Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and the colourful costumes made in-house for the television series At Home with Amy Sedaris. Their clothes in fact are so much part of the story, every little detail sewn into the characters, that I reached out to the costume designer, Vicki Farrell, to talk at length about the costumes for the film. The landscape is so vast, but the characters’ world is so confined that you come to inhabit their world, aware of every single sound and fact about their everyday life, about their moves, about their manners, about their clothes. Watching the film, you get the grip of the reality of the wagon trains going West, and of so many broken American dreams – there’s nothing spare in that. In Meek’s Cutoff (2010), the director builds drama with endless landscapes and endless days and an endless journey and characters gradually lost in front of the wilderness. It is a different kind of West that her characters are part of, a West they do not conquest, maybe do not even inhabit, but survive: quiet, spare, rendered through a visual naturalism and a realistic, subdued approach, but with more provocative messages running underneath. Kelly Reichardt has carved out a distinctive universe with her films, especially her westerns. That is why I find that it is fascinating to talk about a film from the point of view of each craft, such as costume design, because it opens up wider ways of interpretation of and interconnectivity with the film. ![]() I am currently leading a project on mothers' experiences of the cost-of-living crisis (2022-2023) and developing the concept of 'cushioning' and social insulation to understand experiences in the context of crises.A film is as good as the sum of its crafts, crafts that must seamlessly wove the threads that spun the illusion that is the story we watch so earnestly. This book was published by Bristol Policy Press in 2020 and shortlisted for the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize in 2021. This work has been published in journal articles, book chapters and as a monograph titled: 'Austerity, Women and the Role of the State: Lived Experience of Crisis'. Within this work, I seek to understand the mechanisms by which forms of inequality are reproduced and legitimised through a focus on everyday lived experiences. My recent research includes work on women's experiences of austerity and welfare reform and understanding the status of women's reproductive health and rights. My research interests centre around social inequalities, particularly the role of the state in shaping gender and class inequality. ![]() In addition, I am Book Review Editor for the journals Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society. I have also worked within various NGO organisations. ![]() I received my PhD from the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College in 2018. Before this, I worked at the University of York, the British Academy and Middlesex University. ![]() Email: joined the School as Lecturer in Sociology in January 2022. ![]()
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