Sophie Milnes is a Doctoral Researcher in Geography and Environment at Loughborough University. Her PhD project examines the impact of the current Cost-of-Living Crisis on young people's everyday geographies, focusing on shifts in university students' lifestyles and experiences. Her wider research interests include youth geographies, geographies of education and social difference.
Sophie’s other responsibilities include serving as the current Postgraduate Officer for Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group (RGS-IBG), as well as Doctoral Lead at Loughborough’s Institute of Advanced Studies (https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias) supporting the promotion and facilitation of international and interdisciplinary research.
Shifting campus geographies: youth transitions of university students during the cost-of-living crisis.
Supervisors: Professor Sarah Mills and Professor Louise Holt
Since 2021, the UK has been facing a rapidly accelerating ‘Cost-of-Living’ Crisis, of which university students represent a particularly vulnerable group. Direct and indirect impacts of the current crisis threaten the wider student experience and their associated transitions into adulthood.
Sophie’s research traces the more subtle, and often silenced, impacts on young people’s everyday campus geographies, looking at the ways in which financial pressures and instability may drive new social phenomenon. Students are now facing more heavily weighted decisions over their university lifestyles. Choices surrounding accommodation, commuting, part time work and the use of free time, such as extra-curricular engagement or volunteering, are becoming financially, socially and emotionally costly. Sophie’s research project aims to explore the ways in which university life is shifting for young people during this current period of change.