• Homelessness and housing precarity.
• Gender dimensions of homelessness.
• Gender inequalities in housing and the intersections with domestic abuse and health. 
• The links between housing inequalities and criminal justice  

Dr Joanne Bretherton is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the School for Business and Society. She joined the University of York in 2005 and until 2021 was a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Housing Policy. Her research interests centre on homelessness and housing exclusion, particularly the gender dynamics of homelessness, including the intersections with domestic abuse and health. Joanne has pioneered research that critically engages with assumptions about the gendered nature of homelessness and her work has been instrumental in the reconceptualization of women’s pathways through homelessness and in informing shifts in policy and practice nationally and internationally. She has published very widely on homelessness, including the 2023 volume The Routledge Handbook of Homelessness. Joanne has led research for the English, Scottish and Northern Irish Government(s), national homelessness and domestic abuse charities (including Crisis, St Mungo’s, Homeless Link, Emmaus and the Domestic Abuse Housing Alliance), the ESRC and across the EU (FEANTSA) and Japan.