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Karen is a Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Member of the Understanding Risk Research Group Cardiff ÀÖ¾ºÌåÓý. She has a First Class Honours Degree (BSc) and PhD in Social Psychology (Bristol) and has previously held academic posts at Brunel ÀÖ¾ºÌåÓý, Bangor ÀÖ¾ºÌåÓý, and the ÀÖ¾ºÌåÓý of East Anglia.

She has expertise in interpretive social science, specialising in experiential (qualitative longitudinal/temporal and psycho-social) approaches to environmental/landscape/infrastructure change and living with risk in changing times. Published work includes multimodal, innovative methodologies for narrative elicitation; analysis of societal, ecological and psychosocial narratives; deliberative, participatory and reflective methods for elucidating socio-technical transitions and transformative interventions. 

She was Cardiff lead for ESRC ‘Changing Lives and Times: Relationships and Identities Across the Life-course’ (2007- 2012), led the ESRC/EPSRC ‘Energy Biographies’ project (2010-2016) under the Energy and Communities joint venture, and was P-I for the AHRC network ‘Homing in: Sensing, sense-making and sustainable place-making’ - an arts/social sciences collaboration (2013- 2014). 

Recently (with Nick Pidgeon) she completed two major multimethod/multimodal qualitative case studies on the Welsh coast investigating saltmarshes as valuable, vulnerable habitats, within NERC’s Valuing Nature Programme (2016-2020).

Currently, her externally funded projects include social sciences work packages within Flexis ( - a consortium researching public responses to energy system change) and (UK Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre: studying public responses to industrial strategy in insecure times). She is also Co-I on the EPSRC project ‘Network headroom, engineering upgrades and public acceptance (NEUPA): Connecting engineering for heat system change to consumers and citizens’. These studies provide a broad-based socio-technical platform for working as part of the GGR-ERW Demonstrator project. 

Her peer review publications span disciplinary scholarship (eg British Journal of Social Psychology); specialist methodology journals (eg International Journal of Social Research Methodologies), multi-disciplinary journals e.g. Health, Risk and Society, Environmental Values, Science, Technology and Human Values); policy research (Environmental Policy, Environmental Science and Policy); and policy advisory reports (Foresight strategy).

She was consultant to the ESRC’s strategic initiative ‘Qualitative Resources for Social Research’ (2003) and editor of the journal ‘Qualitative Research’ (2014-2019).