Dr Alison Wallace

Profile

Biography

Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Housing

• HNC Housing (College of North East London)

• MA Social Policy (York)

• PhD (York)

I am a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Housing and have been part of the Centre for Housing Policy since 2001, working on a range of projects relating to the sustainability of marginal homeownership, shared ownership housing, private landlords and housing markets. I have worked in Northern Ireland on housing inequalities and the fallout of the financial crisis. I am currently developing an interest in the use of new digital technologies in housing, from risk profiling in housing access and the use of Internet of Things technologies in people’s homes. 

I work on policy-driven impactful research and have contributed to policy debates around shared ownership, Northern Ireland’s housing markets and sustainable homeownership. 

Previously a social housing practitioner with many years experience, I completed my doctoral research into the cultural economy of local housing markets in 2007.

I served as the Secretary of the Housing Studies Association and was a Committee member between 2011 and 2014. I am a Trustee of the Housing Studies Charitable Trust since 2019, a Churchill Fellow - for work on homeownership education in the US - since 2016 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts since  2016.  

I lead undergraduate modules on housing policy and contribute to other modules for undergraduates and research methods training for postgraduates. 

Alison is currently a supervisor of two PhD candidates Carl Makin (Social housing regulation) and Yiqian Wang (marketisation social housing in China and the UK). She is interested in PhD supervision relating to any of her areas of interest.

Research

Overview

Research interests

• Housing and AI/ML technologies
• Low cost homeownership
• Sustainable homeownership
• Self-build housing
• Housing markets
• Cultural-economy
• Systematic review methodology

Projects

• Research into the sustainability of affordable homeownership programmes for the Standard Life Foundation.
  
  
• Code Encounters: A study exploring the societal impact of algorithmic risk-profiling tools used by lenders and landlords in relation to access to housing funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
  
  
• Research into the use of Internet of Things smart home environmental sensors to mitigate indoor air quality risks in social housing.