Research
Grace's research sits at the intersection of climate finance and corporate accountability, with a particular focus on tracing corporate influence in water governance. She works across investigative and academic registers, using methods drawn from both fields to follow financial flows, scrutinise institutional actors, and understand the consequences of climate finance instruments for communities on the ground.
Alongside her doctoral work on Mexico City, Grace has researched water pollution in English rivers. As part of this work, she submitted Freedom of Information requests to the NHS to track the incidence of water-borne diseases including cholera in England, investigating whether these increases might be connected to the ongoing sewage pollution crisis.
Grace's doctoral research investigates the financialisation of water in Mexico City. Building on an understanding of financialisation as the increasing involvement of financial mechanisms in everyday life, she explores how and why the production of water scarcity as an investible asset — a product within climate finance — actively contributes to the reproduction of crisis in the city.
Her research uses investigative geographic methods, including "follow the money" approaches, to trace the financial actors, instruments, and logics shaping water governance in one of the world's most acutely water-stressed urban environments.
Grace was awarded a £10,000 grant from Antipode alongside colleagues from Mexico and Barcelona to study the effects of water financialisation on women in the most water-scarce areas of Mexico City. Fieldwork commences in October 2026, employing methods including body-mapping, site-specific performance, and participatory workshops.
Working as a researcher for the research institute Oxford Net Zero, Grace contributed first to the ACCESS-UK funded project, which sought to incorporate justice and equity principles into climate standards through participatory workshops with a youth cohort that resulted in this report. She subsequently worked on a meta-analysis of current corporate climate standards, including a detailed examination of regulatory practice and comparative assessment against product standards frameworks. The project has produced one forthcoming academic paper and several grey literature outputs.
Grace works within the Real Existing Degrowth working group as part of the €10 million ERC-funded REAL project, which explores post-growth alternatives for a more sustainable, climate-compatible economy in which more people can live well within planetary boundaries. She is co-supervised by Angelos Varvarousis at ICTA for her DPhil, and works collaboratively with the project alongside scholars including Giorgos Kallis and others, with outputs including publications in Environment and Planning E and a forthcoming piece in e-flux.
Worked with Drs Mark Hirons and Pete Barbrook-Johnson on a NERC-funded project examining public participation at the environmental science-policy interface. Grace was lead author on one resulting publication and co-author on a second, and co-hosted a webinar with colleague Molly James to present the work alongside four research publications.
Worked with Dr Amy Penfield (Department of Anthropology) on the UKRI-funded Infracursions project. Grace first contributed an in-depth literature review supporting the project's successful £1 million grant application, then returned to work on gender and extractivism in Amazonia once the project was under way.