PhD Studentship - Legal Geographies of Vehicle Dwelling

Applications are invited for a funded PhD studentship with the Manchester Law School at Manchester Metropolitan University. This socio-legal research project will explore the everyday legalities and mobilities of vehicular dwelling.   

Vehicular dwelling sits uneasily within legal and spatial categories designed around fixed forms of residence. As people increasingly live, travel and work from vehicles, they move through legal and jurisdictional spaces, encountering a range of legal processes: parking and traffic regulation; insurance; social care; health; employment; education; planning and waste management, each overlaid by a longstanding legal tension around the public/private divide. Drawing on legal geography and mobilities scholarship, this project understands vehicular dwelling as a form of everyday mobility through which law, movement and dwelling are continually negotiated.

Exploring ‘van life’ as a specific form of vehicular dwelling, this project expands on the aspirational and/or touristified framing of this way of life to scrutinise inequities, immobility and systemic legal inadequacies faced by vehicle dwellers. 

Objectives

This project aims to examine how mobile forms of dwelling are governed and regulated.

Research Objectives:

• To map the plural legal and regulatory frameworks encountered through vehicular dwelling.

• To understand vehicle dwellers' everyday experiences of these legal and regulatory frameworks and how they shape mobility practices.

• To understand what these encounters reveal about the normative assumptions underpinning law and its privileging of fixed forms of dwelling.

Funding

This studentship is open to home and international applicants. Home and international tuition fees will be covered for the duration of the 3-year award.

The student will receive a standard stipend payment for the duration of the award. These payments are set at a level determined by the UKRI, currently £21,805 for the academic year 2026/27.

Candidate requirements

• A postgraduate degree (or equivalent) in the subject of law or a field demonstrably relevant to the area of research inquiry (together with a first-class or upper second class undergraduate degree in a related subject).

• Excellent written and oral communication skills in English.

• Enthusiasm for multidisciplinary research and innovative methodologies.

• Research experience in socio-legal studies or legal geography desirable though not essential.

How to apply

If you have any questions, please contact the proposed Principal Supervisor,  Dr. Christopher Morris (c.morris@mmu.ac.uk).

To apply you will need to complete the online application form for a full-time PhD in Law. Please note that you are not required to submit a research proposal through the online application portal.

Please complete the Doctoral Project Applicant Form, and include your CV and a covering letter to demonstrate how your skills and experience map to the aims and objectives of the project, the area of research and why you see this area as being of importance and interest.

Please upload these documents in the supporting documents section of the University’s Admissions Portal or email the requested documents to pgradmissions@mmu.ac.uk.

Expected start date: October 2027.

Please quote the reference: FoBL-CM-2027-28-Legal Geographies Vanlife

This PhD project is one of six independent projects open for applications, with only three funded studentships available. All applications will go through an initial review stage conducted by the project supervisors. Candidates selected from this stage will be invited to a second-round interview, where final funding decisions will be made based on performance across all projects.