Ashleigh Rushton

Dr Rushton is a Human Geographer who specialises in disaster risk reduction and gender. Her research focuses on disaster risk reduction, climate change, gender and health. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Fraser Valley, BC and holds a postdoctoral trainee scholarship from the Canadian Immunization Research Network (CIRN). She is a qualitative researcher and has an interest in better understanding the ways in which social constructions, such as gender, shape how people are affected by, and recover from disasters. She is currently working with a diverse research team, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), to examine the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on migrant South Asian mothers in the Fraser Valley.

Dr Rushton completed her PhD at The Joint Centre for Disaster Research at Massey University, Wellington Aotearoa New Zealand in Emergency Management (2021). Her doctoral research examined rural men's ontological stories of the Kaikōura earthquake, Aotearoa New Zealand. Originally from the UK, Dr Rushton holds a Master of Science (MSc) in International Disaster Management from The University of Manchester (2015), Manchester and a Bachelors of Arts (BS) in Human Geography from Northumbria University (2013), Newcastle.