Alison completed all of her degree in Geography, receiving her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2002. An urban social geographer who studies contemporary urban and suburban culture, her work examines the contradictory relationships between cultural workers, cities, and suburbs with particular attention to questions of identity formation, artistic practice, and urban change. Her research has been published in edited collections as well as numerous scholarly journals. In 2013, she published the monograph Creative Margins: Cultural Production in Canadian Suburbs and, in 2017, she co-edited the textbook Urbanization in a Global Context.