Profile
Biography
After leaving school, I worked as a civil servant and as an insurance clerk before going to Liverpool University to do a degree in sociology. After graduating, I did a PhD (a study of the mother-daughter relationship) at Lancaster University. I joined the sociology department at York in 2014 after posts at Lancaster, Durham and Newcastle.
Research
Overview
From the start, my research has been concerned with social inequalities and social identities, particularly those of class, gender and generation. I have tried to explore the ways in which identity and inequality are interrelated through, for example, the conferring or the denial of value (if people are considered to be stupid or ignorant, how will their claims or demands be listened to?). ‘Identity’ is of course a contested and contentious term but I have been concerned to analyse it, not primarily in terms of the categories it produces, but in terms of how it is socially produced and how it socially circulates: in other words, I have asked how identity as such is possible, how it is made and re-made, and why it occupies such a privileged (yet often untheorized) position in the social imaginary.
More recently, I have been working – with Pete Steggals and Ruth Graham (Newcastle University) on a Wellcome Trust funded project on non-suicidal self-injury.
I am happy to discuss PhD supervision on identity, class, gender, self-injury, and /or using psychosocial perspectives, or the theoretical work of Bourdieu or Goffman.
Recently completed PhD students
- 2016 Jacqui Close (ESRC funded, ft) Ideals and Expectations: Representations, Practices and Governance of Contemporary Motherhood. Newcastle University.
- 2014 Michelle Addison (ESRC funded, ft) Knowing how to play the game at work: a study of class, gender and emotion in Higher Education. Newcastle University
- 2013 Gemma Metcalfe (ESRC funded, ft) Young women’s everyday lives: home and work in the North East of England. Newcastle University.
- 2013 Peter Steggals (ESRC funded, ft). Harming the body/constructing the self: identity, selfhood and power relations in the construction of a self-harming subject.
- 2012 Victoria Mountford, (ESRC funded, ft).Everyday class distinctions in Higher Education. Newcastle University.
- 2010 Sabina Begum (ft) Narratives of Radical Lives: Women, Auto/Biography and Feminism in Bangladesh. Newcastle University. (MPhil).
- 2009 Ceri Black (ESRC funded, ft) Virginity Practices: Sociological Perspectives on Agency, Identity and the Body. Newcastle University.
- 2007 Elaine Robson (ESRC funded,ft) Yobs and Slobs: British media representations of youth. Durham University.
- 2007 Steve Walls (ESRC funded, ft) ‘Are you being served?’: Gendered Aesthetics among Retail Workers. Durham University.
- 2007 Judy Richards (ESRC funded,ft) ‘Older’ women’s identities in cyberspace. Durham University.
- 2006 Susan Parker (pt) Mothering in the New Moral Economy: Making, Marking and Classing Selves. Durham University.
- 2005 Andrew Smith (University of Durham, Millennium Studentship, ft) The process of change in a public-private partnership. Durham University.
