Australian Research Council (2024-)

In process. Future bid on the seductive power of Financial Apps. Submission. April 2024.

Retirement (2024)

COVID (2020-22)

During Covid I did research for ADASS (Association of Directors of Social Services) North West. I produced this report:

I also joined the North West Public Health BME group to monitor death rates in NW England. Combined, I felt like I was in a horror movie: the reports from care workers, doctors and nurses was completely different to the script being offered by the government i.e. workers had no PPE, they were working in impossible conditions and BME people were dying at a much higher rate. I wrote about this in the necroeconomics paper as the malevolent disregard by the government towards frontline workers became more explicit. My perspective and all our research was vindicated by the Government’s Covid Inquiry. Very few conditions have changed, in fact it may now be much worse as a combined result of Brexit, more austerity and the huge numbers of health and social professionals leaving their occupations – see Care & Gratitude paper. What we saw was a latent disregard for the life of those who staff the frontlines of the welfare state and those who care for others: a completely cruel and care-less government that lined its own pockets at the expense of the lives of the most vulnerable.

During this time I also submitted two large research grants for work on care with the Imagination Centre at Lancaster. They centred on the design of care and a thorough overhaul of the current system, including a different financial model. Both were unsuccessful (although I learnt a huge amount).

Digital Science Institute (2019)

Awarded to develop workshop with Dr Simon Yuill and Lancaster practitioners on Digital Care workforce platforms.

Funding: Digital Science Institute (Lancaster), £5000

Professorial Fellowship “A Sociology of Values and Value’ (2013-2017)

A study of what happens when economic value is accumulated from spheres previously considered non-economic: social media and prosperity theology. For instance, Facebook makes considerable economic gain from commodifying friendship through the algorithmic conversion of ‘likes’ into advertising sales. Does this process reconfigure the value of friendship? What happens to values such as loyalty and care in this conversion? Do friends capitalise upon their own value,? Digital friendliness is conducted through rhythms of interaction driven by algorithms that artificially stimulate the intensity of exchange. Within this, affect is differently (digitally) co-present and authority is dispersed. Yet the encounter (technically and textually mediated by the design of the site) can be powerfully affective – people can be outraged and hurt by their digital encounters. What happens when everything they post is ignored – attributed with no relational value? Value may be momentarily lost through one wrong sentence – but is this sustained over time? Is their person-value diminished or left intact?. See https://values.doc.gold.ac.uk/. With Dr Simon Yuill as Postdoctoral Fellow on software design, and Danny Zscombler as PhD student on Prosperity theology in London.

I was Head of Department at Goldsmiths from 2010-2013.

The Fourth Shift: On the Borders of Home, Labour and Affects (2007-2010)

Principal Investigator, Professor Eeva Jokinen, University of Joensuu, Finland. Funded by The Finnish Academy, January 2007. Role as international advisor.

Making Class through Televised Ethical Scenarios (2005-2008)

Principal Investigator with Dr Helen Wood, Manchester.

The research explored how televisual texts mediate morality by showing how class is currently produced through different methods for self-formation. Mapping the current possibilities for making the self in popular culture enabled us to understand how class-based identities are formed. Whilst many social commentators promote and predict the demise of class, this research suggests that class is not declining at all but is instead made and resourced differently. See Reacting to Reality Television book.

CRESC Contingencies of Value ESRC Centre for Social and Cultural Change (2007)

I was part of the initial bid to the ESRC but moved to Goldsmiths. I retained a small amount to study what matters to people who are beyond the normative understandings of exchange value personhood. Three groups were interviewed: ex-offenders, a group of older women +80 and a group of young mothers to examine what matters when investments either previously made, not made or impossible to make do not generate attachments to future participation in society. Published as “Struggles for Value” and informing future work on “subjects of value”.

I was Head of Department at Manchester from 2001-2004 thus considerably reducing research time.

Regenerating Communities through Radio: A case study of Radio Regen (2003-2004)

The study involved 3 stages. The first was an organizational evaluation, examining work culture and how this impacts upon training policy and the radio stations’ output. The second examined training and volunteers and the third was a community evaluation to understand how both the former two stages of analysis can be used to understand the impact of the Radio stations on their local community.

Representations of Smokers (1999- 2000)

Seed corn funding, Faculty of Social Science, Lancaster University (with Professor Hilary Graham and Jai Hadcraft). A literature search and review of the state of research on smoking. This included all health promotion literature alongside TV and media representations.

Violence, Sexuality, Space: A Study of the Practical and Policy Context of Sustainable Safe Public Places (1998-2001)

Sexual Citizenship: Space, Consumption, Law (1997)

Seedcorn funding from Lancaster University (with Les Moran). This research generated pilot data for the above ESRC research proposal. It began with three different focus groups (Lesbians, gay men and heterosexual women, but added a trans group later when identified through the research) to generate an issue based understanding of homophobic violence and the production of safer-space

Women, ‘Race’ & Resistance in Music (1992)

In New York, LA and Manchester. I interviewed performers and powerful women in the music industry to identify the sites, places and motivations for the production and circulation of different forms of feminist address. Published as: (the 1992 rap and race article). Please note this article was published when it was only a submitted draft. It needed a great deal of editing.

Sexual Awareness Amongst Young People in the North East (1991)

Using innovative research methods, such as popular cultural questionnaires, and intensive interviewing with a sampled group of 16-24 year olds, it generated issue understanding that was used to develop training materials for Further Education staff development on HIV/AIDS awareness.

Multi-Ethnic Educational Needs in Hereford and Worcester: Part Two (1988-89)

This research identified the needs of black students in Hereford and Worcester Further Education Colleges. Firstly, to inform the design and provision of staff development courses.  Secondly, to establish a county network for the incorporation of this research in the review and design of curriculum materials. 

Follow-up study to doctoral research (1988)

This traced the eighty -three young women studied for the PhD, to develop theories of sexuality and explore the influences of popular culture upon familial and employment decisions. Finally published as Formations. This research makes the study into a rare longitudinal ethnographic analysis. I was very lucky to be given time by Worcester College of Higher Education to undertake the research.

The research culture at the time was far less intense and so I focussed on the topics that interested me rather than those established by a research council. The funding was local not national.

Multi-Ethnic Needs in Hereford and Worcester: Part One (1988)

This involved interviewing all managers and department heads in Hereford and Worcester Further Education Colleges to map the form and type of racism in existence in college to develop staff training programmes to fit local requirements. The initial research produced training material on anti-racism rather than research papers. When I came to publish the papers I was advised not to do so because I was reporting on highly contentious issues.

Research Fellow for ESRC: The Educational and Vocational Choice of School Leavers (1983-84)

This research, quantitative and qualitative, produced a data bank by monitoring and recording the qualifications and labour market choices of all sixteen -year old school pupils in Cheshire. Use was made of SPSS computation through IBM mainframes.

PhD: An Ethnographic Study of Young Women and Their Experience of Caring Further Education (1981-1986)

With Further Education as an institutional foci and tracing movement through broader cultural spaces it explored how young, white, working class women became implicated in the construction of their own subjectivities in relation to wider structures of class, gender and race.  Drawing from the theories of Bourdieu, Butler, Gramsci, Genovese and Foucault the study demonstrated how young women implicate themselves in subordination and self-surveillance, providing free caring in areas where state provision was withdrawn.

Note: I had so much ethnographic data that I was struggling to make sense of it and then I had to get a job to survive which took up a great deal of time, moving, new courses, new life, which meant I took 5 years to complete. An issue which would now be frowned upon and the department penalised for my late submission.