Sociology PhD

I supervise PhD students on a range of topics broadly relating to identity, ecology, climate change, human-animal relations and mental health. I am especially interested in supervising students adopting qualitative methodological and critical theoretical approaches. Interdisciplinary projects are especially welcome. Recent/current projects I have supervised address the following:

• Terror Management Theory approaches to climate change communication
• Ethnography of place in the Anthropocene
• Empirical application of social practice theory to no-fly holidays
• Foucauldian analysis of ecotourism practices
• Practices of contemporary fatherhood
• Ethnography of mental health interventions in lifestyle TV 

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in all areas related to my current research interests (please see above), as well as those focusing on broader issues linked to sport and popular culture, in/equality, identity and social justice.

My current PhD students are undertaking research on the experiences of bisexual women in sport, the use of trauma-sensitive yoga with refugee women, and gentrification at the English seaside. 

Risk and trust in and healthcare settings;  Perspectives on vaccines (including hesitancy and refusal);  Public understanding of science;  Poverty, deprivation, and social exclusion

Research ideas related to Indian subcoontinent and the Global South are particularly welcome. Interested students are encouraged to send a short email to Apurv with their initial ideas.

Mark is interested in supervising anyone with a passion for critically examining sport or fandom. This can be through the mobilisation of football fans around the world, challenging discrimination in and through sport, understanding sport governance and corruption or the role sport can play with refugees and asylum seekers.

I am currently on the supervision team for Vanessa Stone De Guzman on her thesis, 'Out and about with my disabled child: The lived experience of parents of children with Down Syndrome'. 

I would be interested in supervising projects on motherhood, teenage pregnancy, fatherhood, parenting or related areas. 

I am currently supervising three PhD students, two of whom are part of a Marie Curie Sklodowska Innovative Training Network programme on which she is Principal Investigator. I am interested in supervising doctoral projects relating to (feminist) political ecology, and in particular, projects that relate to social and environmental justice, agrarian resource extractivism, decolonial thinking and critical approaches to sustainable development. 

I supervise students across a range of social science disciplines, although my main discipline is sociology.  I am interested in supervising projects in sociology of science and technology / science and technology studies, sociology of work and employment, social theory. Projects I currently supervise are researching science and technology, work and employment, climate change / emergency, communing / the commons, trade union studies, gender and design, children and migration, and mental health.

Applications to the following proposal are very welcome: Managing science: workers and management in the replication and reproduction of scientific knowledge

Despite Wajcman’s exhortation for management studies and science studies to combine to understand science and technology better (1) there has been very little collaboration or cross fertilization between these two areas of social science in the past two decades. Studies of the working practices of professional, academic scientists are rare, despite the importance of these workers in the knowledge economy, and there is little understanding of the relationship between HR practices, labour process and scientific knowledge production and reproduction.

This project will use a management studies perspective to consider a contemporary ‘crisis’ in formal science. The crisis of reproducibility – the inability for one research team to replicate the results obtained by another research team – has received considerable attention in the scientific press in recent years (2, 3). A recent survey in Nature found that 50% of scientists have failed to reproduce one of their own experiments (4).

This problem threatens to undermine public confidence in scientific expertise and opinion, a very major problem given the legitimised discourse of climate change denial (5). The project will investigate the management of scientists involved in knowledge production work, and will examine the labour process surrounding knowledge production (6, 7). It will consider whether it is constraints of work, managerial and institutional imperatives (8), an instrumental orientation to career (9), and a ‘publish or perish’ culture (10) that are barriers to replication and factors in low reproducibility rates.

This research will address these issues from a combined management studies and sociology of work perspective. In particular the research will consider the relationship between the construction of occupational identities, managerial control of work time and the decision making processes that take place inside work teams regarding identification of experiments to replicated and / or reproduced (10). The project will adopt a qualitative approach, including semi-structured interviews and an ethnography, and documentary analysis deployed across a range of disciplines and trans-disciplines.

Research questions

1. How is the academic science labour process organised, managed and resisted?

2. How do teams of scientists in different disciplines decide on replication experiments and how is this work allocated?

3. What is the role of reproducibility/ replication in the formation of occupational identities by academic scientists?

References

1. Wajcman, J. (2006) 'New connections: social studies of science and technology and studies of work', Work, Employment and Society, 20, 4, 773-786. 2. Harris, R. (2017) Rigor Mortis. How sloppy science, worthless cures, crushes hope and wastes billions, New York: Basic Books. 3. Freedman, L.P., et al (2015) 'The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research', PLoS Biol, 13, 6. 4. Baker, M. (2016) ‘Is there a reproducibility crisis? Nature 533, 452–454 (26 May 2016)  5. Makri, A. (2017) ‘Give the public the tools to trust scientists’ Nature 541, 261 (19 January 2017)  6. Thompson, P. (1983) The Nature of Work.  An introduction to debates on the labour process, London: Macmillan. 7. Thompson, P. and Ackroyd, P. (1995) 'All quiet on the workplace front?', Sociology, 29, 4, 615-633. 8. Bradley, H., Erickson, M., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2000) Myths at work, Cambridge: Polity.  9. Erickson, M., Bradley, H., Stephenson, C. and Williams, S. (2009) Business in society: people, work and organizations, Cambridge: Polity 10. Erickson, M. (2015) Science, culture and society: understanding science in the twenty-first century. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Polity.

Students drawn to studying with me are generally people with a commitment to social change. All of them share my passion for researching resilience-related topics and most of their studies involve some form of co-production with communities, policymakers or practitioners. Many of them also volunteer for our social enterprise Boingboing and there are loads of opportunities in our Centre for students to get involved in some fabulous personal development activities, for example attending conferences on behalf of our Centre, being on the Management Group, staffing a stand etc. 

Prospective supervisory topics I get excited about include:

Co-productive and resilience-based approaches to tackling social and environmental issues including:

Child, family and adult mental health

Practitioner stress and burnout

Schools practices

Higher Education community-university partnership practices.

I have supervised two PhDs to completion and regularly supervise undergraduate dissertation projects. I welcome applications for PhD research from students interested in gender, sexuality, youth cultures, media representations, the place of media in everyday life, discourse analysis, diary research and creative methodologies. 

I am interested in supervising students in the interdisciplinary areas of migration, war, conflict, violence, refugees, transnationalism, ethnicity, mobilities, cities, migrant health and mental health, social inequalities, and environmental violence- particularly those working on Pakistan, Afghanistan, and migrant populations in Europe. My past and present students also work on very different kinds of topic, including race and sexuality, autophenomenography and psychotherapy, childrens’s violence to parents, adolescent refugee mental health, refugee women and government yoga, honour based violence and the British police, and FGM in the UK.

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in classed inequalities, urban sociology, social housing and ethnographic methodologies.

I am currently supervising the following projects:

Social and cultural exclusion through seaside gentrification on the south coast Bethan Prosser

Precarious practices and policies in the divided ‘smart city’ Matthew Smith

I am interested in supervising doctoral students on a range of topics including transport and mobilities, urban sociology, visual sociology and gender and generation. In addiiton, I welcome proposals from students seeking to adopt creative and inventive methodologies and methods. I am currently supervising projects on: non-flying holidays; lived experiences of the anthropocene; urban place-attachment across generations; sequential art in architectural practice; urban seaside gentrification; the datafication of cycling; and precarious mobile employment in the ‘smart city’.

Please get in touch if you would like to discuss PhD supervison. I am availabe to supervise doctoral students in areas including:

social work

child abuse and neglect

gender

substance misuse

neuro-diversity 

autistic women and girls

organisational culture 

I am interested in supervising doctoral research in the areas of outer space studies, environmental sociology and social movement studies, as well as work more broadly situated within psychosocial studies.

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in the areas of death, dying and grief, as well as the sociology of the internet and online methodologies. 

I am interested in supervising student projects in LGBT+ health and wellbeing, and in gay, bisexual, and trans masculinities. I would act as co-supervisor on projects in other areas that use Discourse Analysis, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, and mixed methods. 

Raphael is interested in receiving proposals for doctoral studies in his areas of expertise, including critical approaches to:

• protest and social movements
• criminal justice and social policy
• migration and citizenship
• policing and security
• nationalism and the far right
• critical and democratic theory

For current funding opportunities see: http://www.southcoastdtp.ac.uk/apply/

Supervision support can be provided to PhD students who are interested in queer theory, poststructuralism, the application of critical social theory, new materialism, intersectionality and feminist theory in health-related research. Focus areas include LGBTQ+ health and healthcare, resilience, trans health and mental health promotion. PhD students that she has supervised to completion worked on studies employing critical social theory and qualitative creative methods. She has examined more than 10 PhD/Professional Doctorate studies in the UK and/or abroad.