Human geography PhD

I am interested in supervising doctoral students in all areas related to my research interests in sociological, cultural and geographical analyses of race, ethnicity and popular culture. In particular, my work addresses: theorising race and racism in football, with particular focus on connecting ideas around Empire, de/coloniality, racialised identities and anti-racist resistance; Black British leisure, musical and sonic cultures and spaces; the experiences of British Asians in sport and leisure; and social, cultural and geographical aspects of the contemporary English seaside and coast, especially the connections between race, whiteness, migration and ‘new’ spaces of multiculture;

My current PhD students are undertaking research on the experiences of bisexual women in sport, Islam and the 2022 men's FIFA World Cup in Qatar, and tourism in post-Communist Romania. 

I am able to supervise doctoral research across the fields of sociology, cultural studies, and politics as they pertain to sport, physical education, fitness, and related fields. However, I am particularly interested in sociological studies of the following specialist topics:

• Martial arts and combat sports
• Sport-related violence
• Risk, injury and medical care in sport
• Consent in sport

I'm interested in supervising anyone for PhD or MRes with a passion for critically examining sport or fandom. With my expertise and networks across Europe, I would love to supervise projects on range of topics around political mobilisation, collective behaviour and community engagement in the world of sport (and football in particular). Topics could include: 

Sport's impact on climate change

Sport and Leisure in the lives of refugees and asylum seekers

Mental health and fandom

Football fandom across Europe – including ultras, away fan experiences, political movements

Political activism amongst football fans, including anti-racism and anti-discrimination, environmentalism or community engagement.

Sport and Hate Crime

I am currently supervising four PhD students, two of whom are part of a H2020 Marie Curie Sklodowska Innovative Training Network. I am interested in supervising MRes and doctoral projects relating to (feminist) political ecology, and in particular, projects that relate to social and environmental justice, climate and 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.

I am interested in supervising postgraduate research students (PhDs and MRes) in the following areas: community led water resource governance; sustainable water futures; elder environmental activism; nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation, degrowth theory in relation to environmental citizenship.

I would be interested in supervising postgraduate students in the following areas:

- Geographies of sport and leisure- Playful cities and urban everyday life- Community-supported agriculture / community gardening

I also welcome discussions on other potential topics.

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas: critical race theory, de/post-colonial studies, feminist activism, sexualities, trans studies, political philosophy, history of ontology.

I welcome the opportunity to supervise PhD students with an interest in the areas of tourism and wellbeing, place and wellbeing, sustainability, nature-based tourism, coastal tourism, blue spaces, water and wellbeing, rural tourism, cultural/heritage tourism, national parks and biospheres.

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 Asia and Europe. My past and present students also work on very different kinds of topic, including around race and sexuality, autophenomenography and psychotherapy, children's violence to parents, climate-induced migration as an emergent political and policy field, adolescent refugee mental health, female genital mutilation in Southern England, honour based violence and the British police, trans lives in Bolivia, refugee women and yoga in Sweden- and postdoctoral research on peacemaking in the Basque country. 

I'm interested in supervising postgrad projects in (but not limited to) the following areas: sexual politics outside the metropolis; social and cultural geographies of fat men; Participatory Action Research with LGBTQ communities; and Bear subcultures and spaces.

Political economy of television production. Aesthetics and narrative in television. Historical development of British television. Representations of space, place and identities in British screen cultures. Science fiction, fantasy and horror, in particular, British folk horror. Telefantasy, world cinema, screen technologies, the sociology of space. Screen acting and performance.

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 addition, I welcome proposals from students seeking to adopt creative and inventive methodologies and methods. I am currently supervising projects on: lived experiences of the anthropocene; urban place-attachment across generations; sequential art in architectural practice; urban pocket parks; generation and automobility futures; and the wellbeing of refugee children.

Marina’s PhD supervisory interests are closely aligned with her research interest and experience. These include:

- Sustainable Tourism Development for Resilient Communities - i.e. the complexity of tourism development in the Golbal South; niche (tourism) product development; the impact of heath crisis on tourism communities (Ebola, COVID); healthy lifestyle tourism development and management; Local, National and IDOs' interventions for sustainability and resilient communities;  travel philanthropy, serious leisure and the act of giving beyond volunteering;

- Innovation, responsible entrepreneurship and sustainability in tourism - community-based and responsible tourism approaches; circular economy, contemporary arts and community development, contemporary arts for sustainable development in Africa; rural diversification and regeneration through tourism.

- Policy, Planning and Governance - i.e. master-planning; training needs analysis and capacity building; responsible leadership; participatory and community cetred development; capacity building processes and practices; overtourism and tourismophobia; tourism and the circular economy.

Tijana is an experienced PhD supervisor and examiner and welcomes informal enquiries from potential PhD applicants who are interested in topics and methodological approaches related to her research interests, projects and publications.

These include but are not limited to the PhD research project ideas which propose to rely on visual and creative qualitative research methods and/or are related to the themes of heritage, tourism and national identity studies; travel, tourism and art; and representations of places, cultures and identities in promotional materials and popular media. 

Tijana is currently supervising 5 PhD research projects: 

• Ms Marineli Codin, working title: Constructing and Projecting National Identity in Post-Communist Romania: a Longitudinal Analysis of Tourism Promotional Materials from 1990 until 2020 (research degree study on-going, Lead Supervisor) 
• Ms Katharina Buerger, working title: Conflicts, Protest and Resistance to (Modern) Olympic Games (research degree study on-going, Lead Supervisor) 
• Ms Lorraine Ojukwu Odumegwu Ojukwu, working title: National Identity Construction in Tourism Promotional Materials in Postcolonial Namibia (research degree study on-going, Second Supervisor) 
• Ms Matea Hanžek, working title: Post-Conflict Destination Branding and National Identity Construction: a Discourse Analysis of Croatia’s Official Tourism Promotional Materials (research degree study on-going, Lead Supervisor) 
• Mr Brendan Downing, working title: Construction of Greeknes in the Travels and Artwork of Fred Boissonnas (research degree study on-going, external co-supervisor, National College of Art and Design, Ireland)

I am an experienced PhD supervisor, and welcome enquiries from potential candidates interested in these and similar areas within the nexus of ethics, tourism, consumer behaviour, marketing and critical cruise studies.