Research in Sociology at Keele is organised into four inter-related themes:
· Family, Community, and Domestic Life
· Consumerism, Everyday Life, and Contemporary Culture
· Globalisation, Risk, Anxiety
· Urban Space and Post-Urban Cultures
Family, Community, and Domestic Life
This research theme covers research into different aspects of family and personal relationships. Graham Allan is best known internationally for his work on the sociology of friendship. He also has an impressive track record of work into the sociology of the family, including work on family change, marital affairs and step-families. Emma Head also works in the sociology of the family, with a policy-focus. Her main work has been on lone-parenting, care in family settings and poverty/social exclusion. Lydia Martens also has a well-developed interest in parenting, but with a particular interest in consumption and material cultures involved in constructing parent/child relationships. She has also worked on gender relations in relation to consumption and this has translated into an edited collection: Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life. Lisa Lau works on the social and spatial ‘entrapment’ of women, with particular reference to their spatial identities and narratives as constructed by others and women themselves. This work translates into a detailed socio-cultural examination of women’s positionality in homes, nations and global regions. Akin to Lau, who works on the ways in which women are constructed in particular environments, Dana Rosenfeld has written on the complex interactions between identity and space. She has documented how the intersection between biography and historically-constructed discourses of homosexuality across the life course produce ‘identity cohorts’ of lesbian and gay elders, with distinctive, historically-specific standards for practical action and moral evaluation that centre on how to appropriately define and enact homosexual identities in public versus private spaces. Similarly, Rebecca Leach also works on the spatialisation of identity. She is currently concerned with the socio-cultural nature of ‘home’,surburban landscapes, and material cultures within domestic spaces. In this respect she provides connections between this sub-theme and the grouping focussed on globalisation, risk, and the construction of safe havens and the urbanism theme which is similarly concerned with the ways in which global processes impact upon social life in particular locales.
(Members: Graham Allan, Emma Head, Lisa Lau, Rebecca Leach, Lydia Martens, Dana Rosenfeld)
Consumerism, Everyday Life, and Contemporary Culture
The research group also has an interest in the ways in which culture informs the behaviours of diverse social groupings in particular social environments. As noted above, Rebecca Leach and Lydia Martens are established researchers in the field of consumer culture, material culture, and domestic life. Related to their work, Jane Parish has a strong track record of publication of anthropological / ethnographic work on the uses of objects in diverse cultural contexts. The combination of these three researchers – two of whom work on the sociological interest of the apparently everyday and ordinary and the other who explores the intellectual significance of the anthropologically strange – provides the nucleus of a strong research theme in the sociology of culture. However, their work is augmented by other researchers in sociology. For example, Mark Featherstone has written widely on the ways in which cultural systems create contexts that inform the conduct of social relationships. In particular his work on conspiracy theory and non-knowledge relates to Parish’s own research in this area. Similar to Parish, who shows how conspiratorial belief systems generate significance in apparently meaningless situations, Featherstone explains how social dis-order tends to produce conspiracy, paranoia, and scapegoating practices. While Parish traces the evolution of such paranoid belief systems from the post-colonial world to the west, and Featherstone roots his study in modern and post-modern macro theories of Europe and America, Siobhan Holohan’s study of media scapegoating shows how the construction of such belief systems is not confined to the kinds of sub-cultural formations they consider, but also embedded in the very structures of mainstream society. Her work in the field of media representation, criminalisation, legal, and social systems shows how social order is always reliant on some kind of exclusion to retain its integrity. Apart from the fact that Holohan’s work on the criminalisation of the socially excluded provides a link between the work of Parish and Featherstone and the research strength in Criminology at Keele, she also reflects a particular interest in cultures of deviance in the sociology group. Similar to both Parish and Featherstone, who study deviant sub-cultural formations, James Hardie-Bick is also interested in the ways in which particular social systems produce extreme cultural practices. Finally, the overall focus of this research grouping, which is concerned with the ways in which culture is used to organise social relations, is reflected in Rosenfeld’s work on the practices of everyday life and risk management.
(Members: Mark Featherstone, James Hardie-Bick, Siobhan Holohan, Rebecca Leach, Lydia Martens, Jane Parish, Dana Rosenfeld)
Globalisation, Risk, Anxiety
Beyond the study of the construction of contemporary everyday cultures, the Sociology group also has an interest in globalisation and its diverse effects on local cultures. Apart from Pnina Werbner’s work on the ways in which diasporic communities manage the uncertainties of life in global society, Mark Featherstone and Jane Parish have sought to explore how various sub-cultural groups construct conspiracy theories in order to apply order to apparently meaningless situations. In much the same way that Werbner, Parish, and Featherstone have shown how theories of scapegoating have begun to re-surface in the post-modern globalised world, Siobhan Holohan has also shown how the ethnic other is the prime target for social exclusion in the risk society. But mastery of risk is not only about social exclusion. As James Hardie-Bick, who studies risky sub-cultures, and Rebecca Leach, Lydia Martens, and Dana Rosenfeld, who similarly focus on risk management in the home, show in their works, efforts to take control of risk pervade contemporary life. The strength of the Sociology researching grouping in the area of risk and anxiety is that it is able to show how risk and anxiety condition every level of the contemporary world. From the global (Werbner, Parish, Featherstone, Holohan) to the local and domestic (Rosenfeld, Leach, Martens), the researchers in this group are focussed on the ways in which contemporary communities and contemporary individuals seek to replace the relative certainties offered by modern states through the evolution of ever more elaborate individualised risk management strategies. For example, Rosenfeld’s recent work documents the recent construction of masculinity as a risk to health and wellbeing, expanding the medicalization of femininity that had occurred over the past century to men and their worlds and constructing masculinity as a pathology in itself. Here, too, risk is shown to be an agent of social control.
(Members: Mark Featherstone, James Hardie-Bick, Siobhan Holohan, Rebecca Leach, Jane Parish, Dana Rosenfeld, Pnina Werbner, Andy Zieleniec)
Urban Space and Post-Urban Cultures
Linked to the sociology group’s focus on processes of globalisation, localisation, culture production, and risk management there is also a strong interest in urban and post-urban culture in the research section. Following his recent book on the history of utopia in western thought, Mark Featherstone has shifted his focus towards the study of the ways in which utopian thought has traditionally concerned itself with the urban form. Beyond this coincidence of utopia and urbanism, his current work also addresses the relationship between imaginary utopian cities and idea of the city as dystopia. Related to Featherstone’s work, Andy Zieleniec is also concerned with the sociology of space. Following his recent book on space and social theory, he is now engaged on a project on the evolution of parks in three major European centres. Otherwise James Hardie-Bick is also currently engaged in a project on heterotopic space in contemporary Britain with Featherstone and Zieleniec where he is concerned with the ways in which particular institutions try to manage the turbulence of global process, attempt to ease their inhabitants ontological insecurities, but continue to maintain profitable links with the high speed network society. Expanding upon the idea of insecurity, security, and mapping, Pnina Werbner, Lisa Lau, and Jane Parish similarly show how particular urban communities attempt to manage their relationships to global processes and Rebecca Leach and Lydia Martens explore the coincidences between notions of consumption, which is rooted in the economy of the city, and home, which is in many ways antithetical to the idea of modern or post-modern urban life. Finally, this concentration on urban space, security, insecurity, and communal life folds back into the theme on family, community, and domestic life (i.e., Emma Head is interested in the urbanism of inequality) and also has clear connections to the sub-themes concerned with consumerism and globalisation.
(Members: Mark Featherstone, James Hardie-Bick, Lisa Lau, Rebecca Leach, Lydia Martens, Jane Parish, Pnina Werbner, Andy Zieleniec)
Sociology Research at Keele
The objective of the Sociology Research narrative is not to produce exclusive groupings or evolve a particular dominant theme to the exclusion of other research interests. Rather, the objective of the exercise is to foreground particular interests in the group in order to encourage the generation of new ideas, promote collaborative work, support the development of innovative teaching, and prompt the future evolution of the research group. Centrally, the above narrative is a synthetic reflection of what is already taking place in Sociology at Keele, rather than a top-down imposition, and it should not be thought of as an ideological statement concerning the kind of sociology that Keele sociologists should carry out. Instead, the research narrative should be understood as an open ended and evolving story able to change as researchers’ interests change over time.
NB Members of the Sociology group are also members of the Research Institute for Life Course Studies and the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice: please follow the links for more information about individuals’ full research profiles and other related research strengths such as Ageing, Health and Migration.
Members of the research group would be happy to supervise research students in any of the above areas or themes.
