Sociology staff at Keele University
Graham Allan, Professor of Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 584143
Email: g.allan@keele.ac.uk
Graham Allan
Graham Allan is Professor of Sociology. He previously taught at the University of Southampton. Between 2005 – 7 he was Visiting Professor in Family Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
His research has focused principally on the sociology of informal relationships, including friendships, family ties, and community sociology. He is currently writing a book on step-family kinship. Recently he has acted as an Associate Editor of Personal Relationships and as one of the Advisory Editors for George Ritzer’s Encyclopedia of Sociology . He is also co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Family and Intimate Life series.
Mark Featherstone, Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0)1782 584179
Email: m.a.featherstone@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Mark Featherstone
His areas of research specialism are psychoanalysis and critical theory and he has previously written on conspiracy theory and mythology in post-war America. His current work revolves around the study of utopias and dystopias in social and political theory. He is due to publish a research monograph on this topic in 2006. Apart from his own work, he is also Reviews Editor of the Sociology journal, Sociological Review, and a reviewer for journals such as Theory, Culture and Society and Cultural Politics.
James Hardie-Bick, Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 583359
Email: j.p.hardie-bick@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
James Hardie-Bick
James Hardie-Bick is a lecturer in Sociology. His thesis, entitled ‘Dropping Out and Diving In: An Ethnography of Skydiving’, considered the significant changes that occur in the ways that novice and experienced skydivers account for their participation and contrasted their perceptions of fear and risk. Since completing his thesis at the University of Durham in 2005, James has worked at the University of Bath on the ESRC funded project ‘Doing Justice: An Analysis of Risk and Needs Assessment in Youth Justice’. He joined Keele in September 2006.
His research interests include sociology of risk, with a particular emphasis on voluntary risk taking, theories of identity, ethnographic research and qualitative methodology.
Emma Head, Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 583898
Email: e.l.head@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Emma Head
Emma Head is a Lecturer in Sociology. In 2004 she completed her thesis at the University of Bristol, entitled ‘Caring and paid work in the lives of lone mothers’. Emma then took up an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leeds, ‘Caring and paid work in the lives of lone mothers: sociological and social policy approaches’. Her work has been concerned with developing a sociological approach to the study of the lives of lone mothers to complement the policy focus which has dominated research in this area.
Emma’s research interests in sociology are in family studies, motherhood, paid and unpaid work, poverty and social exclusion, and the social organisation of care, particularly the care of children. She also has an interest in research methods and ethics.
Siobhan Holohan, Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 584230
E-mail: s.holohan@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Siobhan Holohan
Siobhan’s research lies in the areas of the representation of crime, law and order, scapegoating practices, multiculturalism, and the confession in contemporary culture and society. Her book, The Search for Justice in a Media Age (2005), examined two high profile legal cases: the US trial of British au pair Louise Woodward and the murder of Stephen Lawrence, in order to reveal how the organization of public discourse around a sacrificial figure intensifies patterns of social inclusion / exclusion. She has also published journal articles and an edited book chapter on the ever-shifting concept of British multiculturalism in the wake of the Macpherson inquiry report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. She is currently working on a book project entitled The Culture of Confession, which aims to historically trace the confession in religious, legal, therapeutic and public discourse in order to show how it remains central to the formation of knowledge and power relations over time and space.
Lisa Lau, Lecturer in Geography and Sociology
Tel: (+44) 01782 583613
email: l.lau@esci.keele.ac.uk
Lisa Lau
Lisa’s research areas include South Asia, postcolonialism, gender studies, cross-cultural studies, power, narrative, identity construction, and interdisciplinary studies; positioning itself at a crossroads of literary, cultural and geographical studies. A significant proportion of her current research focuses on the representation, positioning, and social and spatial entrapment of women. The results, derived from detailed textual analysis, interviews and discussions with authors, publishers and readers, cyberspace fieldwork, and increasingly, electronic ethnography, have identified many significant ongoing changes in the creation of South Asian women’s images and identities (in a South Asia undergoing rapid economic and social changes), as well as cultural changes within diasporic South Asian communities.
Rebecca Leach, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 583359
Email: r.leach@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Rebecca Leach
Rebecca’s research interests lie in the area of consumerism, with specific focus on the home and the role of taste in constructing identities and relationships. Rebecca was (2005-2007) Principal Investigator for a £200k project funded by the ESRC/AHRC Cultures of Consumption programme (see www.consume.bbk.ac.uk ) called Boomers and Beyond: Intergenerational Consumption and the Mature Imagination, which was a multi-method study exploring the consumption patterns of the 1945-54 birth cohort as they near retirement. Prior to the Boomers project, she was working on research tracing consumers’ experience of objects from the At Home with Art (AHWA) project. AHWA was a contemporary art project, curated by Colin Painter, in which contemporary artists produced objects for sale in Homebase (a major DIY store in the UK ). The follow-up research explored the embedding of these ambiguous art-consumer objects within homes and documents the way objects help to configure intimate social relations.
Previous work has explored the theoretical dimensions of consumer culture, the meaning of home and the symbolic construction of ‘community’ in new private housing estates in the UK . Rebecca has contributed to a number of public debates on these issues, including lectures at Tate Britain and the Institute for Contemporary Arts, and she engaged in numerous media activities, including consultancy/appearances for BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Place Called Home’ and BBC4 ‘Are We Having Fun Yet?’ on Baby Boomers.
She is interested in supervising doctoral theses on any aspect of the following:
- sociology of consumption
- domestic cultures and the idea of home
- embodied/material social relations, particularly around objects
- locality, community and belonging
Lydia Martens, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 584125
Email: l.d.martens@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Lydia Martens
Dr. Lydia Martens joined Keele University as Senior Lecturer in Sociology in 2006, having previously worked at Durham University (2000-2006) and the University of Stirling (1997-2000). Her research interests focus on consumption and domestic life and she also has an interest in qualitative research methodology, having recently completed an ESRC-funded project in which she researched the potential of video recording in an investigation of everyday life and practices in domestic kitchens. Lydia contributes towards the undergraduate teaching programme in sociology. For further details on her teaching work, see the sociology website of the School of Criminology, Education, Sociology and Social Work.
Lydia’s research agenda is positioned at the intersection between consumption and domestic life. She adopts an approach informed by feminist sociology in an attempt to develop theories of consumption and domestic life that are more gender ‘informed’ and that aid an analysis of continuity and change in consumer culture, domestic cultures and domestic identities in late modern society. She is currently working on three different substantive terrains with overlapping theoretical concerns. These are:
- Gender & Consumption
- Mundane Practices and Products
- Adults, Children and Consumer Culture
Gender & Consumption
Lydia’s interest in consumption has always been infused with an interest in gender and the specific ways in which feminists have engaged with consumption. This is reflected in a new edited collection put together with Emma Casey entitled: Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life (in press with Ashgate). In addition to the edited collection, she has finished some other writing projects that relate to this agenda (see for instance the article in Consumers, Markets and Culture in the list of publications below) and she is planning others – including a co-authored book with Emma Casey. She is currently working on a book chapter for an edited collection by Gillis and Hollows in which she traces how domesticity and consumption were discussed within early second wave feminism. This work reflects not only an interest in the contemporary conjunctures between gender, gendered domestic identities and consumption, but also a preoccupation with the nature of consumer culture in late modernity.
Mundane Practices and Products in Domestic Life
The agenda of work on gender and consumption is closely linked to Lydia’s other research interests. She has been working on two related research projects since 2002 in order to develop her interest in mundane domestic practices (especially cleaning and ordering), and how these connect with mundane domestic products, like cleaning products, and their representation in cultural texts. Together with Sue Scot, she conducted content analysis of Good Housekeeping magazine between the years 1951 and 2001. This work has been used to discuss how cleaning products address risk and danger in domestic life, but are also important contributors towards the experience of risk in the domestic sphere. Between 2002 and 2004, they also carried out an ESRC funded project called Domestic Kitchen Practices: Risk, Routine and Reflexivity (the DKP project) in which they investigated the nature of domestic practices in the contemporary domestic kitchen. This project has successfully piloted a methodology for studying domestic practice through video recording and they hope to utilise further in the future. The End of Award report for this project may be downloaded from the ESRC website.
Adults, children and consumption
As reflected in a jointly authored article in the Journal of Consumer Culture in 2004 (see details below), sociologists of consumption have not been very vocal on children’s consumption practices or practices of consumption around children. Lydia is particularly interested in how adults ‘do’ generational culture through practices of consumption around young children that, for instance, feed into cultures of the cute and safety. She is currently engaged in some ongoing fieldwork at The Baby Show – a tri-annual exhibition for new parents and parents-to-be to consider how ‘becoming’ parents is connected with consumer practices and how consumer culture operates as a commercial community of parenthood, which informs new parents into the practices and the products of early childhood and parenthood.
PhD Research Supervision
Lydia has supervised research students at Stirling and Durham working on a range of projects including youth club cultures; friendship cultures amongst older women; children’s consumption practices; the experiences and needs of children with a sibling with autism; and the crisis in British farming. She is interested in supervising doctoral thesis in areas commensurate with her research interests and she also has a strong interest in supervising projects which aim to adopt innovative qualitative research methodology, including visual methods.
Jane Parish, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 584232
email: j.a.e.parish@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Jane Parish
Her research interest centers on the occult economy and, in particular, West African witchcraft, conspiracy and globalisation. Her recent fieldwork is among West African migrants in Liverpool, Northwest England. Publications based on this research include articles on West African gambling and anti-witchcraft shrines in the journal Ethnography (2005) and conspiracy, corruption and racism and the Sierra Leonean diaspora in Culture and Religion (2005). She is the joint editor of the sociological monograph, The Age of Anxiety, Conspiracy Theorising in the Human Sciences (2001). Jane is currently writing a book, Witchcraft, Modernity and Social Change, which looks at how occultism, rather than secularisation,is an essential feature of the global economy.
Dana Rosenfeld, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Tel: 44 (0) 1782 583932
Email: d.rosenfeld@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Dana Rosenfeld
Dana Rosenfeld is a qualitative sociologist whose research centres on the intersection between ageing and the life course, health, identity and embodiment. Her early work examined the identity work of lesbian and gay elders, specifically, how the early experience of a stigmatized homosexuality on the one hand and the emergence of gay liberation on the other inform homosexual identity across the life course. This produced a number of articles and book chapters and a monograph entitled The Changing of the Guard: Lesbian and Gay Elders, Identity, and Social Change (Temple University Press, 2002), and grounded her current research into the interpretation, management and regulation of the body, particularly the body in later life and/or ill health, and their impact on identity and everyday life.
Dr. Rosenfeld has also published on the use of the life course by medicine to produce unequal relations between patients and medical agents, on the negotiation and production of moral competence in the face of compromised movement by osteoarthritis sufferers (in the journal Symbolic Interaction ) and other invisible chronic illnesses, and on the practical, interactional and phenomenological disruptiveness of acute illness and injury. She is the lead editor of a volume entitled Medicalized Masculinities (Temple University Press 2006) whose introduction (lead-authored by her) considers why the growing medicalization of masculinity across the life course has been ignored by medical sociology and a range of other substantive areas. Dr. Rosenfeld is currently working on decision-making in clinical drug trials, leadership in the NHS, the use of visual technologies in modern medicine, and adherence to medical regimens. She is on the editorial boards of Social Theory and Health and the Journal of Aging Studies .
Pnina Werbner, Professor of Social Anthropology
Tel: +44 (0) 1782 584233
email: p.werbner@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Pnina Werbner
Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology at Keele. She is the author of ‘The Manchester Migration Trilogy’ which includes The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis (Berg 1990 and 2002), Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: the Public Performance of Transnational Identity Politics (James Currey, Oxford, and School of American Research, Santa Fe, 2002) and Pilgrims of Love: the Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Hurst Publishers, London and Indiana University Press, 2003; also OUP Karachi). Recent edited collections include Debating Cultural Hybridity and The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe, both co-edited with Tariq Modood (Zed Books 1997), Embodying Charisma: Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults, co-edited with Helene Basu (Routledge 1998), Women, Citizenship and Difference, co-edited with Nira Yuval-Davis (Zed Books, 1999), and a special issue of the journal Diaspora on the topic of ‘The Materiality of Diaspora,’ co-edited with Karen Leonard (2000). She has presented keynote addresses at a range of universities in Europe, the USA and Australia, and is the author of numerous articles and chapters in professional journals and books and until recently, co-editor of the ‘Postcolonial Encounters’ series published by Zed Books. Her fieldwork, funded by Nuffield and the ESRC, has included research in Britain, Pakistan, and Botswana where she is studying Women and the Changing Public Sphere, and the Manual Workers Union as part of an ESRC Programme on Non-Governmental Public Action. Recently, she was awarded £208,000 by the ESRC UK for a study of ‘New African Migrants in the Gateway City’ and £460,000 from the AHRC for a joint project with the University of Hull on International Filipino migration, In the Footsteps of Jesus and the Prophet’, as part of the Diaspora Programme.
Andy Zieleniec, Lecturer in Sociology and Geography
Tel: +44 (0)1782 583362
Email: a.zieleniec@appsoc.keele.ac.uk
Andy Zieleniec
My current interests concern the interface between society culture and space. In particular I am interested in the development of spatial theories and social theories of space (including Marx, Simmel, Lefebvre, Harvey, Foucault, de Certeau, Massey, Cosgrove, Urry, etc.) and their application to the analysis and investigation of a number of substantive areas. These include a socio-spatial understanding of the urban as a key site and locus for modernity; social spaces of distraction and display, leisure and recreation; the rhythms and experience of everyday life across the life course; policy and practice in creating sustainable and ‘healthy’ cities.
There are also a number of sociologists working in management positions in the University or affiliated to us; these include:
Professor Janet Finch, Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Social Relations
Professor Ronnie Frankenberg, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology
Professor Gill Jones, Emeritus Professor of Sociology
Professor David Morgan, Visiting Professor of Sociology
Professor Ray Pahl, Visiting Professor of Sociology
Professor Chris Phillipson, Pro-Vice-Chancellor & Professor of Applied Social Studies and Social Gerontology
Professor Sue Scott, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology
