Based on 97 in-depth interviews, this ESRC funded project has produced a monograph Fitting into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (Ashgate, 2011) which adopts a multi-dimensional interdisciplinary approach to explore shifting dynamics that re-constitute 'city publics' - and the place of the 'public sociologist'. Class, race and gender (dis)advantages are situated in relation to urban-rural contrasts, where 'future selves' are reconfigured in and through 'local' and 'global' sites: people inhabit shifting times and places, from industrial landscapes of the 'past', to a current present and (imagined) 'cosmopolitan' 'regenerated' future.
Contact: Yvette Taylor
Yvette Taylor is the named social scientist on the ESRC 'Filming Identities' event and is involved in the film screening of Tina Gharavi's new film I am Nasrine Q+A sessions, workshop and dissemination. Yvette asks about differential economies of 'impact' in and beyond academia, questioning what it means to be a 'public sociologist'. This is returned to in a project on educational interventions and inequalities in the 'Global' university (Visiting Scholar, The Australian National University, $3000 AUS, Summer 2012).
Contact: Yvette Taylor
This project explores intersections of class, gender and race in the negotiation of same-sex rights in the UK and US probing at the material and subjective costs, consequences and constructions of 'intersectional citizenship' in changing times. Moments of US-UK sexual citizenship are these in terms of LGBT campaigning groups' actions, institutional reactions and broader public relations evident in the course of claiming and lamenting citizenship, community and diversity. In celebrating new queer presences it argues the absence of 'others' must also be considered.
Contact: Yvette Taylor
'Your Space!' is a longitudinal research study that's following changes in young people's relationships with their sisters, brothers and friends over time, as they get older. We listen to young people's own understandings and experiences about their relationships with other people. We've been researching the lives of 52 young people born between 1989 and 1996 from across England, Scotland and Wales since 2002. Find out more about the Your Space project.
Contact: Susie Weller
This longitudinal study is recording the progress of 50 young people in foster care with the Adolescent and Children's Trust (or TACT). TACT, a voluntary organisation and Independent Fostering Agency is funding this study http://www.tactcare.org.uk/ and the report of the study's first two reports entitled 'Aspirations: the views of foster children and their carers' and 'Aspirations Three Years On; the views of young people who are fostered and their foster carers' (2011) are both available on the TACT web site.
Contact: Bob Broad
In collaboration with Single Parent Action Network (SPAN), an independent network organisation representing the diversity of single parent families throughout the UK, this ESRC project seeks insights into the everyday experiences of 30 lone mothers of children from mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in three differing neighbourhoods in an English city. Drawing on Census data and in-depth interviews with the mothers, the research will explore how mothers' understandings and negotiations of their children's racial and ethnic identities are shaped, supported or challenged by social attitudes to racial or ethnic mixing in their neighbourhoods. The project also investigates the challenges of conducting research around 'mixedness' generally, particularly regarding the commonalities and specificities of experience across different mixes and circumstances.
Contact: Chamion Caballero
This project has built on previous work (ESRC funded under QUADS - quads.esds.ac.uk) to identify ethical strategies for sharing and representing data from the Inventing Adulthoods study: a 15 year qualitative longitudinal study of young people's transitions taking place in five UK locations.
Contact: Sheila Henderson
This ESRC funded project is a collaborative project concerned with support for, and extending knowledge about, quality and stability for couple relationships where each partner is from a different ethnic or racial background but might also involve faith differences. The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of their Follow-On Funding Initiative, where the findings from the research that they fund become beneficial in the wider world. It was set up as a collaboration between academics (from University of Southampton, London South Bank University and University of Nottingham) and voluntary sector agencies (One Plus One, Intermix, Mix Together and People in Harmony) concerned with couple and family relationship support and with 'mixed' people and families support respectively.
Contact: Elaine Bauer
This ESRC funded project builds on and develops the findings from an ESRC funded study which explored the experiences, personal identifications and meanings drawn on by pupils at risk of school exclusion. The aim is to produce targeted policy and practice resources in collaboration with Kids Company (a charity supporting challenged and challenging children and young people) their service users and other specialist practitioners. Two core products will be produced as an outcome of a co-ordinated programme of knowledge exchange. 1.A policy directed 'Manifesto for Learning' 2. A practitioner directed 'Reflexive Toolkit' to prompt and facilitate critical, reflexive awareness among teachers and other professionals working with pupils at risk of school exclusion. Project partners are Kid's Company and St Mary's school in Croydon.
Contact: Val Gillies and Yvonne Robinson
The ESRC Fellowship will provide the opportunity to consolidate research undertaken so far, and to develop new conceptual frameworks to analyse European sexualities in a comparative perspective, advancing an intersectional research agenda attuned to national and local contexts. My research to date includes an ethnographic study on lesbian identities and queer space in contemporary urban Russia (2003-2008), which compared the experiences of women from Moscow and from provincial Ul'ianovsk, and an oral history project on lesbian existence in Soviet Russia (funded by the Carnegie Trust, 2010). While much research and theorising within sexuality studies have focused on Anglo-speaking or Western European countries, and on metropolitan areas as major centres of gay consumer culture, sexualities in post-socialist Eastern Europe remain underresearched. My work engages with debates on the globalisation of sexualities, and uses ethnographic data to interrogate the unspoken biases of existing theory. Moving beyond a narrow focus on 'gay' neighborhoods and the commercial scene, my work embraces a more holistic notion of queer space through an exploration of women's everyday places, such as the parental home and the workplace, and by examining how certain very public urban locales such as the street are collectively appropriated as 'lesbian'.
Contact: Dr Francesca Stella
Connect with LSBU
