Postgraduate Programmes - Staff Interests
Academic staff in the Department of Social Sciences
Many of the Department’s staff are international leaders in their respective fields. See below for an overview of their interests. More detailed information about individual members of staff is available here.
Dr Jo Aldridge - Children with care responsibilities (young carers), mental illness and the family; women, crime and feminist criminology
Professor Charles Antaki - conversation analysis, especially as applied to topics in social psychology
Professor Barbara Bagilhole - ‘equal opportunities’ as it relates to
gender, ‘race’ and disability.
Professor Michael Billig - developing a critical social psychology that stresses the importance of studying language and rhetoric; nationalism, psycho-analytic theory; humour.
Dr Daniel Chernilo - Classical and Contemporary Social Theory, Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and Global Modernity, Universalism and Natural Law, ‘Doing Theory Research’.
Professor Duncan Cramer - mental health, personality, personal relationships,
organizational commitment, psychotherapy and counselling.
Professor David Deacon - Political Communication, Journalism, Public Relations, Voluntary Sector, Quasi-Government
Dr Jack Demaine - education policy and contemporary politics; citizenship education with particular reference to the European Union; race and ethnicity; sociology of education
Dr John Downey - Critical Theory; Cinema; Information and Communication Technologies; European Media.
Professor Derek Edwards - discourse, rhetoric and conversation analysis; the relations between psychological topics and everyday talk, or ‘discursive psychology'
Professor Graham Farrell – Criminology, crime prevention.
Dr Alexa Hepburn – Conversation analysis; discursive psychology; young people and abuse; critical social psychology.
Dr Dennis Howitt - media, forensic psychology, the racism in psychology and the professional care of children.
Dr Emily Keightley - Media,time, gender and history.
Professor Ruth Lister CBE - Citizenship, gender, poverty and social exclusion, social security, welfare reform.
Professor Jim McGuigan – Social theory and cultural studies; cultural policy; film and television.
Dr Sabina Mihelj - identity and communication, nationalism studies, nationalism and religion, media rituals, identity and space/place, the role of media and communication in social change, mass media under socialism.
Professor Graham Murdock - Sociology and Political Economy of Culture.
Professor Karen O'Reilly - The implications of contemporary forms of mobility, and sociological themes around home, belonging, community and identity, and qualitative methods. Her books include The British on the Costa del Sol (2000) and Ethnographic Methods (2005).
Professor Michael Pickering - Communication and Media Studies, Sociology of Culture and Cultural History, Popular Culture and Memory Studies.
Professor Sarah Pink – Visual anthropology and sociology; gender; performance; homes and material culture; hypermedia
Professor Jonathan Potter - development of discourse analysis and discursive psychology.
Dr Line Predelli - Sociology of gender, citizenship, migration and ethnic relations, and the sociology of religion.
Professor Alan Radley - the social study of health and illness, the role of the body in social life and questions of charitable giving and voluntary aid. .
Dr James Stanyer - campaign communication; political attitude expression and new communication technologies; transnational political movements and new communication technologies; personalisation of politics; impression and issue management; political public relations.
Professor Dennis Smith – Globalisation; Modernity; Social Theory
Dr Mike Stephens - criminal law and the criminal justice system, especially
the role of the police.
Professor Elizabeth Stokoe - gender, identity and discourse, educational talk-in-interaction, neighbour relationships, disputes and complaints, speed-dating, and ethnomethodological approaches to data analysis: conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis.
Dr Paula Saukko - Sociology of health and science and qualitative research; she has conducted research on the lived and historical dimensions of diagnostic discourses on eating disorders and the social and personal implications of genomics of common disease, particularly heart disease and “nutrigenomics”. She is the author of Doing Research in Cultural Studies (Sage 2003) and The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse (State University of New York Press), and is planning a book with a tentative title Domesticating Genes.
Dr Christian Tileaga - Critical social psychology of racism, political discourse analysis, social representations of history and collective memory.
Professor Liesbet van Zoonen - Gender, Cultural Studies and Political Communications.
Professor Harriet Ward - Outcomes of children's services, assessment of children in need, children looked after away from home (the Looking After Children project), adoption policy, history of child welfare policy..
Dr Iris Wigger - Historical Sociology; Racism, Nationalism, and Imperialism; Race, Gender, Nation, Culture, and Class as categories of social inclusion and exclusion
Professor Sue Wilkinson - Feminism and psychology; women’s health; lesbian and gay issues; healthcare interactions; qualitative methods; focus groups; conversation analysis
Dr Dominic Wring - Political communication; Election campaigning; Media and politics; Labour Party.