pathway: Sociology

My PhD examines the UK subculture of herptile keepers—those who keep reptiles and amphibians as domestic pets—shaped by the interplay between internal community dynamics and external societal perceptions. Using ethnographic methods across exotic pet shops, breeder conventions, and online forums, alongside analysis of media representations and public discourse, I will reveal how these forces define the cultural identity and societal impact of herptile ownership in the UK. This integrated approach advances understanding of the complex relationship between subcultural practices and public attitudes, offering insights that may inform public policy, animal welfare debates, and approaches to subcultural diversity in contemporary society.

My research looks at the lived experiences of working-class mature students in the South-West of England through a Bourdieusian lens. I am looking to find evidence of emergent forms of capital that students may embody that may enable them to overcome adversity and succeed in Higher Education despite lacking high levels of economic, social, and cultural capital. Unlike most academic research into mature students’ experiences, I am examining how certain forms of embodied experience and dispositions arising from them function as beneficial forms of capital.

Using a combination of computational and qualitative content analysis, my research focuses on ideological cross-pollination between the online manosphere and the alt-right, exploring thematic similarities in user-generated discourse on extremist platforms. In addition to hypothesising the implications of these findings regarding the nature of the on and offline self – and how these factor into supremacist radicalisation – I also aim to provide empirical support for the conceptual treatment of these loosely connected networks of interest groups as biotopes forming self-sustaining and ever-evolving virtual supremacist ecosystems that, while somewhat ideologically distinct, overlap and influence one another as in the natural environment.

My research focuses on the production of sociodigital futures of buildings and urban spaces by exploring the imaginaries, visualities and materialities of digital organisational and planning tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM). In this context, I am particularly interested in more-than-human interactions, the connections between digital and physical spaces, and future-making practices. By emphasising digital construction tools as socio-technical assemblages, my research aims to integrate an approach rooted in actor-network theory and ethnographic as well as visual methods.

My research centres around plurisexual (cis and trans) men and radical imaginations, and attempts to prefigure radical ways of doing sexes, genders, and sexualities in resistance to binaries. I focus on creative, co-constitutive research method(ologie)s to reflect how plurisexual people are creators of their own epistemologies. I draw from work on embodiments, utopias, and queer theory, as well as sociology, cultural studies, and cultural geographies.

My research investigates how heterosexual masculinity not only perpetuates femicide, but also erases the role of heterosexuality from the femicide problem in Kenya. To do this, I focus on how the media and Key government departments frame femicide cases in Kenya and how women’s rights activism to end femicide is dismissed.

I’m interested in how social and technological arrangements are brought to bear on the production and dissemination of academic research. Drawing on insights from science and technology studies and economic sociology, my PhD looks at how platformization is affecting the long-established functions and infrastructures of the publishing field, how actors are responding by repositioning themselves in a digitalized market, and how this all makes a difference to the ways in which we collectively imagine, create and use academic texts.

I am researching the reintroduction of the wildcat (Felis silvestris) into Devon and exploring practices of care involved in their conservation. Drawing on ideas around ethical conservation and concepts developed within anthrozoology, I aim to pay attention to the entangled lives of wildcats and their spacio-temporal interactions with each other and other species (including humans). By investigating practices of care in this entangled ‘cat’s-cradle’ I aim to produce a multispecies ethnography that explores what ‘care-full’ conservation is and how it could be used in future conservation practices.

My research explores pupils’ perceptions of ‘fundamental British values’ (fBv) in contrasting primary schools in the South West of England. The aim of my study is to gain an insight into these perceptions and the related concepts of Britishness, citizenship and identities, and contribute to the literature in this area through a multi-method research project foregrounding children’s voices.

My research focusses on the ways in which knowledge generated in microbiology becomes meaningful for society. I look at how microbes become enrolled in biotechnological applications including gene editing or technologies for mitigating plastic pollution. I focus on the material practice of microbiology and biotechnology and scientists’ interactions with microbes. I am especially interested in how enlisting bacteria and viruses as tools in biotechnology might change microbial behaviour and ways of being.