pathway: Sociology

My research focusses on embodied food practices and asks the fundamental question: where does food knowledge reside? I explore sensory perceptions (taste/smell in particular) and the role they play in locating experiences of food and eating within the body, while also going beyond the body to the mind in order to understand how sensory memories are implicated in the construction of selfhood and identity. Food is considered as a material substance through which cultural knowledge can be carried and reproduced. I will work with migrants to investigate how sensory taste/smell memories may enable food to provide a sense of continuity of bodily experience through spatial and temporal ruptures, and how shared embodied practices of food and eating might foster belonging.

My research aims to understand how knife carrying/crime spreads in England among young people aged 10 to 25 years, to investigate urban and rural vulnerabilities, to generate a new conceptual framing of the debate around knife carrying/crime with a view to developing strategies to address it. I am looking to utilise a public health approach that has been successfully employed in the US and Scotland as a method of violence prevention because it aims to provide the maximum benefit and impact for the largest number of people, it focuses on health and wellbeing of entire populations by drawing on a multi-disciplinary science base. I intend to use a mixed methods approach including social network analysis to identify if/how knife carrying/crime spreads through communities of youth.

The visibility of animal slaughter in Denmark contrasts starkly with the modes of concealment typical of slaughterhouses in industrialised societies. The public can enter a pig slaughterhouse and tour the facility, tracking the animal from the slaughterhouse gate to the dinner plate. Interestingly, Denmark boasts one of the highest meat consumption rates in the world. This transparency of animal slaughter transcends the slaughterhouse to other arenas of animal consumption. My ESRC-funded PhD will involve a 13-month ethnographic fieldwork wherein I will interrogate Danish cultural attitudes towards animals and explore how these are influenced by visibility of animal consumptive practices.

My interest lies in edges and boundaries, intersections and overlaps, and how we treat the people and things that inhabit these fuzzy, uncertain areas.  I am currently exploring these issues in relation to chronic illnesses, especially conditions that are unpredictable, invisible, and/or contested.  Such conditions refuse to conform to binary understandings of the world, making them difficult for us to conceptualise, understand, or even believe in.

My research focuses on ME/CFS in young people, and the impact that uncertainty and ambiguity has on their lives.  This includes its episodic character, issues of in/visibility, dis/ability, and medical/classificatory ambiguity, and social responses.

My doctoral research seeks to better comprehend the under-researched terrains of masculinity and immigration detention in the UK and explore the gendered, inter sectional and multi-scalar dynamics of identity, power and personal relations that operate in these hidden carceral spaces. By developing recent theory on masculinities and detention, the project will expand understandings of gender, transnational migration and belonging. The research design – a qualitative mixed methods engagement with people inside and outside of detention – will enable me to examine how everyday lived experiences in detention are tied to broader gendered issues including state power and citizenship, border controls and the international securitisation of migration.