University of Stirling

Department Member, Applied Social Science

Research Fellow

About

I am currently working as a Research Fellow with Dr Sarah Wilson on her ESRC project 'Young People Creating Belonging: spaces, sounds and sights'. The research is looking at notions of belonging with young people who are looked after. The objectives of  the project are to develop sociological and social work thinking around belonging, relationships and sensory experience of space; to reflect on methods in order to explore sensory, particularly visual and audial, experiences of space; and to contribute to the development of relational policy and practice with 'looked after' children. To find out more about the project see our project website on www.spacesightandsound.weebly.com

Prior to moving to The University of Stirling I was a Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada, Post Doctoral Research Fellow. During this appointment I was hosted by McGill University where I was involved in researching and writing on participatory visual methodologies and the production of knowledge. My work at McGill with Claudia Mitchell led to a collaboration with  Claudia and Naydene de Lange (Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University) to create the Handbook of Participatory Video, 2012, AltaMira Press https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780759121133 . The book due to be published in July 2012 involves 42 authors in 13 counties.


For the past nine years I have been involved in exploring methodological issues in research with 'excluded' young people and their families. This includes research in deprived urban communities, where residents are constructed as the ‘Other’ and ‘deviant’ and where poverty and social exclusion is high.

I was awarded my ESRC funded PhD from the Department of Peace Studies, at The University of Bradford, in February 2008. My doctoral research examined legislation and policy on anti-social behaviour from the perspective of adolescent male youth from inner-city Bradford. Through exploring the social as constructed by adolescent young men, I critiqued new labour legislation, arguing that by developing a mono-dimensional interpretation of the social, the government constructs those who fail to subscribe to societal codes as ‘anti-social’. This framing fails to take into account the lived realities of young men developing their masculinities in the context of de-industrialised inner-cities. If the government is to effectively engage with young men, I argued that it needs to develop ways to understand young men’s sense of the social. In order to support the potential of young men the government needs to shift from a discourse of control and subjugation, which assumes individual free agency but ignores the context and structures into which people are born. By failing to acknowledge this, I posit that the government risks turning them into societies’ ‘Other’, benefiting neither young men nor wider society.

As my research progressed I found that the more traditional research methods limited my ability as a researcher to engage with young men and capture their experiences of growing up and how they construct their concept of the social. Furthermore, the methods allowed few opportunities for young people to participate in, or influence, the research process itself. This was significant, particularly as my research sought to involve young men who felt marginalized within their own communities and were being ‘legislated into’ criminality. The young men I worked with wanted me to produce social research with, rather than on, them. This led to a significant shift in my research and led me to explore the potential of innovative methods in researching adolescent young men and their communities. 

Since the completion of my PhD my research has been based around developing the use of innovative qualitative approaches in research, critiquing the more traditional qualitative approaches to producing knowledge, and seeking to develop collaborative methods that serve to decolonize the research process. My research seeks to further the development of less extractive and more negotiated processes of knowledge production working not only in my interests, and that of the academy, but also for the interests of, and for, the participants and their communities.

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