Our research

Our academic staff regularly publish books on a wide range of topics. Their most recent work includes:

Dr Shaul Bar Haim

• The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood, and the British Welfare State
• Wilding Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life

Dr Alexandra Cox

• Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People

Dr Isabel Crowhurst

• The Tenacity of the Couple-Norm: Intimate citizenship regimes in a changing Europe

Dr Valentin Danchev

• Migration Networks: Applications of Network Analysis to Macroscale Migration Patterns

Dr Rhiannon Firth

• Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom

Dr Carlos Gigoux Gramegna

• Indigenous Peoples and Colonialism: Global Perspectives

Dr Ayse Guveli

• Intergenerational Consequences of Migration: Socio-economic, Family and Cultural Patterns of Stability and Change in Turkey and Europe

Dr Michael Halewood

• Language and Process: Words, Whitehead and the World
• Propositions in the Making: Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory

Dr Renee Luthra

• Origins and Destinations: The Making of the Second Generation

Dr Tara Mahfoud

• Vital Models: The Making and Use of Models in the Brain Sciences

Professor Linsey McGoey

• The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World

Professor John Preston

• Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom
• Grenfell Tower: Preparedness, Race and Disaster Capitalism
• Overkill: Why universities modelling the impact of nuclear war in the 1980s could not change the views of the security state

Professor Colin Samson

• Indigenous Peoples and Colonialism: Global Perspectives
• The Colonialism of Human Rights: Ongoing Hypocrisies of Western Liberalism

Dr Anna Sergi

• From Mafia to Organised Crime

Dr Katy Wheeler

• Household Recycling and Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies

Dr Neli Demireva

• Pioneering Social Research, with Paul Thompson and Ken Plummer is out now with Policy Press.

Professor Nigel South

• A. Brisman and N. South (eds) (2020) The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, Abingdon: Routledge (2nd edition).
• E. Carrabine, P. Cox, I. Crowhurst, A. Di Ronco, P. Fussey, A. Sergi, N. South, D. Thiel and J. Turton, (2020) Criminology: A Sociological Introduction, Abingdon: Routledge, (4th edition)
• A.Brisman, B. McClanahan, N. South and R. Walters (2018) Water, Crime and Security in the Twenty-First Century: Too dirty, too little, too much, London: Palgrave.
• E. Milne, K. Brennan, N. South and J. Turton (eds) (2018) Women and the Criminal Justice System: failing victims and offenders? London: Palgrave.
• A.Brisman, E. Carrabine and N. South (eds) The Routledge Companion to Criminological Theory and Concepts, Abingdon: Routledge.
• M. Hall, J. Maher, A. Nurse, G. Potter, N. South and T. Wyatt (eds) (2017) Greening Criminology in the 21st Century: contemporary debates and future directions in the study of environmental harm, Aldershot: Ashgate.
• D. Rodríguez Goyes, H. Mol, A. Brisman and N. South (eds) (2017) Environmental Crime in Latin America: The theft of nature and the poisoning of the land, London: Palgrave.

Our academic staff regularly publish work in leading journals. Examples of their most recent work include:

Dr Shaul Bar Haim

• ‘The Drug Doctor’: Michael Balint and the Revival of General Practice in Postwar Britain in the History Workshop Journal.

Professor Eamonn Carrabine

• Geographies of landscape: Representation, power and meaning in the Journal of Theoretical Criminology.
• Traces of violence: Representing the atrocities of war in the Journal of Criminology and Criminal.
• Unsettling appearances: Diane Arbus, Erving Goffman and the sociological eye in the journal of Current Sociology.

Dr Alexandra Cox

• Challenging the logics of reformism and humanism in juvenile justice rhetoric in the Journal of Critical Criminology.
• The language of incarceration in the Journal of Incarceration.

Professor Pamela Cox

• Constitutional powers of the Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales in a report commissioned by the Office of the Victims’ Commissioner.
• Reducing recurrent care proceedings: Building a local evidence base in England in the Journal of Societies.
• The ‘Great Decarceration’: Historical trends and future possibilities in the Howard Journal of Crime and Justice.
• Why we are failing victims of crime for The Conversation.

Dr Isabel Crowhurst

• “A cathartic moment in a man’s life”: Homosociality and gendered fun on the Puttan tour in the Journal of Men and Masculinities.
• International comparative explorations of prostitution policies: Lessons from two European projects in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research.
• The ambiguous taxation of prostitution: The role of fiscal arrangements in hindering the sexual and economic citizenship of sex workers in Sexuality Research and Social Policy.

Dr Valentin Danchev

• Calibrating the scientific ecosystem through meta-research in Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.
• Meta-Research: Centralized scientific communities are less likely to generate replicable results in eLife.
• Neither global nor local: Heterogeneous connectivity in spatial network structures of world migration in Social Networks.

Dr Maitrayee Deka

• Bazaar aesthetics: On excess and economic rationality in the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
• Calculation in the pirate bazaars in the Journal of Cultural Economy.
• Embodied commons: Knowledge and sharing in Delhi’s electronic bazaars in The Sociological Review.
• Street level tinkering in the times of ‘Make in India’ in the Ephemera Journal.

Dr Neli Demireva

• Does the ethno-religious diversity of a neighbourhood affect the perceived health of its residents? in Social Science and Medicine.
• Ethnic and migrant penalties in job quality in the UK: the role of residential concentration and occupational clustering co-authored by Dr Neli Demireva in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
• Receiving country investments and acquisitions: How migrants negotiate the adaptation to their destination in the Journal of Social Inclusion.

Dr Anna Di Ronco

• Law in Action: Local-level prostitution policies and practices and their effects on sex workers in the European Journal of Crimonology.
• Urban space and the social control of incivilities: Perceptions of space influencing the regulation of anti-social behaviour for Springer - Crime, Law and Social Change.
• Representations of environmental protest on the ground and in the cloud: The NOTAP protests in activist practice and social visual media in Crime, Media, Culture.
• Environmental activism and social media: the #NOTAP protest for the European Forum for Restorative Justice.

Professor Chris Greer

• Breaking Bad News? Penal Populism, Tabloid Adversarialism and Brexit in Political Quarterly.
• Theorizing Institutional Scandal and the Regulatory State in Theoretical Criminology.
• Why Becoming a National Treasures Matters: Elite Celebrity Status and Inequality in the UK in the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Dr Ayse Guveli

• 2,000 Families: identifying the research potential of an origins-of-migration study in the Journal of Ethnic and and Racial Studies.
• Inequalities in home learning and schools’ provision of distance teaching during school closure of COVID-19 lockdown in the UK in ISER Working Papers.
• Understanding the benefits of migration: multigenerational transmission, gender and educational outcomes of Turks in Europe in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Dr Katerina Hadjimatheou

• Citizen-led digital policing and democratic norms: The case of self-styled paedophile hunters in Criminology and Criminal Justice.
• Enhancing Public Security Through the Use of Social Media in European Law Enforcement Research Bulletin.
• "No black and white answer about how far we can go”: police decision making under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme in Policing and Society.

Dr Michael Halewood

• A Question of Faith? Stengers and Whitehead on Causation and Conformation in Sub-Stance.
• Do those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease lose their souls? in The Sociological Review.

Dr Laurie James-Hawkins

• Adolescent sexual norms and college sexual experiences: Do high school norms influence college behavior? for Science Direct.
• It Happened to a Friend of Mine: The Influence of Perspective-taking on the Acknowledgment of Sexual Assault Following Ambiguous Sexual Encounters for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

Dr Renee Luthra

• Mitigating the hostile environment: the role of the workplace in EU migrant experience of Brexit in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
• Unravelling the ‘immigrant health paradox’: ethnic maintenance, discrimination, and health behaviours of the foreign born and their children in England in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Dr Tara Mahford

• The Limits of Dual Use in Science and Technology.

Professor Lydia Morris

• Activating the welfare subject: the problem of agency for the British Sociological Association.
• Moralising welfare and migration in austerity Britain: a backdrop to Brexit in European Societies.
• Reconfiguring rights in austerity Britain: boundaries, behaviours and contestable margins in the Journal of Social Policy.
• The moral economy of austerity: analysing UK welfare reform in the British Journal of Sociology.
• The topology of welfare-migration-asylum: Britain’s outsiders inside in the Journal of Poverty and Justice.

Professor Sean Nixon

• Gentlemanly Professionals and Men-about-Town: Occupational Identities Amongst London Advertising Men, 1951–67 in Cultural and Social History.
• Life in the kitchen: Television advertising, the housewife and domestic modernity in Britain, 1955–1969 in Contemporary British History.
• Trouble at the National Trust: Post-war Recreation, the Benson Report and the Rebuilding of a Conservation Organization in the 1960s in Twentieth Century British History.
• Vanishing Peregrines: J.A.Baker, Environmental Crisis and Bird-centred Cultures of Nature, 1954-1973 in Rural History.

Dr Johanna Romer

• Ambiguous Publicities: Cultivating Doubt at the Intersection of Competing Genres of Risk Evaluation in Catalan Prisons in Punishment and Society.

Professor Michael Roper

• From the Shell-shocked Soldier to the Nervous Child: Psychoanalysis in the Aftermath of the First World War in Psychoanalysis and History.
• Making Histories. The Meeting of German and British Descendants of First World War Veterans in “No Man’s Land”, Bavaria, 2016 (.pdf) in The Public Historian.
• Family legacies in the Centenary: motives for First World War commemoration among British and German descendants (.pdf) in History and Memory.

Dr Anna Sergi

• Playing Pac-Man in Portville: Policing the dilution and fragmentation of drug importations through major seaports in European Journal of Criminology.
• Polycephalous ‘ndrangheta: Crimes, behaviours and organisation of the Calabrian mafia in Australia in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology

Dr Carlos Solar

• Austerity and governance: coordinating policing and mental health policy in the UK in Policy Studies.
• Cybersecurity and cyber defence in the emerging democracies in the Journal of Cyber Policy.
• Decentralisation and central-local relations: the case of policing and mental health in England in British Politics.
• Trust in the military in post-authoritarian societies in Current Sociology.

Professor Nigel South

• All knowledge begins with the senses’: Toward a sensory criminology in the British Journal of Criminology.
• Arcologies, eco-shelters and environmental exemption: constructing new divisions and inequalities in the Anthropocene in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.
• Between ‘conservation’ and ‘development’: The construction of ‘protected nature’ and the environmental disenfranchisement of indigenous communities in the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy.
• The commodification and exploitation of fresh water: property, human rights and green criminology in the International Journal for Law, Crime and Justice.

Dr Jason Sumich

• Enclaving: Spatial detachment as an aesthetics of imagination in an urban sub-Saharan African context in Urban Studies.
• ‘Just another African country’: socialism, capitalism and temporality in Mozambique in Third Word Quarterly.
• The Political Aesthetics of Middle Class Housing in (not so) Neoliberal Mozambique in Antipode, A Radical Journal of Geography.

Dr Darren Thiel

• Charismatic violence and the sanctification of the super-rich in Economy and Society.
• Enabling and constraining successful reablement: Individual and neighbourhood factors in PLoS One.
• Moral Truth and Compounded Trauma: The Effects of Acquittal of Homicide Defendants on the Families of the Victims in Homicide Studies.
• Philanthrocapitalism and crimes of the powerful [Le philanthrocapitalisme et les « crimes des dominants »] in Politix.

Dr Katy Wheeler

• The moral economy of ready‐made food in The British Journal of Sociology.

Professor Colin Samson

• ‘The Idea of Progress, Industrialization, and the Replacement of Indigenous Peoples: The Muskrat Falls Megadam Boondoggle,’ Social Justice, 2018, 44, 4, 1-17.
• ‘A State Strategy of Dispossession: Aboriginal Land and Rights Cessions in Comprehensive Land Claims in Canada,’ Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 31, 1, 2016, 87-110.
• ‘Indigenous and European Views of Happiness: An essay on the politics of contentment,’ in Yuri Contreras-Vejar, Joanna Tice Jen and Bryan S. Turner and (Eds), Regimes of Happiness: Comparative and Historical Studies, Routledge, 2019, 219-234.
• ‘Dispossession and Canadian Land Claims: Genocidal Implications of the Innu Nation Land Claim,’ in Andrew Woolford, Alex Hinton and Jeff Benvenuto, (Eds) Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, Duke University Press, 2014, 382-416.

• 'The Idea of Progress, Industrialization, and the Replacement of Indigenous Peoples: The Muskrat Falls Megadam Boondoggle', Social Justice, 2018, 44, 4, 1-17. 

Our academic staff frequently feature within the wider press and media. Below are some examples of their latest appearances:

Dr Shaul Bar Haim

• Read the blog post on the Birkbeck website The Chronic Time of the ‘Dress Rehearsal’.

Professor Andrew Canessa

• Read the article in The Conversation Gibraltar: How Brexit Could Change Its Sense of British Identity.

Professor Eamonn Carrabine

• Read the news story on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio how entitled True Crime Bloodline: Investigating our Murder Story Obsession.

Dr Alexandra Cox

• Read the interview on the Abolition Journal website entitled Building a “Kinder” Justice System: Youth Experiences with Incarceration.
• Watch this interview on The Critical Criminologist videocast about Trapped in a Vice: the Consequences of Confinement for Young People.

Professor Pamela Cox

• Read the article in The Conversation Blamed For Being Abused: An Uncomfortable History of Child Sexual Exploitation.
• Read the Telegraph article The Justice System is Failing Victims of Crime.

Dr Neli Demireva

• Watch the recording from the Global Empowerment Meeting entitled E PLURIBUS UNUM: How to overcome the tension between diversity and social cohesion to make the most of ‘Us’.

Dr Rhiannon Firth

• Read the blog post on the Springer Nature website entitled Research in the Time of a Pandemic: Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the UK.

Professor Chris Greer

• Listen to the BBC Radio 4 show entitled The Scandal Machine.

Dr Ayse Guveli

• Read the blog post on the London School of Economics and Political Science entitled Open Schools First for the Hardest Hit Children.
• Explore Dr Ayse Guveil's article on the Conversation - Mandatory remote teaching could reduce inequality during the pandemic – but delivering it will be difficult;

Dr Katerina Hadjimatheou

• Read the blog post on the BSC Policing Network website entitled Getting the Ethics Right in Police Technology Projects.

Dr Laurie Hawkins

• Read the Daily Mail article 'Late blooming' teenagers who stay virgins during high school years are more likely to 'jump into' having casual sex at university after they shake off overbearing parents.
• Read the case study on the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change website entitled The impact of ethnic and racial harassment on mental health.

Dr Renee Luthra

• Read the article in The Conversation How Ethnic and Racial Harassment Damages Mental Health.

Dr Tara Mahfoud

• Read the report entitled OECD Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology.

Professor Linsey McGoey

• Read the Guardian article The Historical Case for Abolishing Billionaires.
• Read the Mondiaal Nieuws article Poverty is not a practical but a structural problem.
• Read the London Review of Books blog Game on

Dr Alita Nandi

• Read the article in The Conversation How Ethnic and Racial Harassment Damages Mental Health.

Professor John Preston

• Read the blog post on the Springer Nature website entitled Research in the Time of a Pandemic: Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the UK.

Professor Michael Roper

• Book to see the Lakeside Theatre/HLF verbatim testimony production based on interviews with children of First World War survivors Voices of the Great War.

Professor Colin Samson

• Read the blog post on the Times Higher Education website entitled Redirecting the Disadvantaged into FE will Further Stunt UK Social Mobility.
• Read the blog post on The Rabble website entitled The Hidden Part of Canada and British Columbia's MOU with the Wet'suwet'en.

Dr Anna Sergi

• Read the article in The Conversation Albanian Mafia: The Dangerous Myth That Distorts Our View Of The Global Drugs Trade.
• Read the article in The Conversation How Mafia and Corruption Scandals Rocked Italian Football and Left Fans with a Crisis of Faith.
• Read the Financial Times article on How the Mafia Infiltrated Italy’s Hospitals and Laundered the Profits Globally.
• Read the article in The Independent What's Really Going On In London's Organised Crime Scene – According To A Criminologist.
• Read the interview entitled Coronavirus Pandemic Creates Lucrative Opportunities For Organized Crime In Italy.

Dr Jason Sumich

• Read the author response to the review of Middle Class of Mozambique: The State and the Politics of transformation in Southern Africa.

Dr Katy Wheeler

• Read the Independent article Is Recycling Really Worth my Time?.

Our academics are actively working on many exciting research projects:

Dr Isabel Crowhurst

• Challenging urban sex workers’ multiple exclusions in Brazil: a network to share knowledge, confront stigma, and promote community-led responses
• Comparing European Prostitution Policies: Understanding Scales and Cultures of Governance

• The Intersection of Sex and Money

Dr Neli Demireva

• Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets Project

Dr Ayse Guveli

• 2000 Families: Migration Histories of Turks in Europe

Dr Johanna Romer

• National Law, Transnational Justice? The role of legal status in parole decision-making in Catalonia, Spain
• Deciphering Violence: New Network Analytic Tools to Improve Hate Speech Detection Online

Professor Michael Roper

• "Meeting in No Man’s Land"
• Afterlives of the Great War

Dr Anna Sergi

• Secureports Opportunities for Organised Crime in Seaports between Vulnerabilities and Informality

Professor Nick Allum

• Prof. Nick Allum is working on a H2020-funded project: www.SOPs4RI.eu.

Dr Jason Sumich

• Enclaving: Patterns of Global Futures in Three African Cities

Professor Lydia Morris

• The moral economy of welfare and migration: reconfiguring rights in Britain

Anna Di Ronco and James Allen Robertson

• The representation of environmental protest Online and Offline (BA-funded project N SRG18R1\181324): http://researchdata.essex.ac.uk/119/

Dr Renee Luthra

• The ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change (MiSoC) is a multidisciplinary centre of quantitative social scientists engaging in cutting edge research and providing evidence with which to address key societal challenges. The Department of Sociology has contributed to MiSoC (based at ISER) since its inception in 1989. https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/misoc
• Immigrant Integration Over Time and Across Generations

Research from the Department of Sociology examines key issues which help to shape our society. Read the research showcases which highlight the prestigious work of our academics:

Professor Andrew Canessa

• Exploring Gibraltar's Identity In the 21st Century

Professor Pamela Cox

• Can We Do More To Support Birth Mothers After a Child's Taken Into Care?

Dr Ayse Guyeli

• 2000 Families: The True Impact of Migration

Visit our Department news page and discover the very latest happenings in the Department of Sociology.