Through theoretically rich and empirically rigorous research, we forge a dynamic engagement with our discipline that encompasses a critical and international outlook, and incorporates interdisciplinary exchange. We are invested in innovative and varied methodological approaches to understanding social processes that include climate change, migration, urbanisation, and the reconfiguration of inequalities, human rights, social movements and social justice.
Our excellence in research is strengthened through our five principal clusters:
This research cluster unites scholarship associated with economic sociology, science and technology studies (STS) and the sociology of risk regulation, to address research questions that require a combination of concepts and methods from these sub-disciplines.
This cluster starts from the analytical, methodological and political recognition that meaning and materiality are co-constituting in their organisation and performance. It shares a commitment to methodological creativity, particularly in generating new modes of engaging and co-producing knowledge with non-academic collaborators.
This research cluster focuses on the social bases of political parties and movements; the theory and practice of human rights; democracy and participation in states, firms and civil society organisations; political ideologies; political violence; and the politics of cities and housing.
This research cluster brings together colleagues working on multiple dimensions and crystallisations of social inequality, including class, race and ethnicity, gender, and age, to critically analyse contemporary challenges across the globe.
This research cluster consists of urban sociologists and ethnographers collaborating with urban designers and planners to study the dynamics of urban transformations. Processes of urbanisation are examined in relation to global systems of power and regulation, cultural hierarchies and subversions, and forms of association and exclusion.