Dr Sacha Hilhorst

Sacha Hilhorst is an ESRC-funded post-doctoral fellow in sociology, working on the changing politics of England’s post-industrial towns. Her doctoral work was an ethnographic investigation of the shifting politics of ex-mining and manufacturing towns in the Midlands. The project found that there was a crisis of legitimacy in England’s former industrial heartlands, as many citizens have come to understand politics as fundamentally corrupt.

Key expertise: Deindustrialisation, Political Discontent, Political Ethnography

Sacha is interested in the connections between economic shifts and political subjectivities, particularly in post-industrial settings. Broadly situated within political sociology, her work employs an ethnographic and place-based approach. She also takes an interest in the history of sociological methodologies and efforts to decolonise the discipline.

Sacha contributes to a course on Social Scientific Analysis of Inequalities.