Research projects

Gendered harassment in public and the potential for a ‘zero-tolerance’ culture.

Dr Ioanna Gouseti’s project, funded through the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship scheme, is focused on the topic of gendered harassment in public spaces in the UK. The project looks at lay experiences of and attitudes to gendered harassment in public spaces in the UK, focusing on socio-cultural and contextual factors. Existing research suggests that sexual harassment in public is a universal phenomenon, disproportionately experienced by women as victims and men as perpetrators (Stanko, 1990), leading to its characterisation as a gendered form of violence (Vera-Gray, 2016).

Although violence against women has been studied extensively, the focus has been overwhelmingly on the domestic and work environments. Only recently has sexual harassment in public attracted more academic, political and media attention, with emerging research suggesting that it is a pervasive form of violence against women (ibid.). Therefore, this project aims to develop a systematic approach to the theorisation and measurement of the phenomenon, examining its sociocultural and contextual explanatory parameters, with emphasis on gender identities and public spaces.

Methodologically, the project utilises triangulation of quantitative methodologies, combining survey and experimental data. The project seeks to develop a systematic approach to the empirical exploration of gendered harassment, looking at its multiple manifestations from a gendered perspective.

It also seeks to investigate the degree of its normalisation in the understudied context of urban public spaces. Conceptualising harassment as part of a continuum of gendered violence and inequality, the ultimate goal is to produce data that will contribute to a ‘zero-tolerance’ culture to gendered harassment in public spaces.

Mapping ‘the Streets’: Young Women Rappers and Violence in East London

East London is renowned as the birthplace of Grime, a genre in which rap plays a significant role (Bramwell 2015; James 2021). While women have played a vital role in this scene, it has predominantly been male-dominated (Ramsden 2022). Dr Baljit Kaur, as part of her ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship project titled 'Mapping ‘the Streets’: Young Women Rappers and Violence in East London,' is returning to a youth club in an East London borough. Here, she aims to delve into the lives of young women rappers whose narratives about structural and interpersonal violence are often marginalised within the rap scene. This project will provide a platform for young women involved in the rap scene to express their real-life experiences of violence, which are interwoven into the social fabric of East London.

Feminist Pedagogy in Times of Struggle

What does it mean to think and teach from the picket line in London or from the revolting streets of Beirut? What are the insecurities and uncertainties we grapple with as we think, write, and teach about injustice and struggles against it? As teachers in these cities, we have been thinking about internationalism and solidarity as constitutive of feminist pedagogy in times of struggle (hooks 1994). As researchers of social justice and feminist practice, we are interested in creating a space that defies notions of completeness and mastery (Singh 2017), and that takes seriously the idea that conversation is a feminist method (Gregg 2004). We thus understand feminist scholarship and education as necessarily a process that is enacted collectively. In this project, we want to go through this process together as an experiment in creating feminist community beyond formal academic modes of engagement. The project will culminate in a meeting in London. We will adopt three methods for thinking together: 1) correspondence; 2) annotation; 3) illustrated conversation. Dr Sara Salemand Dr Mai Tahaare the lead researchers. The project is funded by the Open Society University Network.

Human Rights. Human Remains

Dr Claire Mooncurrently holds a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award for her project 'Human Rights, Human Remains: forensic humanitarianism and the politics of the grave' (2018 - 2021). This project explores the ‘forensic turn’ in humanitarianism and the effort to establish the identities and causes of death of the mass victims of atrocities such as enforced disappearance, torture, genocide and war crimes.

Exhumations and forensic identification carry enormous social force. They represent a powerful way of establishing the truth. Yet forensic identification is a social act and interacts with legal, political and humanitarian imperatives which include accountability, combatting political and cultural denial, and returning the dead to families to assist psychological closure.

This project examines the emergence, social complications and implications of forensic investigations of atrocity. It provides the first global history of the forensic turn in humanitarianism, investigates challenges and innovations in the field by analysing a case in Mexico, and explores the hypothesis that as a result of the forensic turn we can now argue that the dead have human rights.

Find out more about Human Rights Human Remains.

Watch this LSE Research for the World videowhich explores the project in more depth.

Care as Science: Animal Husbandry

Dr Carrie Friesehas received a Wellcome Trust New Investigator Award as Principal Investigator on the research project "Care as Science: The Role of Animal Husbandry in Translational Medicine." This is a five-year project (2015-2019) utilises quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore why scientists perceive high-quality animal care as a scientific priority and how it influences their work. Find out more about Care as Science.

Crime Information and its Impact on Public Attitudes

This research, led by Dr Ioanna Gouseti, is funded by LSE's Suntory and Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD) and looks at the impact of crime information on fear of crime. More specifically, the key research question is: What is the impact of different types of crime information and its processing on affective, behavioural and cognitive attitudes to the crime-risk? Crime is an important discursive subject within political, cultural and societal contexts, encompassing stereotypes, normative assessments, images of criminals and victims. Publicly available crime information can thus determine how people view, experience and react to the risk of crime.

The timeliness of this project relates to the fact that in the era of ‘fake news’ and with the immense increase of media channels in recent years, the public are exposed to mixed-quality information about social phenomena, such as crime, which can be highly politicised, sensationalised and often lacking in direct knowledge. Criminological research has shown that as crime narratives in the media are more market-driven than data-driven, the information that they disseminate can be distorted, negatively affecting people’s perceptions of the crime-risk, and thus individual and collective wellbeing.

This research takes into account the pluralism of crime information that exists today, exploring crime statistics, crime news and crime fiction, and their impact on public attitudes to crime. The experimental methodology of the study enables the exploration of causal associations between crime information and public attitudes to crime as opposed to the primarily observational studies that are conducted in the context of fear-of-crime research.

Disconnected Infrastructures

Continuous and widespread violence against women in urban India highlights the challenge of delivering the UN's Sustainable Development Goals of Gender Equality and Sustainable Cities and Communities. Combined with this is an acute information and skills gap in technology use amongst urban poor women that impedes their knowledgeable and empowered engagement with urban infrastructures.

'Disconnected infrastructures and Violence Against Women (VAW): Innovating digital technologies in low-income neighbourhoods to produce safer Indian cities' is led by Dr Ayona Datta (Kings College London) as Principal Investigator with co-investigators including Dr Don Slater. The project take a rights-based approach to the challenge: how to address VAW by improving women’s knowledge of, and safe access to, urban infrastructure in the Indian city. Find out more about Disconnected Infrastructures.

Idiosyncratic Ties

Professor Monika Krausewas awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to conduct research on 'Idiosyncratic Ties: mission agencies and the future of transnational relations' (2018-19).

Most research on international mission agencies focuses on their historical role. Most research on NGOs discusses religious NGOs in relation to secular aims such as humanitarianism, development or world peace. Yet mission agencies today command a significant amount of resources and are an important actor in many of the contexts that humanitarian and development NGOs also inhabit, and they cannot be understood without reference to their specifically religious goal of "spreading the word".

Based on in-depth interviews with managers in mission agencies, participant observation, site visits and analysis of reports and published materials, using case studies from India, Kenya, the US and the Ukraine, Dr Krause's forthcoming book will describe the work of contemporary mission agencies on their own terms and argue that our thinking about transnationalism needs to take into account the kind of ties they establish.

Immigrant Employment Rights and Varieties of Capitalism

The conventional view of immigration control is that it is a process that regulates entry to a country. However, immigration control also extend beyond points of entry to include the extent to which migrants can participate in activities that are often taken for granted by local citizens, such as engage in employment. Working with Eiko Thielemann (Government Department, LSE) we focus on two issues, namely access to employment and the freedom to change employers, in assessing competing hypotheses about cross-national differences in migrant rights. Drawing from the varieties of capitalism literature, we examine whether liberal market economies grant immigrants more employment rights than those in coordinated market economies. In addition, we ask if the more internationalised/Europeanised states (those bound by more liberal constraints entailed in international/European law) can be expected to grant immigrants more employment rights.

The project will update selected questions from the IMPALA database on immigration policy to compare British and German policies in the context of the European Union. The IMPALA consortium has already completed coding on a year by year basis for the UK and Germany for the period 1999-2008. This research will focus on any changes to labour market participation rights in the period since 2008.

This project is funded by LSE's Suntory and Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD).

Find out more about Dr Pat McGovern.

Income Inequality in the Mass Media

Pat is working with Martin Bauer and Sandra Obradovic of LSE’s Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science on a project that examines the way income inequality is framed in mass media discourse. We examine the rise of income inequality as a social problem. Specifically, we want to know if it has been recognised as a scandalous social problem that requires new policy responses or whether it has become subsumed within existing discussions of economic policy.

Drawing on an extended analysis of UK and US newspapers we find that the coverage of income inequality came in three phases; an initial surge in the 1990s, followed by a decline in the early 2000s, and a second surge that takes off after the economic crisis of 2008. Despite this surge in media attention, the problem of inequality seems to have remained an academic concern as it does not appear to have resonated more widely. Across the three periods, we observe a shift in framing, some diversity in frame sponsors and a shift in political slant, yet public attitudes towards inequality remain stable across this same time-period. Our argument is that social inequality has not become a mobilizing social problem, at least as reflected in the print media.

This project is funded by the International Inequalities Institute's Research Innovation Fund.

Find out more about Dr Patrick McGovern, the project’s Co-Investigator.

Migrant Margins

The Migrant Margins project is a collaboration between researchers at the African Centre for Cities, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Cape Town. Over the course of 2020 and 2021 we’ve explored issues of precarious citizenship and urban refuge in the context of Cape Town and its racial legacies of colonisation and apartheid. In this project we’ve focused on formations of gender and livelihoods amongst asylum-seeking women from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, tracing the violence of everyday bordering within discriminatory migration and urban systems. Our recent journal articles that emerge from this research include new thinking on:

· how gendered access to the city is acutely delineated and fragmented;
· how faith and spirituality work as a repository of hope in ambient crises, where precarity is exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic; and
· how money is saved and transferred across borders through lively and intricate circuits of migrant know-how, transactions and technologies.

Funding acknowledgements:
We are grateful to the support from a Philip Leverhulme Prize (Grant number: PLP-2017_189).

Find out more about Professor Suzanne Hall, the project’s Co-Investigator.

Resilient Communities, Resilient Cities?

This project, led by Professor Myria Georgiou from the Department of Media and Communications as Principal Investigator, and Professor Suzi Hallas Co-Investigator, examines the role of digital communication in the making of cities of refuge. More particularly, it focusses on urban communities’ digital responses to sudden and unplanned change resulting from irregular migration into the city. The project zooms into urban neighbourhoods that receive large number of refugees and migrants. It examines how urban communities – established and new – mobilise digitally to respond and manage change in the city. From the development of local networks in support of refugees, to local training into digital skills, cities’ resilience is tested in the capacity to sustain inclusive, integrated and prospering communities.

Risk Regulation, Resilience, Inequality and Flooding Strategies in the UK

Professor Bridget Hutter's current research developed with the UK Environment Agency’s Social Science and Flood and Coastal Risk Management teams is exploring issues of risk regulation, resilience and inequality in the context of UK flooding strategies. It aims particularly to promote a more holistic conceptualization of resilience among policy-makers and flood management practitioners, and to enhance their understanding of the relationship between risk management strategies and resilience approaches. The more broadly-conceived approaches that it promotes embrace ideas of social resilience and policy choice; encourage the inclusion and participation in flooding policy discussion of wider societal groups; and foreground issues of responsibility for flood mitigation, adaptation and reduction.

Bridget Hutter and her research assistants are currently conducting a survey of residents in at-risk areas about how local communities are involved in dealing with risks in their neighbourhood.

Find out more about Professor Bridget Hutter.

Theory and Method in the Workplace Case Study Tradition

This project focuses on problems of theory and method within the qualitative case study tradition in industrial relations and the sociology of work. Drawing on an analysis of studies published in eleven major journals over a fifteen year period this work is intended to open up a discussion about the current state of the art in this tradition. One paper with Diego Alburez, which has already been published, examines whether differences in the reporting of workplace casestudy research methods are associated with gender, experience, academic rank and PhD training. We find a distinct gender difference in that that women take more care reporting their research methods in the context of a general increase in methods reporting.

A second paper, which is under review, assesses the nature of theorizing in workplace case study research by examining how theory is used to inform research questions, select cases and interpret findings. Detailed content analysis reveals that workplace case study research is largely descriptive and that there is remarkably little interest in theoretical matters. A surprising amount of research is, however, preoccupied with the analysis of concepts. Exemplars of theoretical and conceptual analysis are identified and discussed. A further paper is planned on causality in workplace case studies, especially in cross-national comparative studies.

Find out more about Dr Patrick McGovern.

Wealth, Elites and Tax Justice

This is a major research theme led by Professor Mike Savagewithin the International Inequalities Institute, active from 2019-21 with five research clusters and drawing on the expertise of numerous LSE academics from different departments, and from international partners including those in the global south.

Concerns with inequality have tended to focus on the nature and extent of income inequality, which is now well known to be growing in many nations since the 1980s. However, income inequality is only the tip of the iceberg. Following the influential arguments of Thomas Piketty, which rework Marx’s emphasis on capital accumulation, it is increasingly realised that wealth is a more fundamental driver of inequality dynamics.

Other colleagues from LSE Sociology working on this project include Dr Fabien Accominotti, Dr Sam Friedman and our research students Kristina Kolbe and Emma Taylor.

Women in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence

Professor Judy Wajcmanhas been appointed Turing Fellow and Principal Investigator on the 'Women in Data Science and AI' research project at the Alan Turing Institute.

Data scientists and AI professionals are in great demand. Machine learning and data science are now the fastest growing professions in the US, and as our ability to collect and analyse data improves, demand for data scientists will continue to increase. However, the explosive growth in data science and machine learning roles hides a problematic dynamic: women occupy only a minority of these new positions.

The aim of this project is to redress the gender imbalance in data science and AI. Digital technologies are changing the way in which we live our lives and it is imperative for women to be equal partners in developing the algorithms, setting the research agendas, and building the applications underpinned by data science and AI.

This research project aims to examine systematically: why so few women enter data science and AI professions; why, once they enter these professions, many women leave; which interventions work to increase the number of women in data science and AI; and the ways in which the gender deficit shapes both the research agenda and the applications of digital technologies.