Research
Transformations: Economy, Society and Place
This research cluster works on the technologies and patterns of global interconnectivity forged between the changing spatial practices and scales of governance and regulation and those of diverse social groups demanding and resisting changes to work and welfare in different times and places. Research ranging across different arenas of action from the home to the state is here commonly concerned with the production of global inequalities in life chances and expectancies, livelihoods and living standards through which new geographies of diversity and difference emerge.
Research foci include the emergence of transitional states and new forms of governance in post-socialist Europe and post-apartheid South Africa; the ways in which transport and related technologies have transformed and been transformed by social and economic developments; work on pensions and life-course decision-making; the culture of markets, workplaces and organisations; and on transnationalism, diasporic communities; on 'translocal' cultures and migrant labour in Europe and in Africa. Research on urban segregation of minority ethnic and religious communities, including Muslims, is an active interest. Those working in this cluster have made major contributions to theoretical and methodological innovation, most notably in the linking ethnographic and macro-scale data collection and analysis and in the development of feminist theories of workplace cultures, and in the cultural economy of financial products and the knowledge competences on which they rely.
Randomly Featured Research
Desegregation and redistribution of resources in South African schools
Dr Tony Lemon; Financial support from British Council and the Oppenheimer Fund; (2000 - 2005)
Education is a critical element in post-apartheid restructuring. The urgency of South Africa’s political transformation provides social scientists with an opportunity to monitor an encounter between idealism and reality in post-apartheid policy-making. Analysis of education policy suggests that it derives from political symbolism (especially of equity and redress) divorced from the material realities of macro-economic policy. This project seeks to explore the consequences of those material realities through investigation of the nature of desegregation and the redistribution of resources on the ground. Continuing earlier, more tentative work in relatively affluent Western Cape province, this project focuses on the Eastern Cape, one of the country’s two poorest provinces which includes a large former black ‘homeland’ population, and KwaZulu-Natal, also poor but including significant white and Indian minority populations in its major cities. more...
Academic and Research Staff
Professor Gordon L. Clark
Cluster Leader
Dr Andrew Currah
Dr Patricia Daley
Dr Rob Hope
Course Director, MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management
Dr Craig Jeffrey
Dr Tony Lemon
Dr Anna Lora-Wainwright
Professor Linda McDowell
Cluster Leader
Professor Judith Pallot
Dr Dariusz Wójcik
The Transformations: Economy, Society and Place research cluster has a number of other researchers and graduate research students actively involved in current research. The cluster also hosts visiting researchers throughout the year and has a number of associated and affiliated non-resident researchers.