My research is focused on the areas of: advertising, branding and promotional culture; consumer society; cities and urban culture; friendship and social ties; visual culture; gender and culture, cultural economy; commercial cultures and neo-capitalism.

I welcome applications from potential PhD students in any of the above areas.

I am available to supervise PhD projects in the areas of: advertising and branding; consumption and consumer society; urban space and culture; friendship and sociality; gender and culture; media and cultural theory.

Current research

I am currently developing a new project on advertising and consumer culture. At the same time I'm writing up the results of my recent British Academy funded project on friendship.

SPACE AND FRIENDSHIP PROJECT. This project explores friendships as forms of social ties that are not captured by (academic or popular) narratives of family or narratives of romance. Most often analysed as relationships that facilitate social capital, I'm instead thinking of friendships as forms that create spaces in particular ways and function as ways of orienting people's interspersonal and emotional experience. Results of the project show interesting and under-explored aspects of people's personal lives. The first article explores how specific contexts, such as the workplace, strongly shape people's friendship practices and examines how emotions are produced intersubjectively in friendship relationships (see publications list). Other articles in progress examine how friendships are not only gendered, but are active in producing gender, and how friendship creates specific forms of spatial imaginaries.

Previous Projects

ADVERTISING AND URBAN SPACE. This project was an ESRC-funded analysis of advertising and spatiality, focusing on outdoor advertising in and around cities (published as the book: Advertising, Commercial Spaces and the Urban, 2010, Palgrave Macmillan). It focuses, firstly, on how outdoor advertising companies' market research practices perform urban spaces and produce certain relationalities with imagined consumers that are spatialised and temporalised. And, secondly, it explores the way in which outdoor advertising - on billboards, panels, buses, building 'wraps' - organises urban space and draws on certain commodity logics, rearticulating the mapping of cities and people's experience of those time-spaces. And, thirdly, the book explores the commercial practices of the industry's actors and how they perform market relationships in the context of neo-capitalism. In the book, I develop ways of thinking about the relationship between visuality, space, and commercial practices, and explore the synergies and tensions between 'public space' and 'commercial space'. I frame outdoor advertising as a kind of 'commercial vernacular' that expresses not only capitalist logics, but also people's more diffuse and potentially resistant experiences of cities.

I have also published an edited collection on consumption and the city with Kevin Hetherington called Consuming the Entrepreneurial City: Image, Memory and Spectacle and a co-edited special issue of Feminist Review called 'Urban Space' (With Liz Oakley-Brown).

Grants

British Academy Small Grant

2011-12 Project: Friendship, Social Ties and Urban Experience

ESRC Grant

2006-7 Project: Advertising and the city: making the symbolic and political economies of urban spaces

AHRC Research Leave Award (2001-2): Dangerous Images: Advertising, Addiction and the Compulsive Self.

Undergraduate:

• Consumer Culture and Advertising
• Friendship, Intimacy and Society
• Introduction to Sociology

Masters:

• Consumer Society
• I currently supervise a number of research students in the areas of consumer society, visual culture, material culture, urban studies, and gender and culture.