I welcome PhD applicants in most areas of social inequalities: including projects on social class, migrants, refugees and borders, racism, sexism, welfare reform and social policy, disability. I am interested in decolonial approaches to social questions and problems, including historical sociological approaches. I am happy to supervise theoretical, qualitative sociological or cultural studies projects. Applicants should be enthusiastic, self-motivated, well-organised and have a strong academic track record.

I am currently Head of the Department of Sociology (2019-2022). I was prevously Deputy HoD (2017-19)

In 2019, I was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science, an award granted by the Academy of Social Sciences to leading academics, policy-makers, and practitioners of the social sciences. 

My research centres on social inequalities and social justice

2015-19: A Philip Leverhulme Prize supported a major research project on stigma and power. 

The outputs from this project seek to enrich sociological understandings of stigma as a concept, idea, material force and practice. This research was particualrly concerned with what social scientific accounts of stigma frequently neglect, namely with developing a new theoretical understanding of stigma as embedded within the social relations of capitalism, and as a form of power entangled with histories of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. This research stretches the frameworks within which we ordinarily think about stigma, dislodges stigma from the settled meanings it acquired within twentieth-century social sciences, and disrupts the individualistic, ahistorical and politically anaesthetised conceptualisations of stigma inherited from this tradition. This paradigm shifting research has to date resulted in the publication of:

Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (forthcoming April 2020)

A Sociological Review Monograph on The Sociology of Stigma (2018) [purchase here]

A graphic novel 'From Stigma Power to Black Power' [download here]

11 journal articles

A series of shorter publication and digital art works

Three recent podcasts about this research:

2019 Podcast with Michaela Benson. Managing editor of the Sociogocail Review: The sociology of stigma and rethinking contemporary social inequalities https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/the-undisciplining-sessions-episode-4-the-sociology-of-stigma-and-rethinking-contemporary-social-inequalities/

2.    2019 Podcast with Jenna Loyd, Genealogies of race, place, stigma in the critique of territorial stigmatisation http://thesociologicalreview.libsyn.com/ep005-genealogies-of-race-place-stigma-in-the-critique-of-territorial-stigmatisation

3. 2019 Podcast with ‘Surviving Society’ https://player.fm/series/surviving-society/e040-surviving-society-with-the-bsa-imogen-tyler

I am currently developing three new research projects:

• "Deportation Nation" examines the genealogy of "Hostile Environment" policies vis a vis citizenship and migration. Linked to this, from June 2019 I will be mentoring Wellcome Trust Research Fellow Dr Gwyenth Lonergan in a 3-year project on ‘Migrant Women's Experiences of Maternity Care’.

• "After Austerity" considers the future of social provision in the context of the erosion of the post-WWII British Welfare State. 

• "Decolonising Lancaster" A mutli-media project which seeks to decolonise histories of welfare capitalism through a local/global of one North West English city and its multifacted links to slavery, plantation labour, industrialisation, and the development of its civic and welfare estate.

In 2017, Dr Tracey Jensen and I developed a new final yr. UG course, Welfare States: Histories and Futures, which was awarded a faculty prize for student experience in 2018.

In 2014 I was awarded a Lancaster University Staff prize for 'Outstanding Research in the area of Social Inequalities'. 

In 2010 I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, the major outcome of which was the monograph Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (2013). Revolting Subjects has had a significant impact on sociology (and a range of cognate disciplines), particularly in fields of research concerned with inequalities, migration, citizenship, social class, disability, poverty and welfare. It was shortlisted for two prestigious prizes: the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and the BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best first and sole-authored book within the discipline of sociology. It has been widely reviewed in academic and the wider public sphere. It has also been widely adopted on course reading lists across the Social Sciences and Humanities. 

Journal editorial board member

The Sociological Review: http://www.thesociologicalreview.com/

Soundings: https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings

Citizenship Studies: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccst20/current

European Journal of Cultural Studies http://ecs.sagepub.com/

Feminist Media Studies http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rfm