My current research looks at how policy, media and cultural texts work together to produce and circulate  commonsense ideas of families ‘in crisis', ‘welfare dependent’ or ‘undisciplined’.   I am connecting these ideas to a broader analysis of the 'post-welfare' shift, in which citizen entitlements are becoming contractual, precarious and sanctioned.  My book Parenting The Crisis: the cultural politics of parent-blame explores the connections between parenting culture, policy and neoliberalism and was recently published by Policy Press.

I have also been examining the recent explosion of a new genre of reality television – known as ‘poverty porn’ – which forms part of a populist authoritarianism around welfare.  I have a longstanding interest in reality television as a site of contested class-making and forthcoming research in this area will explore the processes and economics of factual welfare television production.  This particular strand of research also feeds into a series of connected current and future projects on welfare, the welfare state and welfare imaginaries, which explore how ideas of welfare provision have been imagined, represented and mediated over 60 years.