My research looks at how different kinds of cultural objects - policy, political speech, media and cultural texts - work together to produce and circulate commonsense ideas about welfare, parenting, family, reproduction, inequality and the future.  I have done substantive research on parenting culture, media and policy, analyzing the media and policy production of 'the dysfunctional family' and 'bad parents' and exploring how this operates as a key consensus object for recent 'post-welfare' shifts in citizen entitlement.  My book Parenting The Crisis: the cultural politics of parent-blame (2018) gives an overview of the ways that a powerful consensus of dysfunctional families was manufactured across two decades in the UK.  

Another strand of my research investigates the production of 'welfare imaginaries' and the history and future of welfare state experiments and representations.  I have tracked the explosion of a 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 this particular television genre feeds into a series of research projects which explore how ideas of welfare provision have been imagined, represented and mediated.  

My current research explores the resurgence of eugenics and reproductive politics in a political moment characterised by authoritarianism and the dismantling of social security systems.  This research investigates the reactivation of eugenic discourse and ideas, especially as they connect to the welfare state in the present austerity moment.  This new project connects welfare history, population and demography, feminist theory and critical race studies, and speaks to the rise of authoritarianism and reproductive politics around the world.