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Associate Researchers with an interest in research on families and relationships
Amanda Amos
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Smoking and tobacco control. Focusing on a broad range of smoking issues at the individual, community and societal levels
Simon Anderson
Research Consultant
Research interests: Simon is an applied social researcher, with almost 30 years’ experience as a practitioner, commissioner, strategist and senior manager across a range of settings, including academia, central government, the private and voluntary sectors. His research interests include criminology, ageing, emotional support, and social research methods. As an independent consultant he helps organisations to design, commission, fund, conduct and use social research more effectively.
Angus Bancroft
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: recreational and problem drug and alcohol use; big data and citizen science; illicit markets; digital crime; health and illness
Nancy Bell
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Children’s rights, socio-legal research and human rights, social policy and service development, human rights monitoring and implementation, public services redress structures, non-traditional remedies to human
Research interests: Gender equality in organisations. Opting out of successful careers to opt in to new lifestyles, and ways of working where different interests and areas of life can be combined in a sustainable way.
Gillian Black
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Adult relationships; parenting and multiple-parent families; family law and justice; and the interaction of adult/child rights.
University of Brighton – Scottish Government
Becca’s work examines the experiences of adults who are estranged from one or more family members. As well as research on the prevalence and causes of family estrangement, my research looks at the systemic inequalities and barriers estranged adults may face in UK society at policy level when they lack family capital.
Liz Bondi
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Emotional geographies, socio-spatial perspectives on counselling and psychotherapy; voluntary sector activism; gendered identities and subjectivities and qualitative methodologies.
Charlotte Bosseaux
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Through her work and research Charlotte has become increasingly aware that languages are not transparent, but represent women and their experiences in particular ways. This specific understanding has raised her awareness enormously of the need for good quality translation. Charlotte’s research focuses on how the voices of women who have suffered from gender-based violence are represented by translation (and interpreting).
Sophia Bowlby
University of Reading
Research interests: Feminist social and economic geography of urban area.
Jenna Breckenridge
University of Dundee
Research interests: disabled women’s experiences of domestic abuse, domestic abuse during pregnancy, managing long term conditions (specifically type 1 diabetes) in the context of daily life, and promoting social connectivity and reducing loneliness in care homes.
Oona Brooks
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Evidence-use, inequalities, gender-based violence.
Sally Brown
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Relationships between generations, particularly in families where there has been experience of teenage pregnancy across two or more generations; how young men experience fatherhood, and what fatherhood means to them.
Julie Brownlie
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Sociology of emotions; personal relationships and social change
Lia Bryant
University of South Australia
Research interests: Rural diversity and the lives of families living in variegated rural communities. Specific focus on wellbeing, examining ageing, the impact of political and moral economies, heath, caring, distress and suicide, gender and sexuality, and intimacy.
Cheryl Burgess
University of Stirling
Research interests: Currently undertaking four small evaluations of services including two PSP Family Support Services, one of a Sure Start programme and one of a self-directed support pilot within Children’s Services in a local authority. She is also part of a team commissioned by British Agencies for Fostering and Adoption, looking at outcomes for children under five who are fostered or adopted in Scotland.
Kate Butterworth
Durham Edinburgh
Research interests: Domestic violence (specifically same-sex domestic violence), police responses to domestic violence, and qualitative methodology. Kate is currently working on research exploring how the police respond to same-sex domestic violence within the UK.
Laura Cariola
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: My current research explores discourses of mental health problems, such as media presentations, and lived experiences of young people and their families. Other research explores the psychology and experiences of mobile families.
Janet Carsten
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Kinship, marriage and relatedness, gender and the person, genomics and reproductive technologies, houses and domesticity, migration, memory, adoption and adoption reunions, Malaysia and Southeast Asia, Britain.
Shruti Chaudhry
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Marriage and intimate relationships, migration, care, ageing and the life-course, inter-generational relationships, lived experience, social change, British/Scottish South Asian families, ethnic minority families. Regional Specialisation: India, South Asia, Scotland
Eric Zhong Chen
Clinical Effectiveness Unit, Faculty of Reproductive Healthcare
Research interests: Sexual and reproductive healthcare service, fertility decision-making, adolescent health and well-being and risk-taking behaviours.
Hope Christie
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Currently my research is focused on understanding the psychological support needs of parents in South Africa who have experienced trauma and may be living with PTSD. Through understanding more about that support looks like for them, I hope to be able to develop a resource around their needs that will help support parents and their children following trauma.
Bronwen Cohen
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: A wide range of issues pertaining to children and young people, family policy, place-based learning and education, children’s sector workforce, equal opportunities and rural development including a focus on European and international dimensions within ECEC.
Philip Cook
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: The moral and political status of children and related questions of family relations. The nature of children’s basic moral equality; justice in schooling and education; children’s entitlements to work; children’s entitlements to political participation.
Elizabeth Cripps
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: The relationship between parental duties and duties of climate or global justice. Do parents have a special duty to mitigate climate change, or a duty to bring up their children as good global climate citizens? How do these affect the perceived tension between doing ‘one’s best’ for one’s own child, and fulfilling general duties of justice or morality?
Graham Crow
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Research methods, methodological innovations, ethics, sociology of families, households and communities.
Patricio Cuevas-Parra
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Primarily on social justice issues related to children in situations of adversity. Within this childhood-focused research, much of the emphasis of my work is on understanding children and young people’s participation in public policy debate. I have a particular interest in exploring innovative and participatory methodologies to engage children and young people in research processes- particularly in looking at cutting-edge child rights advocacy approaches and models to enhance children opportunities to participate collectively in society in accordance with relevant human rights standards.
Nicola Cunningham
University of Stirling
Research interests: qualitative research. Current research interests: dementia, cancer and homecare; dementia and multimorbidities; gender, welfare and wellbeing; rights-based approaches.
Jenny Dalrymple
Glasgow Caledonian University
Research interests: Currently exploring the role of transitioning from long term relationships as a potential point of risk taking for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Aiming to develop an STI risk reduction intervention, potentially applicable for adults at all stages of the life course.
Glyn Davis
University of St Andrews
Research interests: Primarily queer forms of culture, especially cinema. Queer politics / queer archives / European queer lives / queer visual culture / experimental cinema.
Rama Dieng
University of Edinburgh
Rama Salla Dieng, is a Senegalese writer, academic and activist. She is currently a Lecturer in Africa and International Development at the Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh. Her PhD thesis provided a feminist political economy analysis of selected agricultural investments and their socio-economic outcomes in Northern Senegal during what has been dubbed “the land rush” between 2008 and 2017. Between 2010 and 2015, she worked successively as a Research Assistant then a Research Fellow in the Policy Research Division the African Institute for Economic Development and Planning (IDEP) based in Senegal. Rama is also a feminist activist who has collaborated with several feminist organisations on agrarian change, gender and development, and social reproduction. Research interests: African feminisms and Feminist Parenting
Lynne Duncan
University of Dundee
Research interests: Language and literacy development; in particular, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of the impact of inequalities, language background (e.g. bilingual, dialectal) and cognitive abilities on typical and atypical development.
Ruth Edmonds
Research interests: Ruth is an Ethnographer and Social Development Consultant at Keep Your Shoes Dirty where she generates local knowledge to help understand people and their lives from their own vantage points. She has fifteen years experience in ethnographic and qualitative research and evaluation and evidence-based approaches to programme and policy design within the public and not-for-profit sectors. Ruth has designed and managed research projects in the UK and internationally (for example, Ghana, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda, Indonesia, Nepal and Ecuador). She has worked with organisations such as the United Nations, DFID, Girl Effect, Rosa Fund for Women, The Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions and the UK Cabinet Office Policy Lab. Ruth has particular expertise in bringing forward the perspectives of hard to reach and vulnerable groups and has specific experience of research with children and families and developing locally driven approaches to research ethics. She has developed training manuals and toolkits for peer research and applied ethnography, including numerous story-based packages to support organisations to conduct their own peer learning and use this to inform the design of their approaches and services.
Liz Forbat
University of Stirling
Research interests: Conducting mixed method studies in palliative care, with a key focus on family relationships when someone has a diagnosis of a life-limiting or life-threatening condition. Patient/user involvement, minoritisation, power and abuse.
Deborah Fry
University of Edinburgh
Deborah is the Principal Investigator on a multi-country study exploring the drivers of violence affecting children and a co-investigator on two studies exploring identification and response related to child protection and disability. A hallmark of all her research has been working with young people and practitioners to explore the real-life, day-to-day issues for providing the safest and best environment to both reduce the impact of violence on young people and ultimately, to prevent violence from ever occurring in the first instance.
David Gadd
University of Manchester
Research interests: Domestic abuse perpetrators and interventions; substance use and Interpersonal violence; men as victims of domestic abuse; young people and domestic abuse; social marketing campaigns to prevent violence; modern slavery, human trafficking and grooming; response to sexual assault survivors.
Andressa Gadda
Research interests: The focus of Andressa’s research is on child care and protection, particularly in relation to looked after children and young people and their families. Her research has looked at various aspects of care and protection systems in Scotland and different perspectives about these systems, including those of children and young people.
Michael Gallagher
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Michael Gallagher has carried out research on a variety of topics including power in primary schools, counselling services, adolescent health and social work. He also has a growing interest in sound, its role in everyday life, and the possibilities of sonic methods for enriching qualitative research.
Karri Gillespie-Smith
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: How core socio-cognitive strengths and weaknesses impact wider areas of functioning in Autism and other vulnerable groups (ie clinical symptomology, forsenic implications, risk awareness, social media use, friendships and relationships, technology).
Cornelia Gollek
University of the West of Scotland
Research interests: Children’s cognitive development and the relationship to language development. How different socio-economic factors influence metacognition and early language learning.
Karen Goodall
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Karen’s research focuses mainly on the impact of childhood experiences on wellbeing and mental health in later life. I am particularly interested in how the quality of childhood relationships (attachment) are related to how individuals regulate thoughts, emotions and behaviour. A further interest is Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), particularly emotional abuse.
Elizabeth Hannah
University of Dundee
Research interests: Autism spectrum disorder; educational transitions; consulting with children and young people; early years; inclusion of children with additional support needs and professional ethics.
Tina Haux
Social Research Association
Research interests: Evidence-use, childhood, families & relationships.
Duncan Helm
University of Stirling
Research interests: Judgement and decision making in social work. Duncan has research experience in the study of sense-making and influencing factors in the ecology of judgement. In particular Duncan is interested in how practitioners combine deliberative (analytical) and non-deliberative (intuitive) thinking when making decisions in conditions of uncertainty.
Mary Holmes
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Mary’s past research has been on distance relationships, where couples (mostly heterosexual) spend much of their time living some way apart. This research links with other collaborative work thinking about heterosexuality and how it can be done subversively. Current research is on heterosexual experiences of internet dating.
Jennifer Hoolachan
University of Cardiff
Research interests: include marginalised groups and precarity; homelessness and housing; the sociology of deviance (with a focus on drug use); youth studies; and constructions of home and place. Theoretically, my work has been informed by symbolic interactionism, deviancy theories, youth transitions, belonging and identity, and understandings of space and place.
Bill Hughes
Glasgow Caledonian University
Research interests: Disability and impairment, social theory and the body, social exclusion.
Cara Jardine
University of Strathclyde
Research interests: Cara currently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, and this project aims to explore how connected men and women in custody feel to their communities during their sentence. This builds on her PhD research, which examined in the impact of imprisonment on families and relationships.
Vanisha Jassal
University of Kent
My current research is examining the cultural constructs of ‘shame’ and ‘honour’ in families and their likely influence upon females who have suffered child sexual abuse amongst Britain’s South Asian communities.
Karolina Kazimierczak
University of Aberdeen
Research interests: Work and families and relationships. Everyday caring practices in cancer services, and at the everyday technocultural practices at work and in the home.
Susanne Kean
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Children and young people, experiences of a critical illness event, sociology of families, sociology of childhood, survivorship and qualitative research methods.
Hyunchul Kim
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: l am a social and cultural anthropologist whose main research interests include the anthropology of contemporary Japan and East Asia, death, religion and ritual, emotion, personhood, kinship, gender, economic anthropology, and more recently migration, refugees, national identity, the politics of death, and political anthropology. I am currently working on research exploring how the intertwined bonds between family members are sustained and adjusted after death, and how the relationship between the surviving family members and the deceased is altered, maintained and terminated.
Kristina Konstantoni
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Children’s rights and participation (particularly in early childhood), intersectional identities/diversities, peer relations and issues around discrimination and social justice.
Alison Koslowski
University College London
Research interests: Labour market, social inequality, and quantitative research methods.
Marlies Kustatscher
University of Edinburgh
Marlies is a Lecturer in Childhood Studies, Programme Director of the BA in Childhood Practice, and Co-Director of the Centre for Education for Racial Equality in Scotland (CERES) in the Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on children and young people’s experiences of intersecting inequalities (race, class, gender, ethnicity, age); interdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to activism and social change; and children and young people’s human rights and participation in research and practice.
Julien le Jeune d’Allegeershecque
University of Glasgow
Research interests: The topic of my MSc dissertation was “Personal Growth after Domestic Abuse”. As part of this research I studied the feasibility of conducting research into Post-Traumatic Growth with female survivors of Domestic Abuse, in partnership with Women’s Aid. The study was successful, and yielded some important feasibility information on how to carry out this type of research in an ethical manner, as well as providing some guidelines on how to work in partnership with third-sector organisations in this field.
Billy Lee
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Phenomenological psychology, and the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to study experience, identity, and psychotherapy, the role of the body, culture, gender and sexuality.
Ai Keow Lim
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Children’s learning and development, early childhood education and care, parenting, linking of child development and policy, cross-cultural comparative studies.
Tania Loureiro
University of Aberdeen
Research interests focus on imprisonment, alternatives to custody, children’s rights and the impact of sentencing options on families and children.
Sian Lucas
University of Stirling
Research interests: Delivery of health and social care services for users with limited English language proficiency. Linguistic minority families and children’s contributions as language brokers.
John MacInnes
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Social demography, especially fertility; the family and the labour market; work-life balance; sociology of gender especially masculinity.
Kirsteen Mackay
University of Edinburgh
Research interests include the participation of children in major decisions impacting on their lives, including children’s access to those who can advocate on their behalf when those closest to them do not promote their views or best interests. She has particular interest in issues relating to the empowerment of children who are or have been maltreated – especially those who have experienced gender-based violence.
Alice MacLean
MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit
Research interests: The ways in which help-seeking for illness, lay understandings of illness, and experiences of illness vary and interact with gender over the life course.
Siobhan Magee
University of Edinburgh
Siobhan is a social anthropologist with particular interests in kinship and relatedness, gender and personhood, material culture, and the intersections between kinship, politics, and the law. She is keen to explore how these topics arise both ethnographically and historically. She carried out her PhD research in Poland but more recently started research in the USA. Her current work is part of the ERC-funded project A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage (AGATM).
Jane Mair
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Family law, matrimonial and family property, UK and EU employment law. Discrimination in employment with particular interest in sex discrimination.
Meiko Makita
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Meiko is currently onducting research on (1) ‘remote’ experiences of care, loss, bereavement and grief in the context of covid-19 and how these are communicated on social media through text and photography, and (2) images of re-negotiated spaces of work and family life during lockdown shared on social media.
Geetha Marcus
Queen Margaret University
Research interests: Marginalised experiences and multiple identities of black women and women of colour, in particular inequalities that impact on their lives as individuals and their relationships with families and communities. Racialised and gendered experiences of Gypsy/Traveller girls and women and lived experiences of young Gypsy/Traveller boys and girls in Scotland.
Charles Marley
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Charles work is interested in why we think and do what we do regarding children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing. He is interested in understanding the history of what we think and do with regards to children’s problems and how this has been shaped a variety of factors. His aim is to understand how these factors have made certain ways of thinking and acting in relation to ‘problems’ more likely than other ways of thinking and acting.
Louise Marryat
University of Dundee
Research interests: Louise works on a range of research studies, mostly using routinely-collected data, such as hospital or health visitor records, to explore the pathways which children take through life, following some sort of childhood adversity. This may be having a mother who used drugs during pregnancy, or having experienced abuse or maltreatment in childhood. She is interested in a range of outcomes across the lifecourse, including physical and mental health, educational and social outcomes.
Kareena McAloney-Kocaman
Glasgow Caledonian University
Research interests: Substance use and risk behaviours among adolescents. Clustering of health behaviours among mothers and their children. Social group memberships in intimate relationships.
Lisa McDaid
University of Queensland
Research interests: LGBT communities, community participative methods, co-production in intervention development and health improvement, asset-based public health, syndemics, sexual health. Previously an Associate Director of CRFR.
Edward McGee
East Renfrewshire Council
Research interests: Numeracy and maths, implementation science and Improvement Science, ASN legislation, Wellbeing, scale design.
Lorna McKee
University of Aberdeen
Main areas of expertise: Qualitative research including organisational case studies and ethnography.
Aoife McKenna
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Sociological approaches to – family and intimate relationships, reproduction, healthcare, inequalities, health technologies, contraception, and qualitative research methods.
Fiona McQueen
Edinburgh Napier University
Research interests: Couples, femininity, masculinity, power. Currently publishing papers in relation to couple relationships, particularly changes in emotional participation brought about by men engaging with their emotions in new ways.
Charlotte Melander
Gothenburg University
Charlottes current research is focusing on children of EU-migrant workers who have reunited with their parent/parents in Sweden after a period of geographical separation. The focus in the first study is on the voices of children and on the building of significant relationships in a transnational context before and after migration. The other study is focusing on how children´s mobility have influenced their feelings of belonging and attachment to people and places.
Sue Milne
The Gateway
Primary research interests are child-adult and intergenerational relations and child and adult play and participation.
Nughmana Mirza
University of Glasgow
My current research interests are marriage migration patterns, kinship and gender patterns within matrilocal settings. I am particularly interested in women’s access to social capital and support structures within these settings, and within the context of family abuse.
Mary Mitchell
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: participation, childhood and youth studies, child welfare, social work interventions, families, re-imaging outcomes, repositioning positions of power, looked after children. Mary’s recent research is a 1+3 collaborative studentship, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and was a partnership between CHILDREN 1ST, the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships and the University of Edinburgh. This qualitative research aimed to better understand the contribution Family Group Conferencing (FGC) makes to longer-term outcomes for children and families.
Niamh Moore
University of Edinburgh
Niamh’s work is centrally concerned with ‘re-visioning’ an eco/feminist politics of sustainability, by applying the lens of sustainability in new contexts. This holistic approach links environmental sustainability with human and non-human health and well-being.
Fiona Morrison
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Fiona’s research interests are in the areas of children’s rights, child welfare, domestic abuse and research with children.
Marta Moskal
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Marta’s research lies within the interdisciplinary area of migration and mobility studies, with a particular interest in family, children and youth ‘s experiences, their relationships and transnational social and spacial geographies.
Ingela Kristina Naumann
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Links between work and care arrangements in European welfare states and on the political mobilizations and political processes around work/family policies.
Sarah Nelson
Research Fellow
Research interests: Mental health and sexual abuse; the long term physical health consequences of CSA; practical prevention strategies at local and national level; and community prevention against sex offending.
Rosaleen O’Brien
Glasgow Caledonian University
Research interests: marginalised groups; complex health and social care needs; parent; maternal mental health; complex interventions; ethnography; gender and health.
Rosemary Okoli
Research interests: Children and young people, families and relationships, gender especially in the majority world context.
Sharani Osborn
Research interests: gender, masculinity, family, family formation, generations, temporality
Martyn Pickersgill
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Social, legal and ethical dimensions of biomedicine and the health professions. Sociological and science and technology studies (STS) approaches to bioethics and public health; the social studies of law; and, the sociologies of health-related enhancement and epigenetics.
Steve Platt
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Socio-economic and socio-cultural aspects of suicidal behaviour, the evaluation of policy and practice interventions for health improvement, the health impact of organisational change and smoking and socio-economic disadvantage.
Carrie Purcell
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Sexual and reproductive health, abortion, menstruation, gender, embodiment, healthcare practices and medical sociology.
Shuang Qiu
University of York
Research interests: Reshaping intimacy: Chinese couples in LAT (living apart together) relationships.
Dr Kaveri Qureshi
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Kaveri is the author of Chronic illness in a Pakistani labour diaspora (2019) and Marital breakdown among British Asians: conjugality, legal pluralism and new kinship (2016), and the co-editor of Parenthood between generations: transforming reproductive cultures (2016, with Sian Pooley) and Infant feeding: medicalization, the state and techniques of the body (2017, with Elizabeth Rahman). Most recently she has been working on intersectional inequalities in maternal and child health in Pakistan, examining how social locations differentiate women’s reproductive and caring experiences.
Koreen Reece
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Currently conducting research on marriage in Botswana, and the ways in which it both reflects and produces social change, thirty years into the country’s AIDS epidemic. The project is part of the comparative, ERC-funded project, A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage.
Research interests: Gender equality, gender public policy, gender attitudes towards domestic violence, diversity and inclusion, sexual and reproductive health.
Jane Robertson
University of Stirling
Research interests: Ageing and older people; well-being and quality of life; programme/service evaluation; cancer care and dementia care.
Autumn Roesch-Marsh
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Young people’s perspectives on risk and decision making.
Neneh Rowa-Dewar
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Public health research, smoking in the home and sociology and health inequalities.
Yingzi Shen
University of Sheffield
Yingzi’s PhD research examines how rural migrant grandparents and parents cooperate on childcare when the three generations are incorporated in migration from rural areas to the cities in China. It focuses on the intergenerational negotiation on childcare, migrant grandparents’ roles in childcare practices in the cities, and how the hukou (household registration) system influences childcare practices in those migrant families. This research intends to contribute to literature on unpaid childcare in internal migrant families and intergenerational connections in the context of migration.
Daniela Sime
University of Strathclyde
My current research focuses on migrant children and youth and the impact that family migration has on young people’s relationships and identities. In the context of Brexit, I am exploring the impact of the UK’s decision to leave the EU on young migrants’ everyday lives, their family and peer relationships, sense of identity and belonging and plans for the future. I am also interested in the impact of austerity measures on families and young people’s experiences of services, as well as researching the inequalities that certain groups experience in education.
Zoi Simopoulou
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: children and young people, existentialism, psychoanalysis, creative methods, psychoanalytic methodologies, relational ontologies, writing as inquiry.
Research interests: Personhood, emotions and the comparative understanding of well-being and the application of this knowledge into improving lives.
Valeria Skafida
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Social stratification of health behaviours and health inequalities; Sociology of health and illness and the sociology of food; Food Policy and public health; Domestic violence and children’s experiences of violence; research using quantitative methods, longitudinal analysis of survey data.
Andrew Smith
University of Bradford
Research interests: sociology of work and employment, public sector employment change, the challenges and complexities of work-life ‘balance’, low-paid work, low-paid multiple employment.
Marion Smith
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: How children as receivers of cultural information express their understandings of justice and the morality of punishment, and how their language discloses key features of current social sensibilities towards punishment; and in pain, particularly medically unexplained or untreated pain.
Jennifer Speirs
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Kinship, origin issues, donor assisted conception, surrogacy, adoption and the anthropology of energy.
Francesca Stella
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Sexuality and intimacy, migration and social networks.
Ferdinand Sutterlüty
Goethe University
Research interests: Social inequalities and its semantics, ethnic conflicts, social theory and qualitative research methods, family and youth violence, family relationships and the sociology of childhood.
Morena Tartari
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Research interests: Morena’s specific and current research interests concern the ways in which child custody laws and social policies shape mothers’ everyday life experiences and understandings of their rights and their claims. With attention to the intersections of gender, ethnicity and social class, she is interested in how social welfare policies, child custody laws, and the institutional discourses on them, frame the mothers’ experience.
Morag Treanor
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Morag is Professor of Social Policy and Inequality.
Morag’s research focus is on poverty, socioeconomic inequalities, and destitution, particularly where they pertain to children, young people and families. Morag uses longitudinal methods, birth cohort survey data, and administrative data to explore the impacts of longitudinal socioeconomic inequalities on children’s cognitive, social, emotional and behavioural developmental outcomes.
Francesca Vaghi
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Building on her doctoral research, Francesca will continue investigating children’s eating practices in institutional spaces, and experiences of food poverty within families. In particular, she is interested in exploring the contradictions that emerge at the intersection of public health and family policies and the everyday lived experiences of children and families.
Gill Viry
University of Edinburgh
Research interests bridge the intersection of spatial mobilities, social networks, family and intimate life. Using mainly social survey methods, social network analysis and sequence analysis, my work advances new ways of studying how physical distance and mobility behaviours, such as travelling, commuting, moving or using digital mobile technologies, relate to family relationships and family networks.
I am currently working on two large collaborative projects: (1) Spatial mobility skills, conjugal networks and conjugal quality (PI) on how individuals’ spatial mobility skills and conjugal network overlap moderate the influence of residential mobility on couples; (2) Personal networks of young adults in Switzerland: Social capital, educational and work aspirations (Co-I) on the role of young people’s personal relationships and personal networks (including their geography) on their educational and work aspirations. I am also involved in international research collaboration with various network scholars (Andreas Herz, Claire Bidart, Marion Maisonobe, Benjamin Bach) on advanced methods for analysing and mapping the geography of personal networks.
Karen Watchman
University of Stirling
Research interests: Dementia, learning disability, Down syndrome and dementia.
Nick Watson
University of Glasgow
Research interests: Disability and childhood, disability theory, identity, the role of impairment, care and personal assistance, disability and technology, disability history
Christine Whyte
University of Glasgow
Christine’s research is focused on the history of children, childhoods and the family in West Africa. She is particularly interested in the practice of child fosterage and the employment of children as domestic servants. She also works on the history of child slavery, child labour and emancipated children in a global context.
Daniel Wight
MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow
Research interests: Early years intervention, young people’s health and lifestyles, parent-child relationships and health outcomes, sexual and reproductive health in low income countries, the development and evaluation of interventions, and developing social science research capacity in Africa.
Lauren Wilks
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: paid domestic work, care, mobility, gender, work & labout, family & personal relationships, inequality, ethnography, qualitative research. Lauren’s research project looks at the working and personal lives of (mostly women) workers who are engaged in daily commuting and domestic work in Kolkata, India.
Wendy Wills
University of Hertfordshire
Research interests: Social, economic and environmental determinants of diet, eating practices, food security, malnutrition, obesity, physical activity.
Jenny Wood
I-SPHERE, Heriot-Watt University
Jenny researches homelessness policy, severe and multiple disadvantage, interventions to assist people facing homelessness, inclusive urban planning, and children’s human rights. Her methodological expertise lies in qualitative research, with emerging skills in interpretive policy analysis, systematic reviewing and meta-analysis. Trained as a town planner, she has a commitment to child-friendly urban planning and the concept of the Child Friendly City, and researches what this means for policy and practice. She co-founded Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, A Place in Childhood in 2018 which seeks to promote and conceive child friendly environments through practice-based research, advocacy and action.
Rachael Wood
University of Edinburgh
Research interests: Child public health.
Congwei Zheng
University of Glasgow
Research topic: the experiences of surrogacy arrangements and parenting children born through surrogacy among Chinese gay men.
Research interests: Surrogacy; gender and family relations; fatherhood; fertility policy; China study.