Graduate Student, Sociology and Criminology
Graduate Teaching Assisstant
Thesis Title: Mobility and Inequality in Greater Manchester
Karl Dayson
Victoria Gosling
About
Bob Jeffery - Biography
Born in Southport and grew up in Carlisle in the North of England, I have completed degrees in BA Media and Cultural Studies at the Nottingham Trent University, and MA Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, producing work on the audience of American ‘televangelism’, the demonisation of ‘Chavs’, and the phenomenon of binge-drinking in modern Britain. I’am currently undertaking a PhD in Sociology at the University of Salford, investigating the links between ever-increasing physical mobility and continuing inequality. More specifically I’am interested in understanding how attitudes to mobility and territoriality are reproduced across generations, and the ways in which actors draw upon ‘Network Capital’ (Urry) in navigating contemporary societies, and in attaining social advancement. I have further research interests in ‘new’ technologies and civic engagement, social research methods (Quant and Qual), the ‘themeing’ of city space, social exclusion in deprived neighbourhoods, the political appeal of the far right, and neoliberal governance. When I’m not giggling at political satire, I have interests in cycling, the music of ‘James’, travel, and political campaigning.
PHD Abstract:
Mobility is an area of increasing concern for sociology and cultural studies. We inhabit a world where mobility is fundamental to the everyday practices of lived experience. This is especially so in the advancing capitalist nations of the developed world. From public transportation, to out-town retail estates, cheap European air-travel to the Internet and mobile phones, various forms of mobility (physical, virtual, imaginative) structure our relations to the places we inhabit, the people who make up our social networks, our access to skills, employment and services, and the tools from which identity and lifestyle are constructed.
To assert these relations is also to assert that mobility can be conceived of as a structuring element in terms of social exclusion. It follows that if we are unable to access skills, employment and services due to mobility constraints, so mobility is a factor in the reproduction of exclusion. However, it is more than this. Mobility in its highest forms is associated with a growing trans-national elite, to this extent mobility has both a socio-symbolic value, and also carries implications for strictly socio-economic mobility. In the case of the former, it is clear that we are dealing with the emergence of a mobile morality, identifiable with the denigration of the immobile and the valorisation of the hypermobile. In the second instance, social class, skills acquisition and employment prospects are clearly related to the ability to be mobile when the context demands it.
In order to explore these issues, this study will focus on two distinct areas of the Greater Manchester conurbation. This study will aim, by way of a deployment of various methodologies, to attempt to unpack the various attitudes, competences and desires for mobility amongst a sample of the sites’ inhabitants in order to test a number of theories currently in development concerning ‘sociologies of mobility’, while remaining focused on the ways in which an orientation to mobility is reproduced across generations.
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