Publications

The results of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom came just in time to add some comments to our newly published book, Nation Class and Resentment: the politics of national identity in England Scotland and Wales. In these comments, we claimed the results tended to confirm some principal arguments we had advanced. We wrote of…

In parliamentary democracies, a key question for citizens and social scientists alike is, “who speaks on behalf of different social groups and on different policy topics?” This informs not only an understanding of how democracy works but also the workings of the formative phase of public policy-making. This allows us to understand a range of…

This paper examines the experiences of Chinese settlers in the Cairns district of northern Queensland, Australia, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a potential early expression of a ‘rural cosmopolitanism’ that has more recently been associated in the geographical literature with contemporary international migration. In contrast to other parts of Australia,…

Book chapter in Reanimating Regions, Riding, J. and Jones, M. (eds). This chapter looks at the ‘new new localism’ and suggests the need to now think about the dawn of a ‘new regional geography’. City-region-based agglomerations are currently riding high on the political and policy agenda across the world. Their emergence is not accidental; they are…

Writing regions, undertaking a regional study, was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically,…

Life stories of mobile individuals provide us with unique perspectives on the condition of modern societies. This article aims to establish the link between narrative accounts of mobility and the conceptual framework of migration studies. Drawing on autobiographical narrative interviews with 91 transnational individuals, this article presents three categories of mobility narratives, emphasizing the specific…

Anderson’s notion of imagined communities has helped to focus attention on the complex connection between language and membership of social groupings. This article explores the sense of membership of an imagined transnational community of ‘Europe’ through a selection of autobiographical narrative interviews in a multi-nation study of identity formation. Data drawn from a sample of…

The contemporary period has seen the emergence of a society where interviews are pervasive: the ‘interview society’ (Atkinson and Silverman, 1997). Undertaking qualitative research within this ‘interview society’ has methodological implications for our understanding of the significance of the technology of the interview itself and the analysis of interview data. To date little attention has…

Socially motivated divestment from the fossil fuel industry is occurring at a rapid rate. Banks, pension funds, universities, and philanthropic organizations around the world are divesting vast amounts of capital. Based on empirical data from face-to-face interviews with key divestment actors in the UK and Australia, this chapter explores the entanglements between the divestment and…

This chapter revisits claims in the light of the growing financialisation of social relations and the rise of neo-liberalisation as an economic and political project. It introduces two working definitions and then modifies them to reflect further theoretical arguments and recent empirical trends. The chapter then explores the implications of economic and political changes in…