This ethnographic study currently traces in situ urban maintenance practices across a number of professional and volunteer groups in Cardiff, UK. It is interested, broadly, in how the city is maintained on a daily basis, and explores the small-scale, street-level tactics and interactions that manifest in and constitute the daily round. Current interests are in members’ categorisation practices regarding people and place, and the implications of their public visibility and accountability as street-level bureaucrats responsible for, and category-bound to, the regular ‘dirty work’ of quotidian regeneration. Other research interests include the situated organisational accomplishment of teamwork, and the navigation of varying levels of practical skills between members in the context of the ever-broadening public requirements and obligations of urban public maintenance work.

The aim of this project is to explore the relationship between young people’s gendered bodies, their sexual practices and their sexual subjectivities in South Wales in its current ‘era of sexualisation’. ‘Gendered bodies’ are in this context understood to be bodies existing in and emerging from gendered discursive frames, in which hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity have materialised and in which an automatisation of ‘gender-appropriate’ perfomativity has occurred (Butler, 1990). Since female bodies have been theorised to be more often objectified and ‘othered’, while male ones have been theorised to more often be presented as subjects and agents (Gill, 2008), this may include the extent to which young people’s bodies are lived and experienced as subjects or objects. ‘Sexual practices’ are in this context understood to be sexual behaviours young people engage in; and ‘sexual subjectivities’ are understood as the way young people understand themselves as sexual beings, and how they experience and make sense of sex, given the confines of their social worlds.

Although an open mind will be kept with regards to the nature of the relationship between young people’s gendered bodies, their sexual practices and their sexual subjectivities, two aspects will be foregrounded in the conduct and the analysis of the study. Firstly it will be emphasised what role the gendered body plays in determining young people’s sexual practices and sexual subjectivities, especially in relation to the accessibility and their experience of sexual pleasure. Accumulating knowledge as to how embodied notions of masculinity and femininity can have detrimental impacts on young people’s sexual experiences, including their sexual pleasure, will be beneficial in challenging such notions and working towards a society in which all young people are given the opportunity to enjoy their sexuality freely. Secondly it is of particular interest what role the sexual practices young people engage in play in reinforcing and subverting the process of the gendering of the body, as this may, as well as giving insight into the maintenance of the gendered body, present an opportunity for young people to work towards social and personal change should this be desired.

The project will take a participatory approach in which young people between the ages of 16 and 18 years, who will have often only just begun to engage in sexual practices with other people and are hence very much in a process of negotiating their changing subject positions, are given the opportunity to contribute to the design of the study and to express their thoughts and feelings in a variety of ways. The project will begin by carrying out focus groups with young people, in which the research questions will be addressed and the further conduct of the study will be discussed. Possible further steps include individual interviews, a range of creative methods such as diaries and collages, and a survey.

My project aims to examine how former coal and steel mining areas in South Wales and Yorkshire are represented in literature, film and other media and how these representations affect communities. The genre of the industrial novel has contributed to an image which can be perceived as one-sided, and in certain, circumstances, stigmatising. Academic and media reports of South Wales and Yorkshire can also present a negative perspective. This study will examine how literary and film projects and other meaning-making structures could counter these representations; and also how places like the South Wales’ valleys and South Yorkshire can become storied differently. The approach will be conceptualised through the suggestion that literacy practices are not independent of social context but are situated in an ideological framework in which reading and writing are intertwined with cultural and power structures. This project is linked to the WISERD Civil Society research centre and will contribute to two projects in the AHRC’s Connected Communities Programme: Representing communities: developing the creative power of people to improve health and well-being and Imagine: connecting communities through research.

Recent Publications

Norms and Values in Defining a Sense of Place in the University of Wales Trinity Saint David magazine The Student Researcher, 2 (2), pp. 49-58, May 2013

In recent times the persistence of nationalist politics has been evident across Europe – of both stateless nations, e.g. Scotland, Catalonia, and of nation-states, e.g. Front National in France or UKIP in Britain. With the emergence of digital media networks provoking accounts of the enhanced agency of political actors and movements, this research will look to map the field of digital activity of nationalist movements situated in the UK. It will explore the structure and organisation of nationalist, but also broader civic, networks in the emerging digital public spaces of social media, the prominent modes and methods of social media usage by actors as well as prominent nationalist discourses and counter-discourses deployed and contested in these spaces. However, this will also be supplemented by investigating how such online activity is situated within broader offline strategies. This will involve conducting various event-based case studies, with the EU referendum anticipated as a prominent case where national identities are to be mobilised.

Investigation into misogynistic hate speech found on Twitter and other social media, employing big data collection and critical discourse analysis.

Though the term “Zero-Hours Contracts” (ZHCs) has been around since the early 1990s, it is now used to refer to all employment in which the employer does not guarantee any minimum hours of work. While this means that the term will cover a great variety of employment forms and practices, much of the public and political discourse tends to pivot on an assumption that ZHCs are uniform in nature. My doctoral work seeks to correct this view based on research from two institutional case studies in the UK higher education sector. It is hoped that the findings can make a timely contribution to the debate and assist in providing effective policy solutions to one of the key labour market issues of our time.

The starting point for my Master’s research was the increasing privatisation and marketisation of residential care for the elderly in the UK. Anxiety over the ability of the residential care sector to promote elders’ quality of life has been expressed by the public, the media and within academia. The research reflected upon this anxiety in terms of wider literature concerning morality, emotion and work, considering whether declining conditions of service in the sector could be seen to rest upon a wider conflict between economic rationality and morality.

The research was conducted using a case study design which focused on one residential home, employing document analyses, participant observation and in-depth interviewing. An examination of the company’s discursive attempts to construct, manage and demarcate its employees’ emotional labour was carried out alongside an exploration of the carers’ own interpretations of, and enrolment in, the care-giving role. A consideration of the potential economic and emotional consequences of these occurrences was a key focus of the inquiry.

The study found that carers, encouraged by the company, naturalised their emotional labour. This had widespread consequences – from justifying the economic devaluation of the carer’s work to leaving her vulnerable to emotional over-involvement and client aggression. One positive consequence, however, was that the carer’s sincere identification with the care-giving role allowed her to uphold the rights of those within her care, even when these were in conflict with the economic motivations of her employers.

My PhD research intends to examine the care sector in greater depth, principally focussing on what it is that makes a residential home work to provide care which is socially valuable to both carers and the cared-for. By means of ethnographic research in several private residential homes, in-depth interviewing with carers and document analyses, I aim to consider the impact which factors such as training, institutional ethos, staff turnover, supervision, shift organisation, cost of care, engagement and reward, and physical layout have upon care-giving.

My research explores queer(-ing) masculinity across South Wales and South West England.  I consider how commodified and commercialised representational forms, critiqued for celebrating identities that assimilate with mainstream ideals around gender and sexuality, are reproduced, resisted and redefined through the digitally mediated cultures and practices of young men who have sex with men, and trans* and non-binary identities assigned male, aged between 18 and 25. In light of recent tensions between binary and non-binary gender and sexual identities, my project is committed to difference. I do not assume that any identity is more or less valid or inherently privileged or less subversive as identities mean and do different things for different people. Through adopting an unstructured and participatory approach, producing data with participants, I consider how gender and sexual identities, whether binary or non-binary, emerge from a variety of experiences, desires and anxieties that cannot be reduced to universal experiences, motives or effects.

Brain injuries can cause catastrophic impairments which leave profound implications for patients, their families, health and social care. Many people with brain injuries undergo a period of rehabilitation, a future orientated process which looks to maximize function, physically, cognitively and socially whilst minimising medical complications.
Positive relationships between patients, families and health care professionals are fundamental to good care. These relationships however can become extremely strained during rehabilitation as efforts to control the future, to influence the outcome of injury, and to shape the identity and care of a patient with brain injury has to be negotiated within a situation of extreme medical uncertainty.

Using the concept of `futures’ as a lens this research explores the challenges in negotiating the triad of patient, family and professional relationships generated by the `not yet’ (Adam and Grove 2007) but imminent aspects of care and treatment in the present.

This research seeks to answer:
How are the futures of people with severe brain injury, their families and HCPs shaped and negotiated during rehabilitation through:
a) Day to day interaction
b) Organisational process and practice
c) Policy
What constitutes positive relationships in brain injury rehabilitation?
What challenges and tensions arise in the relationships between patients, their families and HCPs during the rehabilitative process, what causes them, and how are they resolved?

Selected Recent Publications:

Latchem, J. & Greenhalgh, J. (2014). The role of reading on the health and wellbeing of people with neurological conditions: A systematic review.  Aging and Mental Health. Early online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2013.875125

Latchem, J. & Kitzinger, J. (2012). What is important to residents with neurological conditions and their relatives in long-term neurological care settings. [Online]
Available at: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/resources/Long_Term_Care.pdf

Latchem, J., Kitzinger, J. & Kitzinger, C. (2015). Physiotherapy for vegetative and minimally conscious state patients: family perceptions and experiences. Disability and Rehabilitation. Early Online pp. 1-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2015.1005759

Latchem, J. & Kitzinger, J. (2015). Breaking down barriers: the importance of good relationships. Nursing and Residential Care 16(12), pp. 512-514.

Fuel poverty affects around 30% of households in Wales, over a third of which contain an older person aged 65 years and over. Older people are particularly susceptible to fuel poverty and are disproportionately affected by its consequences especially in terms of respiratory illness, cardiovascular events, and excess winter deaths. As well as its negative effects on health, fuel poverty can severely impact on many aspects of quality of life.

My research aims to explore the types of poverty and disadvantage that may exist in older households experiencing fuel poverty in Wales. I am particularly interested in food poverty, benefit uptake, and cognitive function in these households.

The first part of this study aims at understanding the interactions and communications processes through which civic issues such as hate speech and freedom of speech are framed online.

My research examines how older people are portrayed in popular discourse, particularly television, radio and online / printed media, and whether this cultural representation extends any influence on the attitudes and behaviours of health care staff. The study uses a mixed methods approach incorporating a quantitative media consumption survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews with NHS and social care staff, as well as discourse analysis of cultural texts that health care staff commonly engage with. It is expected that the study will provide critical insight into the social and cultural influences that may explain the delivery of quality care or the lack of dignified care in the health sector, as well as assessing the potential to accommodate messages from the media discourse of older people into more effective dignity training or campaigns.

Selected Recent Publications

• Hillman A., Tadd W., Calnan S., Calnan M., Bayer A. and Read S., Risk, governance and the experience of care. 2013, Sociology of Health and Illness [In press]
• Tadd W, Hillman S , Calnan S, Calnan M, Bayer A and Read S., From right place – wrong person, to right place – right person: dignified care for older people. 2012 HSRN/SDO supplement of the Journal of Health Services and Research Policy [In press]
• Calnan,M, Tadd, W, Calnan, S, Hillman, A, Bayer A and Read S ‘I often worry about the older person being in that system because often they – they’ve got more needs, are more vulnerable’: Providing dignified care for older people in acute hospitals Ageing & Society. [Accepted for publication]
• Tadd, W; Hillman, A; Calnan, S; Calnan, M; Bayer, A; Read, S. Right place – wrong person: dignity in the acute care of older people. Quality in Ageing and Older Adults, 2011; 12(1): 33- 43

I am interested in the multiple ways in which migrants as both local and transnational actors participate in and contribute to the (re)production of cosmopolitan cities as part of global restructuring processes. The research project is inspired by an emerging research agenda in migration studies which draws on sociological and anthropological studies of migration and transnationalism as well as discussions of urban transformations and spatialities in human geography and urban studies. With its comparative perspective, the project seeks to contribute to an empirically grounded understanding of the varying and dynamic relationships between international migrants and the cities of their (temporary) sojourn in a multiply connected but unequal world.

During my fieldwork in Seoul (2015/16) I am affiliated with the Institute of Globalization and Multicultural Studies, Hanyang University (ERICA campus, http://multiculture.hanyang.ac.kr).

Selected Recent Publications

Yi, H. and Shin, H. 2014. Conclusion: Border crossers as potentialities in globalising societies [German]. In Chang-Gusko, Y. et al. eds. Unknown diversity – Insights into the history of Korean migration to Germany [German]. Cologne: DoMiD Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration in Germany. 

Scheffer, T. and Shin, H. 2010. The case in the case-system. In Scheffer, T. Adversarial Case-Making – An Ethnography of English Crown Court Procedure. Leiden: BRILL Academic Publishers, pp. 219-249.

Scheffer, T. and Shin, H. 2008. Book Review – Fighting for Political Freedom. Law and Politics Book Review 18(10), pp. 871-876.

My research will investigate how young people from unskilled households fare in gaining employment in local contexts of poor work and job shortages. The aim of this research is to evaluate different projects run by the People in Work Unit to discover the impact these programmes have had on individuals and in terms of a ripple effect in the wider community.

Some of the research questions for this project include:

• What careers do people go into from community development?
• Did those people who were engaged in the different projects become inspirational to others?
• Are these projects successful in creating or breaking self-image?
• What is the impact on Self Fulfilling Prophesy?
• Does a whole community approach create a cultural tipping point for cultural change in the value of education?
• Do people have aspiration without knowledge?