Sociology
Daniel Chernilo – Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Daniel Chernilo studied sociology at the University of Chile as an undergraduate and did a PhD at the University of Warwick, where was also a Lecturer in Sociology. Between 2004 and 2009 he worked in the Department of Sociology at the University Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, where his main task was the setting up of the first doctoral programme in Sociology in Chile. He is the author of more than twenty five articles on nationalism, cosmopolitanism and the history of social and political thought and has published three books: A Social Theory of the Nation-State (Routledge, 2007) and, in Spanish, Nacionalismo y Cosmopolitismo (UDP, 2010) and La Pretensión Universalista de la Teoría Social (LOM-UChile, 2011). His forthcoming monograph on social theory and natural law will be published by Cambridge University Press. He has been invited to give seminars, lectures and short doctoral courses in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Singapore and the UK and is a member of the international advisory boards of the British Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory and Revista de Sociología.
Dave Elder-Vass - Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Dave Elder-Vass teaches on several of the core sociology modules, our dissertation workshop for third year undergraduates, and an MA module on digital economies. He studied economics at Cambridge and social and political theory at Birkbeck in London. In between he worked as an economist and then as an IT specialist and IT executive. Since returning to higher education, he has been researching in the area of sociological theory. His first book, The Causal Power of Social Structures (2010) offered a new take on the problem of structure and agency, and his next book The Reality of Social Construction (forthcoming in 2012) looks at the nature of language, discourse, culture, and knowledge. Prior to joining Loughborough, Dave was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Essex.
Jim McGuigan- Professor of Cultural Analysis
Jim McGuigan teaches about social theory, cultural studies and television. Before entering academia, he worked for the Arts Council and BBC TV. He has been a visiting academic at various universities around the world and is a College and Panel member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). His books include Cultural Populism (1992), Culture and the Public Sphere (1996), Cultural Methodologies (1997), Modernity and Postmodern Culture (1999, 2nd edn 2006) and Rethinking Cultural Policy (2004); and he is currently writing a book entitled, Cool Capitalism. He has also published in a wide range of journals and edited books. His work has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese. Jim’s current research interests are the culture of ‘cool capitalism’, and satirical humour in political and social criticism.
Karen O’Reilly - Professor of Sociology
Karen O’Reilly gained her PhD from the University of Essex in 1996, based on an in-depth ethnographic study of British migration to Spain. She then did quantitative research for three years at Essex, helping design the UK government’s new social class scheme, before moving to the University of Aberdeen as a lecturer and finally to Loughborough in 2007. She has been a visiting lecturer at Hong Kong City University and the University of Basel. Karen continues to study the implications of contemporary forms of mobility and migration, and is particularly interested in sociological themes around home, belonging, community and identity. She teaches core sociology and methods, as well as a module in tourism. Karen also teaches qualitative methods at the prestigious summer school in Lugano. Her books include The British on the Costa del Sol (2000) and Ethnographic Methods (2011).
Sarah Pink- Professor of Social Sciences and Programme Director for Sociology
Sarah Pink studied Social Anthropology at the University of Kent and Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has recently taught as a visiting academic in Norway, Spain and Austria. Her books include Women and Bullfighting (1997), Doing Visual Ethnography (2nd edition 2007 in English and Polish), Home Truths (2004) and Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009). Her two new books to be published in 2012 are Situating Everyday Life: practices and places and the edited volume Advances in Visual Methodology. Her research, mainly in Spain and the UK, focuses currently on issues including sustainability, energy, digital media, the visual and the senses. Her current projects include research into how people use energy and in their homes, digital media practices and Slow Cities. She uses photography, video and other digital media in her research and she is committed to doing research that will be both of interest to academics and accessible to non-academics.
Line Nyhagen Predelli - Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Line Nyhagen Predelli has studied political science at the University of Bergen, Norway, and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. After obtaining a Master’s degree in political science, she went on to study at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, where she obtained an MA and a PhD in sociology. From 1998 to 2003 she worked as Senior Researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR). She moved to the UK in 2003, and started working here as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Social Policy, Loughborough University. She became a Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, in 2007. She has recently (2007-2011) led an international research project on gendered citizenship, women and religion, and women’s movements in Europe (FEMICT; see www.femcit.org), funded by the European Commission. Her main research interests are in the areas of gender, religion, social movements, citizenship, migration and ethnic relations, and public policy. She has published extensively in international journals, and her PhD on issues of gender, race, and class in the Norwegian missionary society in 19th century Norway and Madagascar was published by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2003.
Paula Saukko - Reader in Social Science and Medicine
Paula Saukko has a first degree in Journalism and Communication from the University of Tampere, Finland and a PhD in Communications Research from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Prior to starting at Loughborough in 2007 she worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Philosophy and the ESRC-Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter and as a Lecturer in the Centre for Mass Communication Research, University of Leicester. Her research focuses on sociology of health and science and qualitative research; she has conducted research on the lived and historical dimensions of diagnostic discourses on eating disorders and the social and personal implications of genomics of common disease, particularly heart disease and “nutrigenomics”. She is the author of Doing Research in Cultural Studies (Sage 2003) and The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse (State University of New York Press), and is planning a book with a tentative title Domesticating Genes.
Iris Wigger - Lecturer in Sociology
Iris Wigger studied Sociology at the Universities of Hamburg and Essex after completing a vocational training as a social worker. She gained her PhD from the University of Hamburg in 2004, and worked as a lecturer and researcher at University College Dublin and Hamburg University. Iris’s main research and teaching interests are in the areas of historical sociology; sociological theory, racism and gender, nationalism, and imperialism. She has published in the fields of historical sociology and racist discrimination. Her PhD dissertation was recently published as a book, Die ‘Schwarze Schmach am Rhein’. Rassistische Diskriminierung zwischen Geschlecht, Klasse, Nation und Rasse (The ‘Black Disgrace on the Rhine’. Racist Discrimination between Gender, Class, Nation, and Race).