Features

Professor Colin Hay

Colin Hay is Professor of Political Analysis in the department, Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), and chair of the REF Politics and International Studies sub-panel. In 2009, he was awarded the PSA’s WJM Mackenzie Prize for Why We Hate Politics and the PSA’s Richard Rose Prize. In this influential book, Hay argues that "democratic polities get the levels of political participation they deserve", counter to the conventional view that "citizens get the politics they deserve".

His most recent research has been concerned with the comparative political economy of exposure to, experiences of and responses to the global financial crisis, with tracing the origins of contemporary political disaffection, with mapping discourses and rhetorics of globalisation and European integration within contemporary Europe and with analytical strategies in political science and international relations. He currently holds ESRC funding for a project on ‘Anti-politics: Characterising and Accounting for Political Disaffection’ (with Gerry Stoker at the University of Southampton and the Hansard Society). The research provides a testing ground for existing explanations of political disengagement and allows for the emergence of new factors in the explanation of political disaffection by providing an open analysis of the proceedings of the focus groups. It will make an immediate impact on the policy and practitioner debates about anti-politics and the open policy arena for reform measures created by the Coalition government in the UK because it will be tied to the authoritative surveys run by the Hansard Society since 2004 but will also provide a more nuanced understanding of factors behind anti-politics and therefore the suitability of various solutions.

 

Professor Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson's current research focuses on commodity culture and the geography of consumption. He currently leads a four-year research programme on "Consumer anxieties about food" (CONANX) which began in January 2009, funded by the European Research Council. The programme involves a team of seven reseachers with co-investigators in Sheffield (Dr Matt Watson) and Sweden (Professor Helene Brembeck), plus a PhD student (also based in Sheffield). The research focuses on consumer anxieties about food at a range of geographical scales, from the global scale of international food markets to the domestic scale of individual households.

Previous projects include an ESRC-funded project on consumption and identity in North London (published as Shopping, Place and Identity, Routledge, 1998); ESRC-funded research on the production, content and readership of men's lifestyle magazines (published as Making Sense of Men's Magazines, Polity Press, 2001); a collaborative study (with colleagues at Royal Holloway and UCL) on "Commodity culture and South Asian transnationality", funded through ESRC's Transnational Communities Programme and culminating in the publication of Transnational Spaces (Routledge, 2004); an ESRC-funded study of "Retail Competition and Consumer Choice" (with colleagues at Lancaster and MMU); and a study of food commodity chains, funded via the AHRB-ESRC Cultures of Consumption programme, culminating in the Food Stories website.

He has recently completed a three-year period as Director of an inter-disciplinary research programme on "Changing Families, Changing Food". Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based in ICOSS (the University's social science facility), the programme involved collaboration with colleagues from Clinical Sciences, East Asian Studies, Geography, Nursing & Midwifery, ScHARR and Sociolgical Studies at Sheffield, together with colleagues in Health & Social Care at Royal Holloway, University of London. For further details and publications from this project, see the Changing Families, Changing Food website.