Professor Peter Jackson

Research Interests

Social and cultural geography, consumption and identity, families and food.

Current research

Peter Jackson's current research focuses on commodity culture and the geography of consumption. 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 (see link, right).

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.

A new four-year research programme on "Consumer anxieties about food" (CONANX) 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.

Teaching

I teach at both undergraduate and Masters level, drawing on my current research interests in consumption, food and everyday life. I'm keen for students to develop a critical understanding of modern agri-food systems, using research evidence to think independently and challenge received ideas. I encourage students to make connections between their everyday practices and wider issues of power and inequality. Food is a particularly good vehicle for thinking about our relationship with the material world, our embodied identities and moral responsibilities. I also encourage students to explore the links between scales (from local to global), emphasising the power of thinking geographically while drawing on a variety of other disciplinary perspectives.

Peter's specialist teaching on undergraduate courses includes:
GEO217 Environment, Society and Policy

All staff also engage in personal supervision and tutoring of individual students at all three levels in the following modules:
GEO163 (Information & Communication Skills for Geographers)
GEO263 or GEO264 (Research Design in Human or Physical Geography)
GEO356 (Geographical Research Project)

Masters Teaching
At Masters level, I teach a module on consumption cultures, examining different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches to contemporary consumption, focusing on a range of different sectors including food and fashion. The content of the module varies from year to year according to the interests of each group of students. Teaching is in small groups based on the discussion of a series of key readings.

Peter's teaching on Masters courses includes:
GEO6009 Consumption Cultures

Key Publications

• Jackson, P. and Everts, J. (2010). Anxiety as social practice. Environment and Planning A, 42(11), 2791-2806.
  doi:10.1068/a4385
• Jackson, P. (2010). Food stories: consumption in an age of anxiety. Cultural Geographies, 17(2), 147-165.
  doi:10.1177/1474474010363844
• Jackson, P., Ward, N. and Russell, P. (2009). Moral economies of food and geographies of responsibility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34(1), 908-924.
  doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2008.00330.x
• Jackson, P., Thomas, N. and Dwyer, C. (2007). Consuming Transnational fashion in London and Mumbai. Geoforum, 38(5), 908-924.
  doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2007.01.015

Other information

Peter Jackson is a member of the editorial collective for the Geographical Association's journal Geography, and is a member of ESRC's Training and Skills Committee. He is currently Chair of the Food Standards Agency's Social Science Research Committee.

Postgraduate Supervision

Peter Jackson currently supervises eight full-time PhD students, funded from a variety of sources.