Cities and Community

The Cities and Community collective engages in research that seeks to explore and problematise the socio-political phenomena shaping peoples’ lives. Driven by a commitment to social justice, our members conduct evidence-based and theoretically-informed research with a transformative agenda. Activities of the group revolve around two main strands of research:

Social Justice and Applied Sociology

Research in this strand is underpinned by an ethos of social justice and an unapologetic aspiration for socio-political transformation. Areas explored in this line of work include: inequality, social movements, critical pedagogy, service-learning practices, university-community engagement, public sociology, and theories of transformation. Whilst remaining attentive to the importance of sound analytical diagnosis, our research in this strand does not shy from taking positions on and working towards the change that we wish to become reality.

Territories, Communities and Social Identities

The framework of ‘identity’ is by no means new, but it has arguably never been more ubiquitous and influential than it is today. Researchers in our group examine its various guises, both from the perspective of conventional sociological categories (e.g. class, race, gender) as well as innovative and cross-disciplinary experiments. This work frequently intersects with our explorations of communities, the sense of community in a range of locales (physical and virtual), and issues of territory, space and place. Topics of investigation include: urban sociology, cities and rights, hybrid space and community well-being, rural communities, social sustainability, and social exclusion.