New book by Keele Criminologists - Losing the Race: Thinking Psychosocially about Racially Motivated Crime

Based on a two-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the book explores why many of those involved in racially motivated crime seem to be struggling to cope with economic, cultural and emotional losses in their own lives. Drawing on in-depth biographical interviews with perpetrators of racist crimes and focus group discussions with ordinary people living in the same communities, the book explores why it is that some people, and not others, feel inclined to attack immigrants and minority ethnic groups. The relationships between ordinary racism, racial harassment and the politics of the British National Party are also explored, as are the enduring impacts of deindustrialisation, economic failure and immigration on white working class communities.
The book assesses the legacy of New Labour policy on community cohesion, hate crime and respect in terms of its impact on racist attitudes and racist incidents, and explores how it is that racist attacks, including racist murders, continue to happen. The book concludes by using psychoanalytically informed psychosocial concepts to explore examples of how and why race-thinking can be put aside and what it is that needs to happen to get perpetrators to loosen or shed their emotional investments in hatred and violence.

Dr David Gadd is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Deputy Director of the Social Science Research Institutes at Keele University Dr Bill Dixon is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Head of the School of Sociology and Criminology at Keele University.

New faces in Criminology at Keele

Criminology at Keele is welcoming five new faces in teaching and research at the start of the new academic year. We are delighted to be joined by three new PhD students, a research assistant and a new member of teaching staff to add to both our research and teaching capability.

Stephanie Alger, a former Masters student at Keele, joins us as a PhD student. Steph holds a linked ESRC studentship called Inverting Assumptions about Domestic Abuse.

Emma Murray also joins us to begin her PhD. Emma comes to us from Liverpool John Moores University where she graduated with a First Class degree in 2009 and has since gone on to study for her Masters in Criminal Justice, also at John Moores. Emma will be researching the topic of Returning Soldiers and their Involvement in Crime. The title of Emma’s Ph.D is ‘Out of the Killing Zone and into the Fire? An analysis of the journey from ‘soldier’ to ‘citizen’ as armed service personnel resettle into British society post combat’ and is based on extensive pilot work in the form of an ethnographic case study of a group of Royal Marine Commandos, focusing on their self-reported racism and violence post deployment. The overarching aim of the project is to provide an empirically rich study that explores the effects of combat on returning soldier’s involvement in crime and attitudes to diversity, and to situate this within approaches sensitive to the experiences they have had and the challenges of resettlement they face.

Ian Mahoney, a recent graduate of the MRes in Social Science Research Methods in Social Relations at Keele, and also a Keele BA graduate, rejoins us to begin his PhD. Ian won one of the ESRC Criminology Quota Awards to carry out research into the link between crime and unemployment with the current working title of:
'Unemployment and Criminality in Stoke on Trent: The impact of unemployment upon criminality in an area of high skill and employment deprivation.'

Mary Louise Corr also joins us as a Research Associate on the ESRC Boys to Men project looking at what can be done to reduce young people's involvement in domestic abuse. The main aim of the research is to produce an answer to the question as to why some young men grow up to be perpetrators of domestic abuse - and to learn more about how we can prevent them from becoming reliant on a range of violent, controlling and threatening behaviours. The research involves administration of an attitudinal scale, self-report questionnaire, focus groups, and in-depth biographical interviews with young people. Mary Louise joins us from The Children's Research Centre Trinity College Dublin project.

Finally, we are also welcoming back Clare Jones, a recent PhD student in Criminology at Keele, who rejoins us in the capacity of Teaching Fellow. Clare will be contributing to the undergraduate Criminology programme at all three levels, as well as on the new Masters in Criminology and Criminal Justice and the MA Ethics of Policing and Criminal Justice. Clare's PhD explored the recent wave of migration of Polish nationals to a small working class town in Cheshire, and questioned whether immigration is inevitably disruptive for neighbourhoods increasing crime, conflict, and insecurity amongst “established” and “newcomer”
groups. Clare said “I am delighted to be joining the criminology team again at Keele, where I first became passionate about criminology when completing my undergraduate degree here in 2005. After continuing to study criminology at Keele for the following 5 years, I am now looking forward to contributing to the programme.”

Chilean miners: 'science' is vital in this human story

By Dr Rebecca Leach

It has been a momentous week. The world is watching 33 men saved by a clunky steel rocket and a host of saints in hard-hats and hazard jackets. It is an almost unbelievable story, except that we are watching it in every tiny detail on TV. Today, it was also the day in which the Science Is Vital campaign closed their petition to defend funding for science research in British universities, and the day after Lord Browne proposed the biggest change to student funding in two generations. And the week before the biggest cuts to university funding since the last slash and burn policy of the mid 1980s.

The irony of this rescue won't be lost on the science geeks: the people who are pulling the miners out of the ground are utterly dependent on university science: their training, their gadgets, their pulleys and winches and cages and breathing apparatuses and bio-belts ALL built from the brains of the geeks. Sure, the block and tackle (or whatever) is made and greased by worker-bees, but the buck stops with those doing the thinking, and the design. The geeks - in effect - got them out.

Some tweeters have objected that the geeks got them in there in the first place. Maybe. There is a mining and geology specialism in universities of course. But profiteering mine owners have been around far longer than the appliance of science started to make things go further, deeper and both safer and more dangerous simultaneously. Given the choice of a bloke with a gold pen and a dodgy record of exploitation, and a spotty, pale youth with an obsession for torque, I know who I'd rather have writing the manual. OK, and perhaps a raft of experienced burly miners to help him 'apply' his writing...

You can't escape the value of science in this human drama however - whatever recriminations rightly emerge about the safety failures in this mine, we all need to be grateful in part to the science. I hope the Science Is Vital campaign will exploit this link as much as they need to.

Next week, when the Comprehensive Spending Review slashes funding, the biggest cut will come - in teaching and research - in the Arts and Social Sciences. The teaching budget is likely to be all but wiped out, and it is hard to see how Research Council funds will be held at anything like current levels. Who cares?, most of the press and public will say. It will seem to make little difference to anyone's lives. The 'Science vote' will care very little too, barring a few with a broad education, because of their own sense of the necessity of their own disciplines, compared to ours.

But what will happen to these miners now? And how will the rest of us make sense of the 'miracle' (or 'tragedy')? The science bit is easily seen: the gadgets, manuals, experts are evident to the world at large. Nobody will, however, make too much of the lengthy training of the eloquent psychiatrist Dr James Thompson, commenting for the BBC, which although medical in part, could not possibly have succeeded had he not developed some grasp of the human condition from other sources. How could Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Piaget and countless other contributors to the understanding of the human personality have known what they know without cultural ideas? How could we all 'get' the drama of rescue, without a narrative of, erm, drama? More prosaically, who will be behind the film makers, writers, journalists who need to be there (perhaps not in quite such volume...) to help the rest of us make sense ? Perhaps the political plan in shutting down the debate is to get everyone to just shut up, and stop trying to make sense of difficult events. The chattering classes have been desperately annoying for the right wing, doing what they do to ask questions and all...

Look, I'm not suggesting people won't make sense without the hidden hand of Peter Mandelson telling us what to think. The point is more general: humans need to make sense and make meaning, and will continue to do it. Ordinary bods do it better, mostly, than lily-livered, soft-handed academics. But the writing, thinking, the ideas generated in arts, humanities and social science departments DO make a difference, albeit in subtle and small ways. A sociologist might help a family therapist trying to put back together those miners' broken relationships once the reality of wife vs mistress hits home. And an artist might help those traumatised children sleep at night. And a philosopher might contribute to a think tank who pushes the Chilean prime minister to rewrite his mining policy, so that the value of human life is reassessed. Someone really will, perhaps, be saved by a historian in a cord jacket, reflecting on this day. Even those betes noires of the Establishment, Meeja Studies graduates, might have their part to play. Not as the journalists (we all know they have Oxbridge degrees in English, which somehow escape the oppobrium...) who bring it all to our living rooms; but as the parents, teachers, managers, friends who say, in their pub or office conversations: 'hey, never mind the distracting rescue narrative, we're ignoring the back story about exploitation here...'.

Do we need to do this in universities? Should the public pay for it? Of course it should. Otherwise we leave all our big questions to blokes with gold teeth who give answers influenced by their paymasters. Good luck to the Science lobby - they need it. They have the luxury of knowing they can do what the public can't. We need more luck and more support, because the public thinks they don't need us. They do.

PhD Grant Success for Keele Sociology graduate!

We are delighted to announce that Rachel Cason (nee Wiggett) has just been awarded a prestious ESRC Studentship for her PhD. This is a real achievement for her (and for Keele) as the Open Competition awards are extremely difficult to come by and Rachel is one of only 77 students nationally to receive one in the whole of the Social Sciences in the UK.

She is just completing her Masters in Research in Sociology, taught by many members of the School of Sociology and Criminology, and prior to that she achieved a First Class degree in Sociology and French from Keele. She also won the Neil and Gina Smith Student of the Year award (the second Sociology student to do so in 2 years!) for her all round commitment to Keele University. Rachel will be supervised by Professor Pnina Werbner and Dr Dana Rosenfeld, both from the School of Sociology and Criminology. If you would like to find out more about studying at Keele, you can find information about our Undergraduate degrees, Masters' degrees or Doctoral opportunities by clicking on the links above, or you can find out about Sociology staff supervision expertise by looking up individual research interests by clicking on staff names.

Here's what Rachel herself has to say about her background and how this led to her interest in her PhD project:

I came to Keele University having lived "full-time" in England for only three years. In fact, I was close to being listed as a foreign student (which would have been of great financial inconvenience!) unless I had completed my three years residency. I was born in Niamey, Niger Republic, West Africa to missionary parents. My father worked at a leprosy project, local market, mission treasury, and as mission director. My mother homeschooled me and my sister alongside several other missionary children, and later worked as mission pastorial director - providing support and acculturation advice to new missionaries.

We lived on an African compound away from the mission compound, and my parents dressed and, in many ways, adopted the cultural habits of their neighbors. When I was 11 years old we moved to the capital, where I was enrolled in the private mission school there. It was this melange of cultures and countries that developed in me a over-whelming curiousity in how societies "worked".

Keele University was not threatened by my questions, nor did it let me get away with stereotypying or cliched "answers". Now, in my fifth year here, I have been granted the amazing opportunity to study more about people who, like me, are constantly re-defining and re-living their identities in ways that cross occupational, national, gender, race, and local boundaries. I am a Third Culture Kid but this ESRC grant will allow me to theorise this personal experience in way that is meaningful across the sociological and anthropological disciplines. I feel very blessed and challenged by this unique opportunity.

The PhD proposal: Third Culture Kids

Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are people who have spent “a significant part of their developmental years outside their parents’ culture” (Pollock and van Recken 2001). They are the children of expatriates employed by international organisations as, inter alia, development experts, diplomats, missionaries, journalists, international NGO and humanitarian aid workers, or UN representatives. The ‘third culture’ they possess is the temporary, nomadic multicultural space they inhabited as children, within an expatriate community and international school. It is distinct from their parents’ homeland culture (the first culture) and from that of the country in which they spend their formative years but of which they are not native members (the second culture). The “third culture” they claim for themselves does not unite their first and second cultures but comprises a space for their unstable integration (Knorr 2005), although how and when this is achieved remains an open question, despite some preliminary research on this group.

TCKs are situated ambiguously in current transnational and identity theory, falling outside conventional sociological and anthropological paradigms. They thus provide an opportunity to expand the relevant literatures’ current theorisation of the deterritorialisation of identity (Debrix 1998; 14, 18) the relation of identity to place (Appadurai 1990 and 1996) and the ‘new’ cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2008). The formative experiences of those who have matured outside of their country of origin are likely to shape how they negotiate their identity, roots and social relations across the life course, nationally and transnationally. For some TCKs, the only ‘home’ to which they can return is that of an expatriate itinerant. Much remains to be understood about identity formation and development as our traditional reference points of national borders begin to dissipate and citizenship becomes increasingly flexible (Ong 1999). The life histories, social relations, and identities of TCKs can thus allow for a critical expansion of current theories of diaspora and transnationalism, and of ideas surrounding double-rootedness, identity and ways of belonging in navigating cultural worlds (Werbner 2002; Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004). The project will explore the McLachlan’s (McLachlan 2005) argument that the adaptability, perseverance and multilingualism typically developed in TCKs contribute to a cosmopolitan sensibility and therefore demonstrate TCK's growing significance to a global society.

Postgraduate opportunities in Sociology and Criminology at Keele

It's that time of year when third year students are getting their heads down on their dissertation, worrying about finals and whether there will be any jobs left in a few months (now that the merchant bankers have destroyed the economy...). Some of them, crazy though it might sound, are even wondering if they might carry on studying, now that they're only just working out what it is all about. Now (and we mean right now) is the time to get your act together if you would like to do some postgraduate study.

So what are the opportunities in Sociology and Criminology at Keele? Well, if you want to study Sociology, you might like to take our Masters in Research in Sociology, which offers ESRC-recognised research training with the chance of taking some advanced specialist modules in research-led fields. Sociology (with colleagues across Keele University) will shortly be advertising a Masters in Urban Futures (subject to University final approval, this course should be available from Autumn 2009 - please check back on this blog and the Sociology homepage for updates). Criminology also has a Masters' and Postgraduate Diploma in the Ethics of Policing and Criminal Justice, which is taught jointly with the Centre for Professional Ethics. This course is particularly useful for those already working in the areas of policing and criminal justice such as police and probation officers, magistrates etc, but applications are welcome from anyone with an interest in this field.

Often students take the MRes as a first step towards doing a Doctorate. PhD training is perhaps one of the most difficult but most rewarding postgraduate routes and if you've got a lot of dedication, a real niggling research question you'd like to solve (perhaps something you've been wondering in your dissertation but haven't been able to follow up...?) and you're prepared to work hard to apply for funding or help support yourself through it, you're probably the right person. You will need to work up a research proposal for a project you'd like to do, and be supervised by someone who is a specialist in that area or related area. Have a look at the research interests and specialist supervision areas of the Sociology group for a better idea of the fields we're interested in. You can also take a similar programme in Criminology and you can see the research interests and specialist supervision areas of the Criminology group here. A PhD is a route into a number of careers, notably professional social research in say Local Authorities, charities and thinktanks, an academic career in research and teaching, or as a 'career' researcher working on different and new projects.

So why Keele? You might start by having a look at the previous blog entry about Keele's success in the recent Research Assessment Exercise, in which staff in Criminology and Sociology had their research rated Internationally Excellent. This blog also gives some reasons why Keele is a great place to study. We particularly welcome International students to Keele - there is a thriving International student community at Keele with visitors from around the world. You can find some information mostly intended for undergraduate International students here but much of it applies to postgraduates also.

But the big question is all about the money. There's no doubt that funding for postgraduate courses and research is a very limited pot and it is highly competitive. It is particularly difficult to get external funding for a taught Masters' and if you can support yourself, you have a much stronger chance of fulfilling your ambitions. You need to have or expect a good (2.1 or above) degree to have a hope of applying for funds. You will also need a decent idea for a research project, even if you're going to apply for the 1+3 route (that is, taking the MRes first) and you will need to get your skates on as most of the deadlines are the end of February! The ESRC application deadline is later but you need to work with us to submit a good application and to have a chance of internal funding, so contact someone as soon as possible.

There are some (very competitive) options for funding at Keele, for example what is called a 1+3 route for Sociology - if you want to apply for this route, you need to get in touch with us NOW to help formulate your application: only the best candidates with the best ideas will get put forward.

If you're interested in Criminology or certain areas of Sociology, there are a few more options. The Institute of Law, Politics and Justice - which hosts all of the Criminology staff and some Sociology - has some dedicated studentships for priority areas plus a +3 scholarship (ie for someone who already has an appropriate Masters') - you can find more details on this link (look at the LPJ details). However, in all cases, we will be encouraging potential students to submit applications to external bodies such as the Economic and Social Research Council - so please have a look at their requirements and deadlines also.

All staff in Sociology and Criminology would be happy to advise you on specific issues to do with your areas of interest, but if you want to enquire more generally, could you please contact the following people:

MRes (Sociology or Criminology): Dr Lydia Martens
MA Urban Futures: Dr Mark Featherstone
MA Ethics of Policing and Criminal Justice: ethics@keele.ac.uk
PhD (including 1+3 options) for Sociology: Dr Lydia Martens and for Criminology: Prof Anne Worrall,


The postgraduate Taught course (Masters') prospectus is here - although it is not updated as frequently as this blog or our School homepage. You can also contact the Graduate School for information on applying for postgraduate Research degrees (PhD) at Keele. The Postgraduate Research Prospectus is here - although this information is not as frequently updated as this blog.