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Last updated 8th June 2026

I am a sociologist of education and Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Primary Education Studies (Accelerated) Degree at the University of Huddersfield. My work explores the social, cultural and educational legacies of deindustrialisation in Britain's former coalfield communities. 

My research is concerned with the intergenerational legacies of coal mining and the socio-economic, cultural and affective traces that haunt the present. Working at the intersections of sociology of education, youth studies, and cultural studies, I am particularly interested in how children and young people experience and make sense of the social, cultural and economic legacies of deindustrialisation, and how industrial histories continue to shape identities, relationships and imagined futures across generations.

Using the concept of social haunting, I examine the ways industrial pasts continue to shape contemporary experiences of education, work, community and identity. My research explores the relationship between the visible and invisible dimensions of social life, attending to the ways histories are carried, inherited, resisted and reimagined within families, communities and institutions. I am interested in what remains after industrial change; how communities live with the ghosts of the industrial past; and how industrial heritage continues to shape contemporary experiences, social relations and ways of being and doing.

More recently, my work has developed the concept of spectral ethnography as a methodological approach for tracing the presence of industrial pasts within deindustrialised landscapes and communities. This work explores how social haunting can be used not only as a conceptual lens but also as a method for attending to the traces, silences and presences that linger within everyday life.

I am the author of Social Haunting, Education, and the Working Class: A Critical Marxist Ethnography in a Former Mining Community (Routledge, 2021) and co-author of Education, Work and Social Change in Britain's Former Coalfields: The Ghost of Coal (Palgrave, 2022).

My current research, undertaken in collaboration with the Youth Work Unit: Yorkshire and the Humber, explores young people's experiences of education, employment, belonging and community through collaborative and participatory methodologies, investigating how the legacies of deindustrialisation continue to shape young people's experiences, aspirations and imagined futures.