Katherine Simpson

I am a Senior Lecturer in Education and Community Studies at the University of Huddersfield where I have worked since 2020. I teach across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate education and teacher-training programmes, and I am Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Primary Education Studies.

I have over ten years’ experience working in a range of educational settings, with children, young people, and adults from a diverse range of backgrounds, although, my main expertise and experience is in primary education.

I have a first-class degree in Early Primary Education and a PhD in the sociology of education. I have recently had research papers published in the Journal of Critical Education Policy Studies and the British Journal of Educational Studies. My first book, Social Haunting, Education, and the Working Class: A Critical Marxist Ethnography in a Former Mining Community is published by Routledge in 2021. Based on a critical Marxist ethnography, conducted at a primary school in a former coalmining community in the north of England, the book provides insight into teachers’ perceptions about the effects of deindustrialisation on education for the working class. The essence of the book is about knowing and harnessing the potentialities of the fullness of a social haunting. It has important implications for analysing and understanding the interplay and enactment of social class and education, and understanding how historical relations and performances, reflective of the community’s industrial past, continue to shape experiences and processes of schooling.

My research interests are in education and social class, especially in relation to the experiences of teachers, pupils, and parents in working-class communities:

• Primary Education
• Social Class
• Deindustrialisation
• Social Haunting
• Critical ethnography