Funded by the Foundation for Sociology of Health and Illness

Imogen Tyler is a Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University. She is a social theorist and sociologist of inequalities and borders (of multiple kinds). Imogen’s research is concerned with social inequalities, power, injustice and resistance. Her work examines why inequalities exist, why inequalities are currently growing (for example, patterns of neoliberalism, marketization, privatisation and the erosion of democracy in the transition to postwelfare state formations), the intersections of different histories and forms of inequality (for example, gender, citizenship status, disability).  Imogen’s work is concerned with how inequalities are measured and classified, the ways in which inequalities are reproduced and resisted, and the kinds of subjectivities and identities which are constituted through unequal social relations. Alongside work on class, culture, gender and inequality, Imogen has published widely in the area of borders, citizenship, migrancy, and in 2009, she set up a cross departmental migrancy Research Group at Lancaster University. In 2010, Imogen was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and the major outcome of this fellowship was the monograph Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013). In 2014, Imogen was awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize which is supporting her current research project on stigma and inequality. The major outcomes of this project will be a Sociological Review monograph on 'The Sociology of Stigma' (2018) edited with Tom Slater, and a single-authored book provisionally entitled 'Stigma Nation' (in progress), along with a series of peer-reviewed journal articles.

​

​

 

​

Tom Slater is a Reader in Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh. He is an urban geographer with interests in: gentrification and displacement, with a focus on capital flows and land rent/land grab; urban inequality and marginality in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on territorial stigmatisation; poverty, social class and welfare reform, and; charting and challenging 'decision-based evidence making' in urban policy via 'agnotology' (a word coined by Robert Proctor from the Greek 'agnosis', meaning 'not knowing'). Tom’s research has been funded by The Leverhulme Trust, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Recently, Tom has been tracing the roots and implications of the current UK government's welfare reforms, which rest on the ongoing and deeply disturbing stigmatisation of the urban working class and the places where they live. A critique of the practices and publications of free market think tanks features strongly in his analysis, and he has also developed an interest in the links between rent gap theory, territorial stigmatisation and austerity, explored in public and keynote lectures in 18 different countries since 2010.

​

​

​

​

Graham Scambler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University College London (UCL). He completed a B.Sc. in Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Surrey in 1971, followed by a PhD in Sociology at Bedford College, University of London. His PhD thesis was on the stigma experienced by adults with epilepsy living in the community. Graham was appointed Lecturer in Sociology at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in 1972-1975. He then moved to the Middlesex Hospital Medical School from 1978-1987 which became part of UCL. He was appointed Professor of Medical Sociology at UCL in 2001 and retired there in 2013 (becoming Emeritus Professor of Sociology). Graham is author or editor of several books and has written over 100 chapters and peer-reviewed papers. He is founding co-editor of the international journal Social Theory and Health and is a prolific blogger at http://www.grahamscambler.com/blog/.

 

 

​