Sheffield Hallam University

Faculty Member, Sociology

Lecturer in Sociology (Research Methods)

About

Bob Jeffery - Biography

Having grown up in Carlisle, I completed my bachelors degree in Media and Cultural Studies at Nottingham Trent University, and masters degree in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, producing work on issues of community, regeneration, the Christian right, alcohol cultures and the socio-political impacts of neoliberalism.

I have recently completed a PhD in Sociology at the University of Salford, investigating the links between ever-increasing physical mobility and continuing inequality. More specifically I was interested in understanding how attitudes to mobility and territoriality are reproduced across generations, and the ways in which actors draw upon various resources in navigating contemporary cities and in negotiating a sense of belonging. I have further research interests in political behaviour, urban sociology, human geography, mobilities, social research methods (quantitative and qualitative), the ‘themeing’ of city space, class analysis, social exclusion in deprived neighbourhoods, the political appeal of the far right, and health inequalities.

My current research projects include work looking at the causes and impacts of the 9th August riot in the city of Salford, the effects of urban change on neighbourhood collective efficacy, and on the discourses of belonging that are mobilised by competing groups in their constructions of and claims to urban space.

In my spare time when I’m not giggling at political satire, I also have interests in cycling, cinema, music, community projects and local politics.


PhD Abstract:

This study attempts to identify the causal mechanisms linking social inequality and physical (im)mobilities, by way of a case study analysis. Adopting a methodological approach of critical realism, the focus of this study lies not with aggregate analyses of transport behaviour, but with qualitative judgements based on mixed-methods regarding the links between mobility, place, and identity, as they are played out in a deprived (though partially gentrified) neighbourhood. Following an examination of the Labour government’s Social Exclusion Unit’s work on transport inequalities (Making the Connections, 2003), I will attempt to link current trends in class analysis to the problematic, giving particular attention to the Bourdieusian inspired concepts of Network Capital (Urry, 2007) and Elective Belonging (Savage et al, 2005).

In attempting to relate sociological theory to the level of individual experience, this work tends towards the ideographic, as against the macro analyses of authors such as Bauman, Beck, Castells, and Giddens. To locate this case study site within the broader array of social processes, a careful description of its contextual attributes will be undertaken, focusing especially on the impact of the mobility of capital (and of regional ‘uneven development’, Massey, 1995), and the restructuring of urban space around modernist planning ideals (Jacobs, 1961).

The substantive empirical data presented in two chapters dealing with everyday and residential mobilities, respectively. In the first of these chapters I engage with Urry’s concept of network capital and, by relating its constituent components to the forms of capital conceived of by Bourdieu, question the independence of this form from other axes of stratification and especially from social class. In the second analysis chapter I thematically explore identity, belonging and residential mobility by reference to perceptions of the locality, discourses around regeneration, residential mobility narratives and residential mobility more specifically in relation to the transition to adulthood. This chapters ends with the assertion of the necessity of a conceptual antonym to Savage et al’s ‘elective belonging’ that recognises the difficulty in achieving such a state for actors occupying more marginal class positions.

To conclude the thesis, I will return to the overall critical realist underpinnings of the thesis in order to demonstrate how a search for causal mechanisms draws attention to the overwhelmingly structural reasons for the experience of unequal mobilities in a deprived UK inner-city neighbourhood. In particular, and in an attempt to develop a critical realist explanatory critique, I firstly draw attention to the increasing remodelling of society around the car, predicated upon a ‘secessionist automobility’ (Henderson, 2009). Secondly, I examine the mechanisms behind inner-city neighbourhood decline and divergences in housing tenure and critique the processes of urban renewal and regeneration that impact upon the experience of belonging of some of my participants. In both instances I point to examples of the ways in which these processes can be challenged at the level of praxis. Finally, I discuss some issues around the exacerbation of inequalities under the political project of neoliberalism and point to the need for a wider ethics of class.

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