Dr Will Atkinson

Personal profile

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bristol, 2009-2010, Research Associate 2010-2011, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow from 2012

Research

I have broad interests in class inequalities and differences, whether they are in education, work, consumption, politics or self-identities, as part of a larger general concern with systems of power and domination. I work closely with the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu in this regard, though with a phenomenological twist.

My book, Class, Individualization and Late Modernity: In Search of the Reflexive Worker (Palgrave, 2010), was an empirical test, and ultimately rejection, of various theories heralding the emergence of a new form of class-busting ‘reflexivity’, and I’m currently working on two projects: one, entitled Ordinary Lives, Different Worlds, is an investigation of the ways in which social class is lived and reproduced, or altered, in the most mundane, routine practices of domestic, family life; and the other, based on my British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, is an effort to construct a sound class scheme for statistical research based on Bourdieusian principles.

I convene the University of Bristol research Network on Class and Power.

Teaching

I currently run the Social Class in Contemporary Society unit at Masters level.

Full publications list in the University of Bristol publications system