I am a cultural sociologist whose research focuses on cultural production with a particular emphasis on the social aspects of music. I am particularly focused on sites of cultural production for understanding how race, work precarity, and forms of social responsibility and citizenship are embedded and articulated within sites of cultural production.

I have just completed a large international research project as Principal Investigator studying European Music Festivals, Public Spaces, and Cultural Diversity (FestiVersities) funded by the HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) network as part of their Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe joint research programme. The research was conducted in five European countries between 2019-2022. Other academic partners include Project Lead – Professor Ian Woodward (Syddansk Universitet, Denmark), and (PI) Professor Pauwke Berkers (Erasmus University, Rotterdam), (PI) Dr Aileen Dillane (University of Limerick, Ireland) and (PI) Karolina Golemo (Jagiellonian University, Poland). You can explore our research here on our project website: www.festiversities.com. Our edited collection – Remaking Culture and Music Space. Affects, Infrastructures, Futures – has recently been published with Routledge in their Advances in Sociology Series available here.

Prior to this I was Co-Principal Investigator (with Lee Marshall) on a British Academy funded project (Digital Entrepreneurs: Negotiating Commerce and Creativity in the ‘New’ Music Industry) that explored the entrepreneurial activities of musicians and the tensions between their commercial and creative experiences particularly in the context of social media. Articles from this research are published in British Journal of Sociology and New Media & Society. Another emergent focus within the sociology of popular music is methodological where I enjoy exploring theoretical and practical questions about researchers’ negotiations of the music field and how to conceptualise music as an object of sociological investigation. Other methodological interests focus on working with archived qualitative data and the use of qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) in research.