These days, and only if I have to, I describe myself as a cultural sociologist working in education. That means that I’m interested in Culture, like the arts, but also in everyday cultural practices and life/lives.

If you looked at my publications, my research agenda might look somewhat haphazard. But it’s not. I’m interested in change which makes life chances and everyday life/lives better for the people that policy and social institutions generally do badly by and for. That means that my research might focus on groups of people who are having a hard time, or on practices that are affirming and offer horizons of hope and possibility. Because of my own professional history in education, this means I sometimes focus on alternative education, school leaders’ work and school change. 

To put it another way,  I’m interested in how ‘stuff”  that is currently elite (what we might call high cultural and social capitals) can be made more widely available…   how education writ very broadly can benefit more people, how the arts can be something for everyone and so on.  I’ve been concerned with trying to make the ‘games’ that lead to the acquisition of elite cultural and social capitals visible and comprehensible and do – able. So my work on the arts sits under this umbrella, as does that on research methods and doctoral writing, as well as that about school and community change.  Ive also been thinking about change via social media.

And in order to make this work more accessible Ive been looking at how we can ‘see’ and understand what happens when people are engaged in (broadly defined) learning experiences. How are they changed? What do we look for to understand what is happening?

This interest has led me to questions of formative evaluation and how we make judgements about what counts as ‘impact’ and ‘value’. I mainly pursue this question through ethnographic and case study research. Ive worked on this question in relation to community theatre and in work on professional development and public engagement in galleries and museums. I now work as Senior Evidence adviser for the Cultural Learning Alliance.

If you are interested in my academic work you can check me out my university home page or on GoogleScholar: my current h Index is 61 if you think that kind of thing is important.