Professor Liz McFall
Job Title
Personal Chair in the Sociology of Markets and Director of EFI Data Civics Observatory
Room number
1.2Street (Address)
21 George SquareCity (Address)
EdinburghCountry (Address)
UKResearch interests
Research interests
My research focuses on three main areas, insurance, market studies and cultural economy. Current research explores the historical, spatial and infrastructural connections between institutional investment, urban governance and everyday social life. This informs the Data Civics Observatory at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and its emphasis on using digital ethnography to investigate the social, political, cultural and economic dimensions of civic planning and placemaking.
My most recent publications include Life funds, urban development, and the experimental practices of financial sociology in the British Journal of Sociology and Insurance, Insurtech and the Architecture of the City. I have two co-authored chapters, including one with Addie McGowan, Elif Buse Doyuran and Kath Bassett; and another with Katy Mason, in the 2024 bumper Cambridge University Press collection Market Studies: Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action.
Keywords: Sociology of markets, insurance and finance; institutional and infrastructual investment, consumption, urban futures.
I'm interested in supervising students working to develop projects in any of the research areas described above. If you are interested in being supervised by me, please see the links below (opening in new windows) for more information:
Background
I am primarily a sociologist of markets with a particular interest in dull or difficult market propositions. In the past this has involved research on the historical practices of advertising and marketing, particularly of doorstep financial products targeted at the poor, especially industrial life insurance. More recently I've worked on big data-driven innovations in insurance and insurtech, cities and civic planning, and especially the connections between the two.
Having spent many years at the Open University before coming back to Edinburgh, I have an appetite for teaching and thinking across a variety of media. This resulted in the founding of AWED, an informal collective that make films and installations exploring the orchestration of civic sentiments and data techniques including Closes and Opens: a history of Edinburgh’s Futures, Milton Keynes of the Mind among others collected on the AWED YouTube channel.
I've published several articles in journals including Economy and Society, Sociological Review, Science, Technology and Human Value and Big Data and Society. Books include Markets and the Arts of Attachment (2017) co-edited with Franck Cochoy and Joe Deville, and the monographs Devising Consumption: cultural economies of insurance, credit and spending (2014) and Advertising: a cultural economy (2004). I was a founding co-editor of the Journal of Cultural Economy and continue to work as joint Editor-in-chief with Philip Roscoe and the editorial collective.