School of Social and Political Science

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.