I am a sociologist who studies work and science. I am not the kind of sociologist who works with numbers and questionnaires, though I can do that, too. My research is mostly ethnographic and theoretical, asking “why” and “how” questions. I mostly work with qualitative and mixed research methods.

I have worked on a variety of research topics united by several connected overarching themes:

• how expertise and professional identity are shaped alongside one another in the process of acquiring a profession;
• what social inequalities arise from large-scale socio-economic processes and pressures, such as the internationalisation, marketisation and casualisation of labour, or the fall of political regimes, and how how individuals adapt to them;
• inequalities in the job market (gender, class, caring responsibilities, migration, health and disability, and so on);
• how different types of knowledge(s) are produced, reproduced, maintained, communicated and challenged;
• how individuals reconcile the clashing demands of their personal lives, caring for others, making ends meet, maintaining a career, and doing meaningful things in their work;
• dignity, motivation and meaning-finding at work.

In my study of mathematics and mathematicians, I want to know (1) how mathematicians are made and what happens to them when they are ready; (2) what it means to work as an academic – particularly at a time of precarity, marketisation, metricisation and globalisation of scientific and knowledge labour.

My earlier research was about maritime labour and post-socialism. It asked how two generations of Bulgarian seafarers and coastal workers coped with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the sudden internationalisation and marketisation of their profession after 1989. I defended my PhD at the University of Warwick in 2012.

From 2010 to 2018 I edited The Sociological Imagination which we founded with Mark Carrigan. The site grew to be huge and had a long and happy life but came to an end in 2018. Sadia Habib and I continued its Facebook and Twitter presence for another year or so. Mark and I wrote an article about the Sociological Imagination here.

In 2023 and 2024 I co-edited The Sociological Review Magazine with Asiya Islam.

If you read this and want to get in touch, and are not a bot, I’ll be thrilled to hear from you by email at <name dot surname AT gmail dot com>.