Imogen Tyler

Professor of Sociology, Lancaster University
I am a social theorist and sociologist of inequalities and borders (of multiple kinds). My research is concerned with social inequalities, power, injustice and resistance. My work examines why inequalities exist, why inequalities are currently growing (for example, patterns of neoliberalism, marketization, privatisation and the erosion of democracy in the transition to postwelfare state formations), the intersections of different histories and forms of inequality (for example, gender, citizenship status, disability). My work is concerned with how inequalities are measured and classified, the ways in which inequalities are reproduced & resisted and the kinds of subjectivities and identities which are constituted through unequal social relations. I draw on a diverse body of scholarship in my work, notably from feminist theory, sociology, media and cultural studies, social and critical theory and political philosophy and I typically bring together and analyse diverse archives of materials, including primary empirical data, policy materials, and a range of cultural materials. It is intersectional research which employs mixed methods and draws together long-standing research interests in migration, internal and external borders, sexual politics, social class, "race" & ethnicity, disability and poverty, and an abiding interest in culture (cultural economies), representation, subjectivity, processes of mediation and political aesthetics.

Alongside work on class, culture, gender and inequality I have published widely in the area of borders, citizenship, migrancy and in 2009 I set up a cross departmental migrancy Research Group at Lancaster University. I have recently edited, with Katarzyna Marciniak (Ohio University) a special issue of Citizenship Studies on `Immigrant Protest`(2013) and a book Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent (New York: SUNY, 2014). I have recently completed an ESRC funded project called 'Making Asylum Seekers Legible and Visible: An Analysis of the Dilemmas and Mitigating Strategies of Asylum Advocacy in the UK and US '. During 2012-2015 I co-organised an ESRC funded series of events ‘Exploring Everyday Practice and Resistance in Immigration Detention‘. The final conference in this series 'The Business of Immigration Detention: Activisms, Resistances, Critical Interventions' took place in Lancaster in Jan 2015.