My research interests revolve around the politics of representation, gender and popular culture and the production of social and symbolic value. My previous research explored the intersections of class and gender in parenting culture, paying particular attention to representational forms such as 'makeover' television, and looked at parents' encounters with parenting culture, how they made social and symbolic value for themselves and how they negotiated the cultural politics of contemporary family life and its mediations.
My current research can be split into two related strands. In the first, I am extending my research around the cultural politics of parenting in order to look at how it is being reconfigured in the new age of austerity economics. I'm interested in emerging sociocultural combinations, and circulations, of the categories of 'parent' and 'citizen', which are reconfiguring how we think about public, private and voluntary sectors, notions of personal responsibility and citizenship. In the second, I am developing my interest in psychosocial approaches to media and culture, specifically around popular television texts, audiences and spaces. In this second strand, I am concentrating on high-concept, 'event television' in order to think psychosocially about how and where we 'do' politics in the contemporary media landscape.