Staff Profile

I joined Newcastle University as a Lecturer in Sociology in September 2025, having completed my ESRC-funded PhD here through the NINE DTP. My academic journey has been shaped by a long-standing commitment to understanding the human and emotional dimensions of inequality, and by a belief in the power of stories to make sense of complex social realities.

Before taking up my lectureship, I combined my studies with professional work as a researcher and practitioner in the field of child poverty and community-based interventions. These roles deepened my appreciation of how research can connect with lived experience, influence practice, and support social change at both local and policy levels.

Across my academic and professional life, I have been motivated by a desire to bring empathy, reflexivity, and accessibility to sociology — to make space for voices and experiences that are often marginalised or overlooked. My work has always sat at the intersection of emotional understanding and social critique, guided by a commitment to social justice and by curiosity about how people make meaning from their lives in unequal worlds.

I hold a BSc in Sociology from the University of Sunderland and an MA in Sociology and Social Research from Newcastle University.

My research centres on the emotional dimensions of social inequality, particularly how poverty and precarity are lived, remembered, and narrated across the life course. I am interested in the ways that emotion, identity, and memory intersect in shaping women’s experiences of classed and gendered inequality.

My doctoral project, “Women’s ‘Stories’: The emotional consequences of poverty in childhood and the shaping of women’s lives,” explored how women recall and make sense of growing up in poverty, and how those early emotional landscapes continue to influence their adult lives. Drawing on narrative and biographical interviews, the study traced how poverty’s effects extend beyond material deprivation, becoming embedded in feelings of shame, resilience, belonging, and self-worth.

Broadly, my work contributes to the sociology of emotion, feminist and life-course sociology, and qualitative narrative methods. I am particularly interested in how emotion can serve as a lens for understanding inequality — not simply as a response to social structures, but as a force that reproduces or resists them.

Methodologically, my research is grounded in qualitative, narrative, and biographical approaches that value lived experience as a site of knowledge. I am committed to research that is reflexive, participatory, and socially engaged, drawing inspiration from feminist and critical traditions that seek to democratise the research process.

Alongside my academic research, I have also worked as a practitioner and researcher on child poverty and community-based interventions, which continues to inform my interest in applied, policy-relevant sociology and co-produced forms of knowledge.

Current and emerging research interests include:

• Emotion, inequality, and the life course
• Women’s experiences of poverty and precarity
• The sociology of childhood and intergenerational disadvantage
• Narrative, biographical, and life-story methods
• Feminist epistemology and the politics of voice
• Co-production and community-based research

I teach across a range of undergraduate Sociology modules, with a focus on qualitative methods, lived experience, and the sociological imagination in everyday life. I have contributed to several introductory and research-focused modules and currently serve as Module Leader for the Stage 3 module Class in Everyday Life.

My teaching philosophy is grounded in creating an inclusive, reflective, and critically engaged classroom environment. I encourage students to connect sociological theory with the textures of daily life and to approach research as a process of curiosity, empathy, and social understanding.

I draw heavily on narrative and qualitative approaches in my teaching, helping students to explore how stories, emotions, and identities shape the social world. I’m particularly interested in developing students’ confidence in using qualitative methods — from interviews and ethnography to creative and participatory research techniques — and in supporting them to see how sociological insights can inform meaningful social change.

• Articles

  • Butler, S. Methodological New Directions in Researching Women's Poverty Through Life Stories. The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice 2025. Submitted.
  • Butler, S. Beyond the Binary: Emotional Agency and the Re-Theorising of Poverty in Women’s Life Stories. The Sociological Review 2025. Submitted.
  • Butler, S. A Disruption to Poverty Paradigms: ‘Emotionalism' and the Shaping of Women’s Lives. New Sociological Perspectives 2023, 3(2), 9-25.