Emma Jackson is an urban sociologist working on practices of place, belonging and the city - particularly London. .
Emma Jackson is an urban sociologist working on practices of place, belonging and the city. She is a Reader in Sociology and the Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research [CUCR] (https://www.gold.ac.uk/cucr/). Before joining Goldsmiths in 2015, Emma held the Urban Studies Foundation fellowship at the University of Glasgow.
Emma's research focuses on people's everyday practices of belonging and the dynamics of urban space. Her work primarily focuses on London and the relationship between the production of space, belonging and forms of class, multiculture and urban change. She specialises in teaching creative research methods and urban sociology. She is currently working on the project ‘Place-making and the Rivers of Lewisham’(funded by Goldsmiths Strategic Research Fund).
She was an editor of the Sociological Review from 2017-2023 and is a trustee of the IJURR Foundation.
Academic qualifications
PhD in Sociology 2010
MA Social Research 2004
BA Sociology and Cultural Studies 2003
Teaching and supervision
Emma is the co-Director of Postgraduate Research and the convener of MA Sociology (urban Studies). She also convenes the courses Methodology Now (MA), Cities and Society (MA), Rethinking the City (MA) and London (BA). The latter is a course entirely taught through walking in the city.
Emma's research has focussed on a wide range of urban spaces from day centres to leisure space to urban rivers.
Emma started out conducting ethnographic research with young homeless people. Through engaging with the young people's accounts of movement and space she argued that young homeless people became 'fixed in mobility', a condition that impacted on both possible futures and everyday life. She then went on to work on the project 'The Middle Classes and the City: A comparison of Paris and London' (ESRC) leading to the publication of a range of papers with Michaela Benson and Tim Butler about the spatial practices and imaginaries of the middle classes in London.
Emma was a Co-I on the project 'Mapping Immigration Controversies' led by Hannah Jones that set out to study Government anti-immigration campaigns in real time. In this project she particularly focussed on how anti-immigration campaigns unfold in, impact on and are met with resistance in particular locales.
Emma's next projects were an ethnography of a London bowling alley ('Bowling together?: the choreography of everyday multiculture', ESRC), allowing her to explore leisure practices, multiculture and urban change in a site that was ear-marked for demolition. And a project investigating the boom of high-up spaces of lesiure in Peckham (Above Street Level, British Academy). Emma concluded that while 'diversity' is is celebrated as an atmosphere and generator of capital, existing spaces of everyday urban multiculture are at best unprotected and at worst not recognised, devalued and demolished.
Most recently Emma has been working on a project called 'Place-making and the Rivers of Lewisham' which examines the relationship between formal and informal practices of place-making and the three rivers of the Borough of Lewisham – from the ways the rivers are represented in council and city level planning, to the everyday ways in which local people engage with river spaces.
2023:
Place-making and the Rivers of Lewisham Exploring the relationship between urban rivers, everyday practice and development. Funded by Goldsmiths Strategic Research Fund
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