CUCR Researchers

Emma Jackson

Emma Jackson is an urban sociologist, ethnographer and an editor of the Sociological Review. Her research and writing explore the relationship between everyday practices of belonging, the production of spaces and places in cities, and relations of class, multiculture and urban change.

Emma previously worked at King’s College London and the University of Glasgow and also held an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellowship (2012-2014) before joining Goldsmiths in 2015.

Emma is the convenor for the MA Sociology (Urban Studies). At post-graduate level, she is also convenor for ‘Methodology Now’, ‘Cities and Society’ and ‘Remaking the City’. At undergraduate level she also convenes the module ‘London’, as well as teaching on Undergraduate programmes in Sociology and Criminology.

Francisco Calafate: Researcher and Visiting Fellow

Francisco is an urban ethnographer with research experience in London (UK), Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), L’Hospitalet - Barcelona (Spain), and Santa Maria da Feira (Portugal). During his PhD and in the subsequent years as a researcher and visiting fellow at CUCR, Francisco has been part of the Centre’s efforts to bring together research in other parts of the world with work and interventions in the surrounding area of Goldsmiths.

He works within the fields of Geography and Sociology and his primary interests are urban change, mobilities, recycling, and political ecology. Francisco convenes the Graduate School’s Module of Core Qualitative Research Methods. He also teaches Environmental Politics, Sociology, Criminology and Social Research Methods in other HE institutions.

Peter Coles: Visiting Fellow

Peter Coles is a fine-art photographer, translator and editor and has been a Visiting Fellow in CUCR since 2007, he regularly teaches on the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths. His interests focus on the urban biosphere and, in 2016, he collaborated with the Conservation Foundation to set up Morus Londinium (supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund) to research, preserve and raise awareness of the cultural heritage of London’s historic mulberry trees. 

David Kendall: Visiting Fellow

David Kendall’s photography and research explore how spatial, economic and design initiatives, as well as participatory practices, combine to encourage social and spatial interconnections or conflict in cities.  He is a graduate of LCC, University of the Arts London and Goldsmiths, University of London where he studied photography, urban studies, design and sociology.

Claire Levy: Research Associate

Claire Levy's research focuses on the experiences of young people in rural locations, examining how young people engage with public space using multi-media methods. She specialises in participatory practices, exploring how the visual can support this approach.

Louise Rondell: MPhil/PhD Researcher

My research examines the co-constitutive relationship between bodies and cities by focusing on the work that goes on in London’s hair and beauty salons in order to understand the ways in which power is both embodied and spatialized and produced, reproduced and potentially contested through material-discursive bodily practices.

Sian Gouldstone: MPhil/PhD Researcher

Sian's research investigates the relationship between the body, materiality and home, and asks: how and where is home encountered in the houses of the British in Australia? It examines the way in which these spaces are negotiated, understood and practiced. Sian is a MPhil/PhD researcher at Goldsmiths College in Visual Sociology and received her MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths in 2010. She has been teaching photography for the last six years.

Sian Gouldstone's website

Viktor Bedö

As an academic with philosophy and design theory background, Viktor Bedö is interested in experimental research methodologies that evolve around embodied knowledge, urban space and technology. As a street game designer, he creates low-tech physical games to understand better how cities work today and prototype how they could work tomorrow.

Viktor is also a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures in Base and founder of Tacit Dimension, an independent street game research lab.

Rupert Griffiths: Visiting Research Fellow

Rupert is an artist, writer, and cultural geographer. His research and creative work considers artists’ representations of waste and wastelands, with an emphasis on the materiality and process. He is currently developing a research project and exhibition entitled Art and Waste, building on his recent work with Xinwei Zhu as guest editors for the Chinese art magazine Art World (艺术世界). Rupert’s recent artistic work has been through a collaboration Site/Seal/Gesture (SSG) with an artist and archaeologist.

Rupert is a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths. He has a PhD in Social and Cultural Geography (Reimagining the Margins: The Art of the Urban Fringe, 2015), and an MA in Architecture and Urbanism (2010). He has worked as an artist since 1997, before which he studied Microelectronic Systems Engineering at UMIST, Manchester.

Imogen Slater: Visiting Fellow

Imogen Slater has extensive evaluation and research experience relating to: community, arts, creative sector, youth & CJS, health & well being, training, professional development, and informal learning.  Imogen has worked with CUCR since 2000 on numerous research and evaluation projects. Currently these include; Creative Families with the South London Gallery, Future Stages with Oval House, Silver Stories an EU Leonardo funded project and the Capital People Programme with the London Leading for Health Partnership (NHS).

Freya Hellier: Visiting Sound Artist

Freya Hellier is a radio & podcast & producer, content maker and strategist.  She has over fifteen years of broadcast radio experience alongside experience using podcasting in communications strategy and academic research dissemination.  Much of her work documents community stories and the experience of city life. 

Professor Marjorie Mayo: Emeritus Professor

Marjorie Mayo is a longstanding associate of CUCR and now an emeritus professor.  For more than twenty years has been conducting ground-breaking community development and social justice work combining urban social research and a commitment to policy intervention and practical community solutions.

Roger Green: Visiting Research Fellow

Urban community researcher, community activist, and campaigner. Actively involved in working with marginalised and ‘hard to reach' communities. Commitment to universities working with communities using co-production/co-design, participatory research and engagement methodologies. 

Louise Rondell: MPhil/PhD Researcher

Louise is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.  Her research follows different objects to and through the city's hair and beauty salons and attends to how they interact with people and places to examine the dynamic co-constitutive relationship between bodies and cities and the socio-spatial impacts and impetuses of the demand for beauty work.  Particularly focusing on the toxicity of beauty work, her research aims to connect intimate salon practices with larger socio-ecological issues. 

Alison Rooke, Visiting Fellow

Alison Rooke is a sociologist with a specialism in urban theory and creative research methods. Alison has an ongoing interest in the dynamics of participation in the city brought about through arts-led interventions, urban policy and regeneration. Alison has a long history of working collaboratively with local communities, activists and cross-sectoral stakeholders in educational and community settings on a national and European scale. 

Caroline Knowles, Professor of Sociology

Caroline Knowles is a former Director of CUCR, she writes about migration and circulations of material objects – some of the social forces constituting globalisation. She is interested in cities, having done research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul. She is the former director of the Cities and Infrastructure Programme, and the current director of the Academy’s Urban Infrastructures of Well-Being Programme. This has 23 interdisciplinary projects based in cities in the global south.