Sustainable Consumption Institute

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, based at the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) (2017-2020). I received a BA in Sociology and an MSc in Cross-cultural Social Research Methods (Sociology) from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Social Change from the University of Manchester. I joined the University as a Research Associate in 2011 and have worked on projects about eating out, food waste, one-person households, and health inequalities. The title of my current research project is (De)synchronisation of people and practices in working households: The relationship between the temporal organisation of employment and eating in the UK.

My primary academic focus is time use research. Specifically, I am interested in the timing of activities across the day and week (utilising sequence data in addition to time budget data) and the (de)synchronisation and coordination of people and practices that occurs in daily life. My research takes a mixed method, comparative design. I use Optimal Matching Analysis, Multilevel regression modelling, and survival analysis with survey data and also use in-depth interview and Mass Observation material. A mixed methods approach ensures that individuals’ understandings and experiences of time are interpreted alongside empirical evidence of the systematic and structured nature of daily uses of time revealed in quantitative and representative analyses. Drawing upon a wealth of historical secondary data, dating from 1975-present, I examine changes in time use over this period.