Tell us about your contribution that has been recognised through the associate professorship.

My work and research interests sit at the intersection of social policy, social care, and the experience of living with a health condition or impairment. A key concern of my research is the lived experience of policies of personalisation in social care, and the multiple implications of system reliance on informal carers, both for carers themselves, and for people without them.

I’m particularly proud of our recent grant from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Research for Social Care for a project entitled ‘Living alone with dementia: managing without informal support to contact and navigate services’. I’m leading a collaboration between Sheffield Hallam, the NIHR Applied Research Collaborative North Thames (based at University College London), Innovations in Dementia (a Community Interest Company dedicated to facilitating the involvement of people with dementia in research), and Leeds Clinical Commissioning Group (now part of the NHS West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board). I’m delighted that we have four people with dementia who live alone without informal support on our advisory board to guide the research.

Another highlight for me is being a trustee of the Social Research Association (SRA), and co-chairing their northern committee, which organises networking, dissemination, and skills events for researchers across the north of England. Students on our BA Sociology and MRes course are now enrolled as members of the SRA, and I will be coordinating SRA work to trial new initiatives and extend existing schemes for students and early career researchers. This will be a valuable opportunity for our students, as many of them go on to work in voluntary organisations, health, government, or education.

Tell us a bit about your career story so far.

I’ve had a fairly straightforward academic career, although my subject and interests have varied over the years. My degree is in environmental management and sociology, then after a small break I did a masters and PhD in what was the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield, focusing on environmental values and travel choice. I became interested in social care through a part time job, and after my PhD, worked as a research fellow at the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York for nearly six years, before coming to Sheffield Hallam as a senior lecturer in sociology in 2016.

If you could go back in time and give yourself some career advice, what would it be?

Keep your eyes and ears open – you never know when you’ll learn something interesting. Don’t say yes to everything at the same time. And keep track of how much time you spend on different activities – you can’t do everything perfectly in the time you’ve got.

What’s next? Tell us about how you want to further develop your contribution.

I’m particularly interested in the aftermath of uncertainties and changes to social care caused by Covid and Brexit, and the implications both for informal carers, and for people who do not have informal carer support. I’m also planning to develop my work around housing and ageing, and around writing with dementia, ultimately leading to an ESRC bid around narrative and dementia.