Dr Charlotte Branchu

Personal Statement

I joined to the Department in 2021 after lecturing at the University of Manchester and at Durham University. I work in the area of sociology of the body, culture and gender, principally based on my ethnographic fieldwork of women’s rugby. I just published a monograph for Palgrave’s book series "New Femininities in Digital, Physical and Sporting Cultures" titled: Tackling Stereotype: Corporeal Reflexivity and Politics of Play in Women’s Rugby. I am interested in the study of cultural practices and what they reveal about the political, economic, and social organisation of value; how valuation is manifested and negotiated at different scales; and the related lived, corporeal and material arrangements it relies on/engender.

My research is also in experiences of education, critical pedagogy and the political economy of education. As of 2022, Professor Vikki Boliver and I are conducting a project called "Socioeconomic inequalities of access to higher-tariff UK Universities in 2020" funded by the ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative.

Increasingly, my work is concerned with the sociology of work, skill, learning, and production attached to territory and, particularly, cultural identity. I am keen to discuss any work on the history, policy context, and experience of apprenticeships in particular localities as well as comparatively across contexts.

I am fascinated by social theory, the sociology of ideas and of intellectuals and am always happy to explore this further, particularly in understanding disciplinary transformations and the genealogy of ideas.

I'd be interested in having dialogues and supervising work in any of the areas above.