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Staff profile

Overview

Ben Main

Postgraduate Research Student

Affiliations
Affiliation
Postgraduate Research Student in the Department of Sociology

Biography

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) I use an extended case ethnography to investigate the social relation of rent and urban precarity in London. I work at an intersection of political economy and the urban sociology of Wacquant

My undergraduate and postgraduate degrees are from the University of London and University of Cambridge. I held the IMESS programme scholarship at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies for the MA in Economy, State and Society. 

 

Conference Papers
  • Structural and experiential 'folds' - sense making and the urban precariat with and against Wacquant and Willis - Critical perspectives on lived experience in social security policy research workshop - LSE, November 2024 
  • Inside urban rental precarity - The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies, Governing the city: polity, politics, policy, Lisbon, November 2024
  • The structure of institutional insulation in contested pharmaceutical spending governance - BSA Medical Sociology Conference, Warwick, September 2024 
  • The theoretical and institutional significance(s) of stable government pharmaceutical spending with increased reimbursement mix - Seventh Annual Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing Early Career Researcher Conference, Durham, June 2024 
  • Money Saving Platforms, Offence and Symbolic Violence - Understanding Offence, (de)limiting the unsayable, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, March 2024 
  •  Jessopified-skocpolianism - institutional insulation in state pharmaceutical spending – In Sickness and in Health Conference, Auckland, February 2024 
  •  On Burawoy, Desmond and the extended case method in housing cases - The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies, Imaginaries of inhabitation, or, the future of planetary dwelling, Lisbon, November 2023 
  •  The selectivity's of New Zealand's pharmaceutical spending policy: incentivisation games, power and societal surplus - BSA Medical Sociology Conference, Sussex, September, 2023 
  •  Thrift, mental health and subsistence – Social Policy Association Conference, Nottingham, July 2023 
  •  UK Mental health policy and discontinuities in the socio-cultural regime of crisis management - Rising inequalities and Poverty – Politics of Lived experience, PGR conference, Durham University, Durham, March 2023 
Teaching

Guest Lecture in Sociology, Durham University, Department of Sociology 2024 - 25

Guest Lecture in Political Economy, Durham University, School of Government and International affairs (SGIA) 2024 -25

Teaching Assistant/Seminar Tutor, Durham University, School of Government and International affairs (SGIA) and Durham University, Department of Sociology (academic year 2024-25)

  • Perspectives of Political Economy 
  • Capitalism: History and Theory 
  • Introduction to Criminological Theory

Seminar tutor (academic year 2023/24):-

  • Capitalism: History and Theory
  • Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Practises Across Social Research (PG)
  • Perspectives of Political Economy
  • Political Theory

Seminar tutor (academic year 2022/23):

  • Contemporary Criminological Theory
  • Criminal Justice Landscape
  • Social Work in Context (PG)