Simon is a specialist in ethnographic research. He is particularly experienced in multi-sited and institutional fieldwork. His doctoral thesis asks what it means to work in the business of ending homelessness in England. Offering an ethnographic account of aid ‘at home’, it focuses on a regularly neglected aspect of scholarly coverage of homelessness: the moral labour, disputes, tragedies and contradictions negotiated everyday by frontline workers at the coalface of the homeless industry. His findings foreground the futility that is hardwired into the post-austerity push to end homelessness in the UK, revealing the feedback loop of apparent state failure and virtuous firefighting that is at the heart of the enterprise.

Simon's work seeks to 'repatriate' critical scholarship about humanitarianism and international development to help better understand the state of governance in the UK. He is particularly interested in questions of deservingness, access to justice and housing policy. More broadly, he is interested in the lifeworlds and moral emotions of frontline workers and their institutions, especially the ambivalent and contradictory feelings that arise from enacting care in institutional settings. In this vein, some of his most recent work as part of the Vulnerable State project critically explores the evolution of modern slavery policy in the UK.