Research

Research interests

• Green and anti-green politics, including related ideologies, sociology, public controversies, public policies and parties, with a particular interest in nuclear energy, air pollution, advertising, and apocalyptic scenarios (see our PAIS Environmental Politics research clusterLink opens in a new window).
• Political communication, including agendas, story-telling, framing, media effects, and media sociology.
• Political sociology, especially through surveys and interviews.
• Data and methods for the social and political sciences, especially multivariate statistics (esp. correspondence analysis, clustering, factorial analysis, regression modelling, visualisation), longitudinal methods (esp. sequence analysis), interviewing and field observation, survey design, text/content analysis, and all forms of novel digital data and creative multi-methodological designs.
• Methodology, sociology and epistemology of the social and political sciences, in particular through the empirical analysis of scientific texts.

Current projects

• Sequence analysis for the social and political sciences. History and epistemology of the development of SA in the social sciences. Application to employment vulnerability and labour mobility in Singapore; biographical turning points (past applications: academic careers in France, Germany and the UK; transnational interlocking directorates in Europe; gendered careers in Swiss trade unions; biographical consequences of activism among 1970s French feminists; and, backsliding trajectories of East-European and post-Soviet countries).
• Post-apocalyptic fiction (novels, movies, games). How post-apocalyptic narratives reveal visions of the past, present and future of modern societies; the role of nature and the environment in the lost world and in the new one; and how survivors of the apocalypse re-develop values and re-build political institutions. See the Warwick Apocalypse Working GroupLink opens in a new window I convene for related activities, including a journal special issue entitled "Whose Apocalypse?".

Reviewing

Journals: Advances in Life Course Research; American Sociological Review; British Journal of Political Science; Data in Brief; Democratization; Ethnographiques; European Political Science Review; Federal Governance; International Journal of Social Research Methodology; Journal of Peace Research; Longitudinal and Life Course Studies; Mobilization; Political Science Research and Methods; Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée; Social Forces; Socio-Economic Review; Sociological Methods and Research.

Other: American Political Science Association, Political Methodology section; European Research Council; German Research Foundation; Hong Kong Research Grants Council; Sage Research Methods book series; SESAME Ile-de-France; Springer edited book; Springer Major Reference Work Series; UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); International Fellowships of the Warwick Institute for Advanced Studies.

Supervisory interests

Prospective graduate students can contact me if they have projects combining green politics, political communication, media and politics, or political sociology (or, better, a combination of two or more of the above), with an innovative or challenging methodological design (such as articulating classical media and social media data, textual and non-textual data, multi-method designs, or analysing values and ideologies through fiction). At the moment I am particularly looking for applicants with a background in data/computational science.

I have contributed to supervise ten PhD research, about:

• Digital Diplomacy in the US-China Tech Cold War
• Narrative Politics and the Economy-Security Nexus in the United States
• Networks and Participation in Online Policy Talk
• Online political communication and democracy in South Korea
• Refugees in the European Media during the Syria Crisis
• Resistance to Western media hegemony in Chinese and Russian international broadcasting
• The impact of formal and informal environmental regulation on air pollution governance in China
• The long-term biographical consequences of feminist activism in France
• The political attitudes and engagement of the Chinese middle class
• Women's involvement and careers in Swiss trade unions.