Bridget Anderson is the Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship. Her post is split between the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies
Bridget has a DPhil in Sociology and previous training in Philosophy and Modern Languages. She is the author of Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). She co-edited Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy with Martin Ruhs (Oxford University Press, 2010 and 2012), The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation with Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti (Springer, 2013) and Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics with Isabel Shutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Bridget takes as her starting point that the 'migrant' and the 'citizen' and the differences between them are constructed in law and in social and political practice. Research also plays an important role in this, raising important ethical, epistemological and political questions. She is interested in the relation between migration, race, and nation, historically and in the contemporary world. She understands the mobility of people in the context of mobilities of goods, finance and ideas, mobilities whose speed and patterns are significantly changing in the face of technological developments. Her work explores the relations between migration, temporalities and future making claims, with a particular focus on precarity, labour market flexibilities and citizenship rights. She has pioneered an understanding of functions of immigration in essential economic sectors. Bridget has worked closely with migrants’ organisations, trades unions and legal practitioners at local, national and international levels.
Professor Vanessa May gained her PhD from Abo Akademi University in Finland in 2001. Between 2002-2005 she worked at the Centre for Research on Families, Kinship & Childhood at the University of Leeds. She joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Manchester in 2005. She was Co-Director of the Morgan Centre for the Research into Everyday Lives 2018-2022 and is currently the Head of Sociology. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and on the Board of Trustees of the British Sociological Association (as Publications Director).
Her current work concerns the self, belonging, migration, family life and temporality. Her previous research has focused on post-divorce parenting, lone motherhood and intergenerational relationships. Methodologically her interests span the use of mixed methods, qualitative interviewing, narrative analysis and biographical methods.
She is currently involved in the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health, based at Kings College London, as the co-lead for the Innovative Methdods platform.
Her recent research concerns ageing in the context of migration, ageing in place, and place and belonging, conducted as part of the following projects:
The experience of ageing in place over time, which was an ESRC-funded project that utilised qualitative longitudinal secondary data to explore experiences of ageing in place across different types of neighbourhood.
‘Place and belonging: What can we learn from the Claremont Court housing scheme?’, an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project involving colleagues from architecture, sociology, social anthropology and social work.
Other past research projects include ‘Inter/Generational Dynamics’, which ran from 2008 to April 2011 and the cross-national comparative research project 'Children's socio-emotional wellbeing and daily family life in a 24-h economy' in collaboration with colleagues in Finland and the Netherlands (2012-2014).
Professor Catherine Degnen's research focuses on how people create meaning and make sense of their social worlds in contexts of social transformation. She has built a significant body of work exploring this central interest in two key empirical areas: older age and everyday life, and the anthropology of Britain. In her career to date, she has engaged with social transformation at multiple levels of scale, from the macro level of post-industrial rupture, to emergent shifts in social identity politics, to the development of new technologies (genetic and digital), to more micro levels of transformation, such as when our ageing bodies begin posing dilemmas for our sense of self and of personhood.
As an anthropologist and ethnographer, all of her research is grounded in a fundamental commitment to the lives of the people she has worked with, and to what matters to them in their everyday experiences. By attending to these experiences and forms of meaning-making in a richly detailed and finely grained way, she has contributed to debates in contemporary social theory on personhood and on self; on identity, belonging and social memory; and on the creative affordances of place.
Her work on ageing challenges assumptions of later life in Western society, generally represented as a series of problems - medical, social, economic - to be solved. Her research refocuses attention on the rich complexity and experiences of real people and their everyday lives as they age, highlighting the perspectives of older people themselves about what it is to grow older. This includes the importance of both social memory and of place for negotiating profound social transformation. It also includes developing a critique of an implicitly middle-aged, universalised self, one which does not allow for the distinctiveness and vitality of older age as lived that I argue demands recognition. She has recently begun a new strand of work exploring these interests in the northwest of Ghana (with Dr Constance Akurugu, UBIDS).
In Cross-cultural Perspectives on Personhood and the Life Course (2018) she build on and extended some of her research interests in later life to explore the category of the person across the life course. In it, she explores the question "what does it mean to be a person?". She considers how answers to this question vary cross culturally as well as through the life course. Broader theoretical considerations that stem from these questions include anthropological concepts of relatedness (how people create and dismantle connections with each other and the world as they move through the life course) and ontology (ideas about states of being and existence, with reference to how these might shift through stages of life).
Other writing projects include Reflections on Polarisation and Inequalities in Brexit Pandemic Times (Routledge, 2025 with Katharine Tyler and Susan Banducci), and the 2017 Sociological Review Monograph, Reconfiguring the Anthropology of Britain: Ethnographic, Theoretical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (with Katharine Tyler). She first research monograph, Ageing Selves and Everyday Life in the North of England: Years in the Making (2012) , was reviewed in the Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute, Times Higher Education and Ageing & Society