Placing Research: ‘City Publics’ and the ‘Public Sociologist’

Abstract

This chapter is based on ESRC¹-funded research (2007–2009) and, as the project title, ‘From the coal face to the car park? The intersection of class and gender in women’s lives in the North East of England’, implies, the objectives lie in charting gendered transitions from the industrial landscapes of one or two generations ago, to a current present and (imagined) regenerated future. In aiming to capture manifold intersections of history, geography and economy, a multi-dimensional approach was adopted to explore middle-class and working-class women’s lives (n = 97) in the context of de-industrialisation and the transition to a post-industrial economy, where processes of ‘fitting into place’ are subject to contestation (Taylor and Addison, 2009; Taylor, 2011a). Put simply, the research argues that change differently impacts on people and places: such changes occur and are contested over time and across space, affecting overlapping arenas such as labour, leisure and residential sites. Change impacts on feelings of belonging, in moving forward or being ‘left behind’, where desires, hopes and resentments intersect with material (im)possibilities. Thus, classed and gendered revisions and persistences are discussed here in relation to the particular fieldwork site, the North East of England, as a methodological as well as theoretical concern, in terms of activating ‘city publics’ and practicing (or failing) ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy, 2004).