Prof Dale Southerton - personal details
Contact details
Biography
My intellectual interests have always spanned the social sciences and it was not until I completed my undergraduate degree that I finally decided Sociology was for me ? before then I had been torn between geography, sociology and history. Having completed my joint honours in geography and sociology, I found myself at Lancaster University and in receipt of an ESRC Studentship to do my PhD. My doctoral work explored how consumption mediates social relations in a New Town, examining senses of belonging, processes of identity formation and the relevance of class in contemporary society.
In 2000 I joined the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC), which allowed for my return to inter-disciplinary work. During my time at CRIC I conducted several projects. The main three projects focused upon consumption and the changing social, economic and cultural ordering of everyday life. The first addressed the changing temporal organization of consumption, and paid attention to senses of harriedness and the challenges of coordinating social practices and networks within daily life. A second project looked at material culture, domestic technologies and homes. While time and consumption remained critical to the analysis, this project brought the added dimension of space?. The most recent (and most ambitious) project empirically assessed theories of cultural globalization, especially arguments that global consumer culture is American culture.
I have recently served as Director of Postgraduate Teaching for Sociology (2007-9) and as an editorial board member on the journal 'Sociology' (2006-9). In addition to my role in Sociology, I am Leader of the 'Sustainable Consumer Behaviour and Lifestyles' Theme at the Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI), and Editor-in-Chief of the 'Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture' (forthcoming, Sage). I am also a member of the Morgan Centre, an Honorary Fellow at CRIC, and Research Affiliate at CRESC. Further details of the above (and other) research projects can be found on my Morgan Centre and SCI webpages.