Many of the research projects in the Department are funded by grants from the major research councils and funding bodies. Current and past awards held by members of the Department are featured below.
Centre for Landscape Regeneration: Developing community-based visions of landscape regeneration for the benefit of climate, nature, and people.
Landscape regeneration is essential for addressing biodiversity and climate crises, with an imperative to reverse the decline of ecosystems across the world. However, while there are ambitious global targets in place on nature recovery, the role of people in processes of restoring landscapes is unclear. There have been...
Reproductive extractivism: An environmental reproductive justice ethnography in the context of industrial mining in Peru
This project explores the effects of industrial mining in the reproductive lives of humans, animals and the land to expand our understanding of reproduction beyond the narrow model of the individual and biological human reproductive cycle that has traditionally constrained this body of scholarship. Amidst the current...
Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies
What are the social-political impacts of smart forests, as digital technologies that are becoming key strategies for addressing environmental change? Forests are crucial to acting on environmental change. They are key contributors to the carbon cycle and biodiversity, as well as air and water quality. At the same time...
This ambitious first-in-kind research project is designed to investigate a significantly neglected area of contemporary British society, namely the shifting valences of Black British identities. The Black British Voices Project is an innovative research collaboration between the Department of Sociology, I-Cubed and The...
The Trauma Resilience in UK Policing project explores how to better support the brain's ability to process trauma exposure and maintain resilience in contemporary operational policing. The project is sponsored by The Wates Family Enterprise Trust for 2024-2025 (formerly by Police Care UK, 2016-2024) and works in...
Our emergency services in the UK share much of the trauma exposure of policing. The Trauma Resilience in UK Policing project is reaching out to the 280 stations of lifeboat crew in the UK to share understanding of the neuropsychology of trauma resilience. We will be working with training teams to cultivate personal...
Mental Health Crises and Trauma Resilience in Policing
Sponsored by the Wates Family Enterprise Trust, the Trauma Resilience in UK Policing project is working with Surrey Police to introduce two new trauma resilience training programmes. One training programme will be for call takers in force control rooms and another for the leadership team. With a focus on cognitive...
Thinking Us: developing intersectional antiracist agendas in research
Professor Mónica Moreno Figueroa and Professor Manali Desai are leading an exciting interdisciplinary project for Cambridge researchers to explore and incorporate intersectional and anti-racist perspectives into their academic work. Through a series of collaborative workshops, conferences and a Festival of Antiracism...
The Reproductive Sociology Research Group was established in October 2012 to support research and teaching on the social and cultural implications of new reproductive technologies and related forms of social and cultural change. ReproSoc was based within the Department of Sociology and was part of a cluster of reproductive...
Shadow expertise: the role of alternative expert advisory groups during the COVID-19 pandemic
This research project examined a highly topical and theoretically under-defined phenomenon: the emergence of alternative expert advisory groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the new public health threat of COVID-19 became apparent in February-March 2020, governments around the world drew on experts to define the most...
The GendV Project: Urban Transformation and Gendered Violence in India and South Africa
The GendV Project aimed to explore the many urban transformations and changing gender relations in New Delhi, India and Johannesburg, South Africa. The project started in January 2020 and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. It was based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and...
GRACE - Grassroots Citizen Science for Global Data Environments Project
This EC-funded research project assessed how grassroots citizen scientists in three world regions (East Asia, Western Europe, Central Africa) mobilize new data devices and technologies to tackle environmental threats; and how formal institutions respond to citizen-driven environmental data practices. With concerned...
Building research and policy capacities and capabilities for health and healthcare in conflict zones and humanitarian crises
Two billion people across the world live in areas of conflict and fragility. This has led to the greatest forced migration crisis since the Second World War. The impact of this migration crisis includes socio-economic, political and environmental change in neighbouring frontline countries. There is now specific concern...
Screening for cancer in the post-genomic era: diagnostic innovation and biomedicalisation in comparative perspective PI: Dr Stuart Hogarth , Lecturer in Sociology of Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge . Overview How do new diagnostic tests find their way into practice? What are the relative roles of...
Alongside the rapid expansion of assisted fertility services worldwide have come changes in how both fertility and infertility are perceived, defined and experienced. Once aimed at the infertile population, modern ART marketing is increasingly aimed at the fertile population, and at new sectors such as the LGBTQ community...
This project is led by Professors Jacqueline Scott and Sarah Franklin and helps address three interlinked projects concerning (in)fertility, education and reproductive health. The first involves a large-scale quantitative analysis of the differential patterns of fertility by education, in the UK. The second uses cross-...
Sarah Franklin was principal investigator of this project, funded by the ESRC and running from September 2013 to August 2015. This seminar series proposed to host an extended discussion of 'IVF Cultures and Histories' focussing on the interrelation of three main themes: its technological development and visual emergence as...
Sarah Franklin is the principal investigator of this British Academy-funded project, which runs from May 2012 to May 2022. This project explores the history of IVF using archival and interview sources, as well as through analysis of media representations and ethical debate. The aim is to provide a historical sociology of...
Monica Moreno Figueroa is the principal investigator of this ESRC-funded project, which will run from January 2017 to December 2018. This project will investigate anti-racist practices and ideologies in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project will contribute to conceptualising and addressing problems of racism...
Professor Sarah Franklin is the principal investigator of this research project, which is funded by a Wellcome Trust Provision Award. The project will run from 2015 to 2018. Professor Franklin received this award as a means to enable a high level of public engagement in relation to the Life in Glass research project. Life...
Life in Translation is a collaborative project led by Professor Sarah Franklin , Dr Noémie Merleau-Ponty and Karen Jent . The project explores from social scientific and ethnographic perspectives a contemporary emphasis in the biosciences on biomedical translation, and examines the varied interdisciplinary techniques and...
SurrogARTs: Assisted Reproduction Beyond the Nation State and Nuclear Family?
‘SurrogARTs – Assisted reproduction beyond the nation state and nuclear family? Transition to parenthood and negotiating relatedness in gay father families created through transnational surrogacy’ This research project focuses on surrogacy as an assisted reproduction technique (hence the short title ‘SurrogARTs’). It takes...
Fertilisation Through a Looking Glass: A Sociology of UK IVF in the Late-Twentieth Century
Sarah Franklin is principal investigator of this project, funded by The Wellcome Trust and running from October 2013 to September 2017. This project aims to chart the emergence of clinical IVF in the UK during a distinctive era of basic scientific investigation of mammalian developmental biology. Drawing on interviews with...
