Many of the research projects in the Department are funded by grants from the major research councils and funding bodies. Current and recent 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...
Sarah Franklin was the principal investigator of this British Academy-funded project, which ran from May 2012 to May 2022. This project explored the history of IVF using archival and interview sources, as well as through analysis of media representations and ethical debate. The aim was to provide a historical sociology of...
Monica Moreno Figueroa was the principal investigator of this ESRC-funded project, which ran from January 2017 to December 2018. This project investigated anti-racist practices and ideologies in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project contributed to conceptualising and addressing problems of racism, racial...
