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Staff Profile

Dr Sarah Burton

Lecturer in Sociology

Background

Prior to working at Newcastle, I held posts at Glasgow, Durham, and City, University of London, where I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.

As well as my lecturer role, I sit on the Editorial Board of Sociology and am one of the BSA Early Career Forum Convenors.




Research


My research is held together by a concern with value-making, practices and processes of legitimation, and investigations into authority and hierarchies. My current focus is especially on hauntings, death, and deviance, specifically in the outlines below.

  • Urban green spaces and their relational and plural uses; deviance and criminality within these relationships.
  • Place and place-making, especially borealism, the north & ‘remote’ islands; urban green spaces; affective relations with places of death (e.g.,graveyards).
  • True crime narratives and content; relationship to public perceptions of crime, criminality, punishment, and justice.
  • Knowledge production, ‘the intellectual’, experts and expertise in the public sphere


 

 

 

Teaching

SOC2044 Sociology of Crime: Social Control in Neoliberal Societies

SOC8073 Perpetual Wars: Crime, Policing, and (In)security

Publications

  • Articles

    • Burton S, Bowman B. The Academic Precariat: Understanding Life and Labour in the Neoliberal Academy. British Journal of Sociology of Education 2022, 43(4), 497-512.
    • Burton S, Outhwaite W, Susen S. The Urgency of Critical Theory Today: Towards Optimism and Renewal in a Neoliberal World. Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 2021, 5(2), 141-168.
    • Burton S. Solidarity, Now! Care, Collegiality and Comprehending the Power Relations of “Academic Kindness” in the Neoliberal Academy. Performance Paradigm 2021, 16, 20-39.
    • Clancy L, Burton S. Introduction: New Writings in Feminist and Women’s Studies. Journal of International Women’s Studies 2018, 19(1), 1-5.
    • Burton S. Becoming Sociological: Disciplinarity and a Sense of "Home". Sociology 2016, 50(5), 984 – 992.
    • Burton S. The Monstrous "White Theory Boy": Symbolic Capital, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Knowledge. Sociological Research Online 2015, 20(3), 14.

  • Book Chapters

    • Burton S. Becoming a Multilingual Researcher in Contemporary Academic Culture: Experiential Stories of (Not) Learning and Using Languages. In: Gibb, Robert; Tremlett, Annabel; Danero Iglesias, Julien, ed. Learning and Using Languages in Ethnographic Fieldwork. London: Multilingual Matters, 2019.
    • Burton S. Writing Yourself In? The Price of Playing the (Feminist) Game in the Neoliberal Academy. In: Taylor, Yvette; Lahad, Kinneret, ed. Feeling Academic in Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights, and Failures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.