Dr Rachel Hurdley
Research Fellow
- hurdleyr1@cardiff.ac.uk
- +44 29208 75069
- 2.12 Glamorgan Building, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WA
- Media commentator
Biography
With a joint Classics and English degree, I initially taught Classics at an Oxford school, while volunteering at a housing rights centre. Curious to explore the problem and meaning of 'house and home', I did a housing studies MSc. In 2006, I completed a PhD in housing, Dismantling Mantelpieces: consumption as spectacle and shaper of self in the home at the Cardiff School of Geography and Planning. Following my time as a researcher in the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods in Qualiti, I took up an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship in SOCSI. I was The Sociological Review Fellow 2009-10, writing a monograph, Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging: keeping culture (2013). Making Wales, Remembering Home was a Beacon-funded collaborative film-making project with refugees and destitute asylum seekers. Building on a short study, The Power of Corridors, I am now doing an ethnography Rethinking Space, Openness and Organisation as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. This explores the relation between social, material and spatial interactions and relations on a university campus.
Publications
2017
- Hurdley, R.et al. 2017. Drawing as radical multimodality: salvaging Patrick Geddes's material methodology. American Anthropologist 119(4), pp. 748-753. (10.1111/aman.12963)
2016
- Hurdley, R. 2016. Everyday life. In: Inglis, D. and Almila, A. M. eds. The Sage Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Sage, pp. 372-389.
2015
- Hurdley, R. 2015. Pretty pants and office pants: making home, identity and belonging in a workplace. In: Casey, E. and Taylor, Y. eds. Intimacies, Critical Consumption and Diverse Economies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 173-196.
2014
- Hurdley, R. 2014. Synthetic sociology and the 'long workshop': How Mass Observation ruined meta-methodology. Sociological Research Online 19(3), pp. 177-202. (10.5153/sro.3376)
2013
- Hurdley, R. 2013. Home, materiality, memory and belonging: keeping culture. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2011
- Hurdley, R. and Dicks, B. 2011. In-between practice: working in the 'thirdspace' of sensory and multimodal methodology. Qualitative Research 11(3), pp. 277-292. (10.1177/1468794111399837)
2010
- Hurdley, R. 2010. In the picture or off the wall? Ethical regulation, research habitus, and unpeopled ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry 16(6), pp. 517-528. (10.1177/1077800410370676)
- Hurdley, R. 2010. The power of corridors: connecting doors, mobilising materials, plotting openness. The Sociological Review 58(1), pp. 45-64. (10.1111/j.1467-954X.2009.01876.x)
2009
- Dicks, B. and Hurdley, R. 2009. Using unconventional media to disseminate qualitative research. Qualitative Researcher 10, pp. 2-6.
2007
- Hurdley, R. 2007. Objecting relations: The problem of the gift. The Sociological Review 55(1), pp. 124-143. (10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00685.x)
2006
- Hurdley, R. 2006. Dismantling mantelpieces: Narrating identities and materializing culture in the home. Sociology 40(4), pp. 717-733. (10.1177/0038038506065157)
- Hurdley, R. 2006. Dismantling mantelpieces : consumption as spectacle and shaper of self in the home.. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University.
Teaching
I have contributed to a number of undergraduate, postgraduate and professional doctorate courses in SOCSI, CPLAN, RGS and HISAR (now SHARE). These include:
Postgraduate
Qualitative Research Methods, Research Design and Practice, Difference and Equality, Latin Historical Texts, Mediaeval Historical Texts, Beginners' and Intermediate Latin
Undergraduate
Power, Culture, and Identity, Social Research Methods, Reading Latin I and II
My research focuses on how identity and power relations are effected, transformed and fixed within:
- Home, work & family
- Everyday spaces & things
- Belonging, remembering, excluding & forgetting
- Methodology
The current Leverhulme-funded ethnography Rethinking Openness, Space and Organisation examines how power is organised into and out university spaces and materials. How is work collaboration transformed by a new 'walk through' common room? How might an 'accessible' building deter 'the public'? The research builds on The Power of Corridors. This unfolds how organisational culture happens within everyday interpersonal, spatial and material relations in the corridors of a university building.
Home, family, memory and identity as mundane practices - particularly focusing on materiality - are ongoing research interests. The monograph Home, Materiality, Memory and Belonging was published in 2013. In Dismantling Mantelpieces, I explore closely how these are made, maintained, disposed of and changed through curating and narrating displays in the home. The film series Making Wales, Remembering Home, co-produced with refugees and 'destitute' asylum seekers, emphasises how homes, memories and identities are precarious, tenuous processes.