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Overview

Benjamin Main

Postgraduate Research Student


Affiliations
Affiliation
Postgraduate Research Student in the Department of Sociology

Biography

Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) I use an extended case ethnography to investigate the social relation of rent and urban precarity in London. I work at an intersection of Marxist and Bourdieusian political economy and the urban sociology of Wacquant

My undergraduate and postgraduate degrees are from the University of London and University of Cambridge. I held the IMESS programme scholarship at UCL's School of Slavonic and East European Studies for the MA in Economy, State and Society. 

 

Conference Papers
  • Structural and experiential 'folds' - sense making and the urban precariat with and against Wacquant and Willis - Critical perspectives on lived experience in social security policy research workshop - LSE, November 2024 
  • Inside urban rental precarity - The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies, Governing the city: polity, politics, policy, Lisbon, November 2024
  • The structure of institutional insulation in contested pharmaceutical spending governance - BSA Medical Sociology Conference, Warwick, September 2024 
  • The theoretical and institutional significance(s) of stable government pharmaceutical spending with increased reimbursement mix - Seventh Annual Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing Early Career Researcher Conference, Durham, June 2024 
  • Money Saving Platforms, Offence and Symbolic Violence - Understanding Offence, (de)limiting the unsayable, Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, March 2024 
  •  Jessopified-skocpolianism - institutional insulation in state pharmaceutical spending – In Sickness and in Health Conference, Auckland, February 2024 
  •  On Burawoy, Desmond and the extended case method in housing cases - The Lisbon Early-Career Workshop in Urban Studies, Imaginaries of inhabitation, or, the future of planetary dwelling, Lisbon, November 2023 
  •  The selectivity's of New Zealand's pharmaceutical spending policy: incentivisation games, power and societal surplus - BSA Medical Sociology Conference, Sussex, September, 2023 
  •  Thrift, mental health and subsistence – Social Policy Association Conference, Nottingham, July 2023 
  •  UK Mental health policy and discontinuities in the socio-cultural regime of crisis management - Rising inequalities and Poverty – Politics of Lived experience, PGR conference, Durham University, Durham, March 2023 
Teaching

Guest Lecture in Sociology, Durham University, Department of Sociology 2024 - 25

Guest Lecture in Political Economy, Durham University, School of Government and International affairs (SGIA) 2024 -25

Teaching Assistant/Seminar Tutor, Durham University, School of Government and International affairs (SGIA) and Durham University, Department of Sociology (academic year 2024-25)

  • Perspectives of Political Economy 
  • Capitalism: History and Theory 
  • Introduction to Criminological Theory

Seminar tutor (academic year 2023/24):-

  • Capitalism: History and Theory
  • Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Practises Across Social Research (PG)
  • Perspectives of Political Economy
  • Political Theory

Seminar tutor (academic year 2022/23):

  • Contemporary Criminological Theory
  • Criminal Justice Landscape
  • Social Work in Context (PG)