Staff profile
| Affiliation | Telephone |
|---|---|
| Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology |
Biography
Robert MacDonald is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham. He studied at Durham for his undergraduate degree - BA (Hons) Psychology and Sociology - in the early 1980s and later completed his DPhil (about youth unemployment in rural areas) at the University of York in 1988. He worked at Teesside University for 25 years, where he was made Professor in 2002, and together with colleagues developed the internationally renowned Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions and Social Exclusion.
His work tends to cross disciplinary boundaries - sociology, social policy, criminology, education, social geography, He has researched and written widely about young people, work and inequality. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, chapters and articles about youth transitions, unemployment, non-standard work, poverty, social class, and the signicance of place. Books include: Youth, the Underclass and Social Exclusion (1997), Disconnected Youth? Growing up in Britain's Poor Neighbourhoods (2005), Drugs in Britain (2007), and Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain (2012) - this won the 'British Academy Peter Townsend Prize'. He has recently co-authored a Special Issue of the Journal of Youth Studies (2024) on 'Rural Youth and Marginalisation'.
Robert recently retired from his post as Professor of Education and Social Justice at the University of Huddersfield. He is Visiting Professor at the Danish Centre for Youth Research, Aalborg University and was until recently Visiting Professor at Department of Sociology, Monash University, and School of Policy Studies, Bristol University. He is an active member of the BSA (and helped to found the BSA 'Youth Studies Group') and continues to be Editor in Chief (joint) of the Journal of Youth Studies.