Professor Karen O'Reilly
biography : publications : workshops & talks : links
Karen O’Reilly is Programme Director for Sociology and a co-founder of Loughborough’s Qualitative Digital Research Lab, The LiQUiD Lab.
Karen is a member of the British Sociological Association Council (2010-14), and the International Assessment Panel of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2010-13). She was on the Sociology panel for the ESRC Major and Minor Recognition Exercises 2005 and 2007. Karen was also a former member of the editorial board of Sociology (2006-9). She has been a visiting academic at City University, Hong Kong (2009), and post-graduate taught programme external examiner at the Universities of Essex, Newcastle and Birmingham.
She has published extensively in the areas of social stratification, tourism, migration and ethnographic methods at both the national and international level.
Research Student Supervision
Karen is happy to supervise research students in the fields of Intra-European migration, children and migration, retirement migration, tourism, community, friends and networks, alternative ways of living and utopias, expatriates, social class and stratification, the housing market and social well-being.
Biography
Having gained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex in 1996, Karen subsequently worked there as a senior research officer until 1999. Between 1999 and 2007 she taught sociology at the University of Aberdeen and lived part-time in Malaga, Spain. She moved to Loughborough University, as Reader in Sociology, in April 2007, where she teaches quantitative methods, the sociology of tourism, and social stratification. Her research interests fall into three broad themes: migration, social class, and ethnographic methods.
Migration
Karen has spent 15 years on and off living amongst and learning from British people who move to Spain in search of a better way of life. Sociologically this has informed an interest in a broad range of themes, including: ethnicity, identity and community; nations and nationalism; home and belonging; social exclusion; the informal economy; tourism-related migration; and friends and networks. The ESRC has funded this research twice, through a studentship (1992-6) and a research grant (2003-6). This research is published in a selection of papers broadly related to migration and the books The British on the Costa del Sol (Routledge, 2000) and Lifestyle Migration (Ashgate, 2009). The research has also generated considerable media interest and has featured on BBC’s Real Story, Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, and mainstream newspaper articles in the UK and Spain. See www.lifestylemigration.net .
Social Class
As Senior Research Officer in the Institute for Social and Economic Research between 1996 and 1999, Karen spent two years as assistant academic convener to the Review of UK Government Social Classifications which led to the production of the new NS-SEC (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/methods_quality/ns_sec/).She then spent one year on an ESRC-funded integrated case study of London, economic competitiveness and social cohesion. Although she considers herself a qualitative researcher, both of these projects involved the quantitative analysis of large data sets. These research projects are published as the The NS-SEC: origins, development and use, Constructing Classes, and Working Capital. More recently Karen has written, with Caroline Oliver, about class reproduction among lifestyle migrants in Spain (published in Sociology).
Ethnography
Karen has a long history of teaching qualitative, especially ethnographic, research methods, including over ten years at the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection; and the Swiss Summer School on Methods in the Social Sciences, in Lugano. Ethnographic Methods was published by Routledge in 2005, and Key Concepts in Ethnography, by Sage in 2009.
Ongoing research- interdisciplinarity, and housing!
Karen continues to prepare publications and research plans in the fields of ethnography and lifestyle migration, and to retain an interest in social class and cohesion more broadly. But she has also published a paper on the implications of interdisciplinarity for sociology, and (with John Bone, Aberdeen University) on the causes and consequences of the UK housing bubble. On this last note, we are currently preparing to undertake a national study of the effects of rising house prices on young people’s lives and career trajectories.