Ellie Lee
Dr Ellie Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of Kent. She researches, publishes and teaches in the areas of the sociology of reproduction, of health, and of the family. Her longest standing research area is abortion policy and service provision. She has published works including Abortion Law and Politics Today (Macmillan 1998) and Abortion, Motherhood and Mental Health (Aldine Transaction 2003), and more recently has worked on influential studies about the provision of 'late' abortion and early medical abortion. Since 2004 she has also developed research projects about motherhood (specifically feeding babies) and parenthood (the contemporary medicalisation of motherhood and fatherhood). With Frank Furedi, she set up Parenting Culture Studies at Kent University in 2007 and in her spare time she co-ordinates Pro-Choice Forum

Emma Head
Dr Emma Head is a lecturer in Sociology at Keele University. Her research interests are in the sociology of the family, particularly in motherhood and parenting. She completed her PhD 'Caring and paid work in the lives of lone mothers' at the University of Bristol in 2005 and took up an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leeds. Emma has recently written on infants and sleep and is currently developing a research project on attachment parenting in Britain.

Charlotte Faircloth

Charlotte Faircloth is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work looks at women's experiences of 'full-term' breastfeeding and attachment parenting in London and Paris. She is interested in the congruence between a wider culture of 'intensive mothering' and attachment parenting; notions of body, gender and equality in care-giving and its implication for other relationships; and more broadly in knowledge claims surrounding 'natural' or 'scientifically best' forms of care.

Pam Lowe

Dr Pam Lowe is a lecturer in Sociology at Aston University. Her main research area is centred around women’s reproductive health, with a particular interest in pregnancy and contraception. She is currently working on a number of projects including examining the construction of foetal alcohol syndrome in British newspapers with Ellie Lee.

Lisa Smyth

Dr Lisa Smyth is a lecturer in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast, where she teaches modules on gender, culture, and reproduction. Her research interests are in the fields of gender and reproduction, gendered national/cultural identities, moral politics, feminism and intimate citizenship. Her book Abortion & Nation: the Politics of Reproduction in Contemporary Ireland, was published by Ashgate in 2005, and examines the shifting dynamics of abortion politics in the Republic of Ireland since the early 1980s. She has also published work on the cultural politics of sex education and abortion debates in Northern Ireland, as well as on pro-breastfeeding campaigns. She is currently working on the moral grammar of reproduction for women (forthcoming 2010 Women and Reproduction: Society, Morality and Recognition Palgrave Macmillan) and is planning work, with Martina McKnight, on everyday life for mothers in post-conflict Belfast, as part of a large ESRC-funded project on Conflict in Cities and the Contested State, a collaboration between Queen’s, Exeter and Cambridge Universities.

Esther Dermott

Dr Esther Dermott’s research on parenting culture focuses on fatherhood. She is interested both in the forms of involvement which men in the UK adopt as their fathering practices alongside the cultural ideas of fatherhood that they express. This has led to an interest in the negotiation of time and issues of work-life balance. Her recent book Intimate Fatherhood (Routledge 2008) argues that recognising the centrality of an emotionally expressive father-child relationship and flexible time use can help to overcome some apparent paradoxes between the culture and conduct of contemporary fatherhood. She has been involved in both qualitative and quantitative research projects, including interviewing fathers about their experiences and attitudes, exploring the effect of fatherhood on men’s employment and, previously, examining lesbian and gay parenting.

Lesley Hoggart

Lesley Hoggart is a Senior Research Fellow at the Policy Studies Institute. She specialises in qualitative research, and works mainly within PSI’s children, young people and families’ research strand. Her research interests span employment and family policies and are focused on lone parents, young mothers, teenage pregnancy and sexual health. Her publications include: Feminist Campaigns for Birth Control and Abortion Rights in Britain, (The Edwin Mellen Press 2002); ‘Risk: Young Women and Sexual Decision-Making’ in Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research (2006); Hoggart, L. and Vegeris, S. (2008) ‘Lone parents and the challenge to make work pay’. In J. Strelitz and R. Lister, Why Money Matters. (2008 Save the Children); ‘Young women, sexual behaviour and sexual decision-making’ in eds. Thom, B., Sales, R. and J. Pearce, Growing Up with Risk, (2007 The Policy Press) ‘Sexual Health’ in International Encyclopedia of Social Policy, eds. Fitzpatrick, T., Kwon, H., Manning, N., Midgley, J. and Pascall, G. (2006 Routledge).

Geraldine Brady

Dr Geraldine Brady’s primary research interest is in the relationship between dominant professional and public discourses, wider policy agendas and lay perspectives; reproduction and parenting has been a substantive area of research since 2004, in particular, a range of research and evaluation projects exploring aspects of support for pregnant teenagers and young parents. This research has focused on the barriers to social inclusion faced by young parents, stigma and discrimination, access to ante and postnatal health care, and housing; experiences of termination or miscarriage; issues of power, control and abuse in relationships; the needs and experiences of ‘young’ fathers. This work has allowed for the development of inclusive and participatory methods and given rise to research accounts which reflect on the relationships between research, policy and practice. Her doctoral thesis (2005) explored experiential accounts of the medically diagnosed condition of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), from the perspective of children, young people and their parents. She has been a member of the British Sociological Association since 1994 and currently convenes the West Midlands Medical Sociology Group. She is also a member of the Association for Research on Mothering. Geraldine has two publications forthcoming (written with colleagues from Coventry and Plymouth Universities), both relate to reproduction and parenting (see link for details).

Janice McLaughlin

Dr Janice McLaughlin is Executive Director of the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Centre and Reader in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University . Her work explores the interrelationships between disability, genetics, family, kinship and broader social, medical and cultural norms. Her most recent book, with Dan Goodley, Emma Clavering and Pamela Fisher, published by Palgrave is titled: Families Raising Disabled Children: Enabling Care and Social Justice.

Jan Macvarish

Dr Jan Macvarish is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Kent. Her interests lie in the sociology of interpersonal relationships, parenting, family life, sex and intimacy. Her doctoral thesis (2007), entitled The New Single Woman: Contextualising Individual Choice, explored the construction of contemporary singleness through qualitative interviewing of single, childless women and cultural analysis of the new ‘culture of singleness’. She is particularly interested in questions of risk culture, de-moralisation and individualisation but is also concerned with policy developments. Through her involvement in a study of teenage parents, she was able critically to explore the relationship between the lived experience of young parenthood and way in which parents and their children are constructed and related to through policy and cultural frameworks.

Frank Furedi

Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His research is oriented towards the study of the workings of precautionary culture and risk aversion in Western societies. In his books he has explored controversies and panics over issues such as health, children, food, new technology and terrorism. His book on contemporary parenting culture, Paranoid Parenting (2001) has been translated into French, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch and a new edition is about to be published. Frank was co-author, with Jennie Bristow, of Licensed to Hug (2008), a critique of the damaging effect of the culture of ‘vetting’ on relationships between adults and children.
http://www.frankfuredi.com/

Jennie Bristow

Jennie Bristow is a journalist and researcher specialising in parenting and inter-generational issues. She is author, with Frank Furedi, of 'Licensed to Hug' (Civitas 2008), a critique of the national vetting scheme, and author of 'Maybe I do? Marriage and commitment in singleton society' (Academy of Ideas 2002). She writes the monthly column 'Guide to Subversive Parenting' on the website spiked, and is a frequent discussant on Radio Four's 'Woman's Hour'. Jennie runs the website Parents With Attitude , and is editor of the BPAS journal Abortion Review.