Simon Bradford
Biographic Data
| ID | 297893 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Bradford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Bradford |
| SIGNATURE | BRADFORD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brunel University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9980-7637 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
No Migration, No Gender, No War: Contradictions and Paradox in Hungarian Migration Discourse
The Hungarian Government’s long -standing politicisation of migration has recently become more complex. Two factors are particularly important here. First, following Russia’s war on Ukraine, over 60,000 refugees have arrived in Hungary seeking temporary protection. Second, Hungary’s FDI -based growth model and the country’s integration into global value -chains has exposed serious labour shortages. Hungary’s prime minister recently indicated the …
Other lives: Relationships of young disabled men on the margins of alternative provision
This article draws on a qualitative data analysis of the experiences of a small group of so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ disabled young men in Alternative Provisions (APs). Supporting young people has largely focused on the use of professional interventions. We contrast the young men’s experiences of professional service interventions with the complementary functions of social and psychological capital embedded in their own friendship networks. The you…
The Advantages of Chaos: Myth-Making and Covid-19 in Hungary
The COVID -19 pandemic has created new opportunities and challenges for populist regimes. A growing body of work has explored the formation of populist and nationalist political reactions in the wake of a global health crisis. This article explores myth-making and the Covid 19 pandemic in populist Hungary. We identify pandemic ‘mythogenic’ narratives that reconfigure and replay older ethno-nationalist myths, those of the ‘polluting’ alien Other ,…
Alternative spaces of failure. Disabled ‘bad boys’ in alternative further education provision
This article draws from an ethnographic study of a group of school-aged disabled white working-class and self-proclaimed ‘bad boys’ in one Alternative Provision (AP) in an English further education college. These young disabled students’ disabilities contribute to the formation of their revalorised – yet stigmatised – identities. Stigma also facilitates the governance of their educational careers. The article considers how this group understands …
Fearsome people and places, narratives of street and hideout children in Freetown, Sierra Leone
This article is based on a GOAL Global field study of street children in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It draws on narrative accounts given by street children who have migrated to Freetown from rural Sierra Leone. The study used the participatory ranking method to generate data about children’s street and hideout (a room, shack or part of a building where children live in groups) lives post-migration. These data contained much about children’s fears, a…
Positive for youth work? Contested terrains of professional youth work in austerity England
This article considers professional youth work in England. It reflects on youth work's persistently anomalous position in the division of labour. Since their achievement of a contested professional status in the 1960s and 1970s, youth workers have pursued an occupational ideology that draws principally on a romantic humanism. Until recently, this provided a relatively stable basis to their practices. Under a dominant contemporary neo-liberalism, …
Youth policy in austerity Europe
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth explores the condition of European youth policy in the context of austerity. It includes contributions from nine countries w
Strangers on the Shore: Sub-Saharan African "Irregular" Migrants in Malta
This article explores narratives of strangerhood given by young migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (some arriving without documentation and in noncompliance with immigration laws) living in Malta. The article draws on Simmel's positioning of the stranger as both proximate and distant—and, therefore, in ambiguous social space—and on Douglas's work on pollution. Migrants’ understandings of their experience from positions of strangerhood in a society …
Introduction for Special Section of Sociological Research Online: Modern Girlhoods
[No abstract]
Stigma Narratives: LGBT Transitions and Identities in Malta
This article considers narratives of transition experiences of a group of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) young people in Malta. The article draws on Goffman's concept of stigma and uses this to explore transitions in a society that retains some traditional characteristics, particularly the code of honour and shame, although mediated by aspects of modernity. Interviews were undertaken with 15 young people with the goal of producing …
The ‘Good Youth Leader’: Constructions of Professionalism in English Youth Work, 1939–45
This article explores the development of professional training for youth leaders (now, youth workers) in England and Wales between 1939 and 1945. The article identifies the state's construction of young people as a problematic social category at a time of national crisis and its mobilization of youth leadership as part of the war effort. The Board of Education supported, sometimes tacitly, the development of courses in some universities and volun…
Successful subjectivities? The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions
This article draws on data collected during a pilot study conducted in two west London schools exploring young people’s understandings of success. It considers ways in which ‘discourses of success’, as part of New Labour’s project of re‐inventing schooling, may shape young people’s subjectivity. The article examines articulations between New Labour policy and aspects of social difference and how these structure new identifications with success. I…
Corporeal Controls: Violence, Bodies, and Young Gay Men's Identities
This article explores the experiences of gay and bisexual young men in Ireland. It draws on focus groups and individual interviews with a group of gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 25 in Dublin. The article explores how their identities are 'discredited' and 'othered' through symbolic and material violence, and their bodies become an index in both maintaining and transgressing normative masculine identities. Gay and bisexual young men are stigmatiz…
Discourses of Partnership in Multi-Agency Working in the Community and Voluntary Sectors in Ireland
This article suggests that practices of partnership in multi-agency working in the community and voluntary sectors in Ireland have not been adequately problematised. In the article, the experiences and understandings of professional youth and community workers engaged in multi-agency work are explored through a series of interviews. Analysis of their responses indicates that there is a range of unexplored issues in relation to ‘partnership’ disco…
Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity, Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground
This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces fo…
The return of the repressed: The gender politics of emergent forms of professionalism in education
Three distinct discourses frame this paper: ‘new public managerialism’, new modes of governmentality, and new masculinities and femininities. This paper considers the changing forms of governance in projects of educational professionalism emerging in the nested contexts of teaching, teacher training, and academic research within departments of education. It takes the production of the subject position of the manager/wo‐manager as central to manag…
Disciplining Practices: New Ways of Making Youth Workers Accountable
Until recently, youth work has been seen as an ‘indeterminate’ educational practice, often focused on ‘process’ rather than ‘outcome’. Trends in the managerialisation of professional work in the public services have meant that an instrumental accountability has been increasingly sought by policy-makers and funders. This article explores shifting practices of accountability in youth services. It argues that new practices embody forms of power whic…
Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity, Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground
This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces fo…
The return of the repressed: The gender politics of emergent forms of professionalism in education
Three distinct discourses frame this paper: ‘new public managerialism’, new modes of governmentality, and new masculinities and femininities. This paper considers the changing forms of governance in projects of educational professionalism emerging in the nested contexts of teaching, teacher training, and academic research within departments of education. It takes the production of the subject position of the manager/wo‐manager as central to manag…
Successful subjectivities? The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions
This article draws on data collected during a pilot study conducted in two west London schools exploring young people’s understandings of success. It considers ways in which ‘discourses of success’, as part of New Labour’s project of re‐inventing schooling, may shape young people’s subjectivity. The article examines articulations between New Labour policy and aspects of social difference and how these structure new identifications with success. I…
Corporeal Controls: Violence, Bodies, and Young Gay Men's Identities
This article explores the experiences of gay and bisexual young men in Ireland. It draws on focus groups and individual interviews with a group of gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 25 in Dublin. The article explores how their identities are 'discredited' and 'othered' through symbolic and material violence, and their bodies become an index in both maintaining and transgressing normative masculine identities. Gay and bisexual young men are stigmatiz…
Alternative spaces of failure. Disabled ‘bad boys’ in alternative further education provision
This article draws from an ethnographic study of a group of school-aged disabled white working-class and self-proclaimed ‘bad boys’ in one Alternative Provision (AP) in an English further education college. These young disabled students’ disabilities contribute to the formation of their revalorised – yet stigmatised – identities. Stigma also facilitates the governance of their educational careers. The article considers how this group understands …
The Advantages of Chaos: Myth-Making and Covid-19 in Hungary
The COVID -19 pandemic has created new opportunities and challenges for populist regimes. A growing body of work has explored the formation of populist and nationalist political reactions in the wake of a global health crisis. This article explores myth-making and the Covid 19 pandemic in populist Hungary. We identify pandemic ‘mythogenic’ narratives that reconfigure and replay older ethno-nationalist myths, those of the ‘polluting’ alien Other ,…
Strangers on the Shore: Sub-Saharan African "Irregular" Migrants in Malta
This article explores narratives of strangerhood given by young migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (some arriving without documentation and in noncompliance with immigration laws) living in Malta. The article draws on Simmel's positioning of the stranger as both proximate and distant—and, therefore, in ambiguous social space—and on Douglas's work on pollution. Migrants’ understandings of their experience from positions of strangerhood in a society …
The ‘Good Youth Leader’: Constructions of Professionalism in English Youth Work, 1939–45
This article explores the development of professional training for youth leaders (now, youth workers) in England and Wales between 1939 and 1945. The article identifies the state's construction of young people as a problematic social category at a time of national crisis and its mobilization of youth leadership as part of the war effort. The Board of Education supported, sometimes tacitly, the development of courses in some universities and volun…
Other lives: Relationships of young disabled men on the margins of alternative provision
This article draws on a qualitative data analysis of the experiences of a small group of so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ disabled young men in Alternative Provisions (APs). Supporting young people has largely focused on the use of professional interventions. We contrast the young men’s experiences of professional service interventions with the complementary functions of social and psychological capital embedded in their own friendship networks. The you…
Disciplining Practices: New Ways of Making Youth Workers Accountable
Until recently, youth work has been seen as an ‘indeterminate’ educational practice, often focused on ‘process’ rather than ‘outcome’. Trends in the managerialisation of professional work in the public services have meant that an instrumental accountability has been increasingly sought by policy-makers and funders. This article explores shifting practices of accountability in youth services. It argues that new practices embody forms of power whic…
The return of the repressed: The gender politics of emergent forms of professionalism in education
Three distinct discourses frame this paper: ‘new public managerialism’, new modes of governmentality, and new masculinities and femininities. This paper considers the changing forms of governance in projects of educational professionalism emerging in the nested contexts of teaching, teacher training, and academic research within departments of education. It takes the production of the subject position of the manager/wo‐manager as central to manag…
Discourses of Partnership in Multi-Agency Working in the Community and Voluntary Sectors in Ireland
This article suggests that practices of partnership in multi-agency working in the community and voluntary sectors in Ireland have not been adequately problematised. In the article, the experiences and understandings of professional youth and community workers engaged in multi-agency work are explored through a series of interviews. Analysis of their responses indicates that there is a range of unexplored issues in relation to ‘partnership’ disco…
Hanging out in Runescape’: Identity, Work and Leisure in the Virtual Playground
This article explores young people's practices in the virtual spaces of online gaming communities. Based on a three-year field-study of virtual worlds, it considers how young people construct and maintain identities within virtual social systems. The article discusses the relationship between the material and virtual aspects of young people's leisure. It suggests that the boundaries between these domains are porous. Virtual worlds offer spaces fo…
The ‘Good Youth Leader’: Constructions of Professionalism in English Youth Work, 1939–45
This article explores the development of professional training for youth leaders (now, youth workers) in England and Wales between 1939 and 1945. The article identifies the state's construction of young people as a problematic social category at a time of national crisis and its mobilization of youth leadership as part of the war effort. The Board of Education supported, sometimes tacitly, the development of courses in some universities and volun…
Successful subjectivities? The successification of class, ethnic and gender positions
This article draws on data collected during a pilot study conducted in two west London schools exploring young people’s understandings of success. It considers ways in which ‘discourses of success’, as part of New Labour’s project of re‐inventing schooling, may shape young people’s subjectivity. The article examines articulations between New Labour policy and aspects of social difference and how these structure new identifications with success. I…
Corporeal Controls: Violence, Bodies, and Young Gay Men's Identities
This article explores the experiences of gay and bisexual young men in Ireland. It draws on focus groups and individual interviews with a group of gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 25 in Dublin. The article explores how their identities are 'discredited' and 'othered' through symbolic and material violence, and their bodies become an index in both maintaining and transgressing normative masculine identities. Gay and bisexual young men are stigmatiz…
Stigma Narratives: LGBT Transitions and Identities in Malta
This article considers narratives of transition experiences of a group of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) young people in Malta. The article draws on Goffman's concept of stigma and uses this to explore transitions in a society that retains some traditional characteristics, particularly the code of honour and shame, although mediated by aspects of modernity. Interviews were undertaken with 15 young people with the goal of producing …
Introduction for Special Section of Sociological Research Online: Modern Girlhoods
[No abstract]
Positive for youth work? Contested terrains of professional youth work in austerity England
This article considers professional youth work in England. It reflects on youth work's persistently anomalous position in the division of labour. Since their achievement of a contested professional status in the 1960s and 1970s, youth workers have pursued an occupational ideology that draws principally on a romantic humanism. Until recently, this provided a relatively stable basis to their practices. Under a dominant contemporary neo-liberalism, …
Youth policy in austerity Europe
This Special Issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth explores the condition of European youth policy in the context of austerity. It includes contributions from nine countries w
Strangers on the Shore: Sub-Saharan African "Irregular" Migrants in Malta
This article explores narratives of strangerhood given by young migrants from sub-Saharan Africa (some arriving without documentation and in noncompliance with immigration laws) living in Malta. The article draws on Simmel's positioning of the stranger as both proximate and distant—and, therefore, in ambiguous social space—and on Douglas's work on pollution. Migrants’ understandings of their experience from positions of strangerhood in a society …
Fearsome people and places, narratives of street and hideout children in Freetown, Sierra Leone
This article is based on a GOAL Global field study of street children in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It draws on narrative accounts given by street children who have migrated to Freetown from rural Sierra Leone. The study used the participatory ranking method to generate data about children’s street and hideout (a room, shack or part of a building where children live in groups) lives post-migration. These data contained much about children’s fears, a…
Alternative spaces of failure. Disabled ‘bad boys’ in alternative further education provision
This article draws from an ethnographic study of a group of school-aged disabled white working-class and self-proclaimed ‘bad boys’ in one Alternative Provision (AP) in an English further education college. These young disabled students’ disabilities contribute to the formation of their revalorised – yet stigmatised – identities. Stigma also facilitates the governance of their educational careers. The article considers how this group understands …
The Advantages of Chaos: Myth-Making and Covid-19 in Hungary
The COVID -19 pandemic has created new opportunities and challenges for populist regimes. A growing body of work has explored the formation of populist and nationalist political reactions in the wake of a global health crisis. This article explores myth-making and the Covid 19 pandemic in populist Hungary. We identify pandemic ‘mythogenic’ narratives that reconfigure and replay older ethno-nationalist myths, those of the ‘polluting’ alien Other ,…
Other lives: Relationships of young disabled men on the margins of alternative provision
This article draws on a qualitative data analysis of the experiences of a small group of so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ disabled young men in Alternative Provisions (APs). Supporting young people has largely focused on the use of professional interventions. We contrast the young men’s experiences of professional service interventions with the complementary functions of social and psychological capital embedded in their own friendship networks. The you…
No Migration, No Gender, No War: Contradictions and Paradox in Hungarian Migration Discourse
The Hungarian Government’s long -standing politicisation of migration has recently become more complex. Two factors are particularly important here. First, following Russia’s war on Ukraine, over 60,000 refugees have arrived in Hungary seeking temporary protection. Second, Hungary’s FDI -based growth model and the country’s integration into global value -chains has exposed serious labour shortages. Hungary’s prime minister recently indicated the …
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (14 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)