Geography

Profile

I joined the Department to work on the Leverhulme funded project ‘Lifestyles, Lifecourse: The Social Context of Household Waste Management’ a project jointly run with Kingston, Exeter and Northampton Universities. The project will explore waste management lifestyles in the UK within the context of both personal life-courses and social context, to assist policy-makers in designing more successful strategies for waste management. My role is to undertake the qualitative aspect of the research which will involve interviewing households to examine their biographies in waste and their current waste practices. I am an experienced researcher who has worked on several projects prior to this including: ‘The Social Technologies of Waste’ as part of the ESRC funded ‘Waste of the World’ programme; ‘Men, Children, Food’ within the Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Changing Families, Changing Food’ programme; and a stand-alone ESRC funded project ‘Disposal, Devaluation and Consumerism’.

I have a range of interests reflected in and generated by this research, including material culture, consumption and waste, food, families and households, and governance and have published widely on these and allied issues in academic and non-academic publications. Prior to research I taught in the Further Education sector before completing my PhD in Sociology at Lancaster University.

Publications:

Owen, J., Metcalfe, A., Dryden, C. and Shipton, G (forthcoming) ‘“If they don’t eat it, it’s not a proper meal”: images of risk and choice in fathers’ accounts of family food practices’. Health, Risk and Society

Metcalfe A., Owen, J, Dryden C and Shipton G (2010) ‘Concrete Chips and Soggy Semolina: Contested Spaces of the School Dining Hall’, Population, Space and Place Published Online: 2 Feb 2010 DOI: 10.1002/psp.612

Metcalfe A., Shipton G, Owen, J, and Dryden C (2010) ‘Dream and Nightmare Lunch-boxes: Playing with Food in Transitional Spaces’ in James A., Kjorholt, A and Tingstad, V. (Eds) Children, Food and Identity in Everyday Life London: MacMillan

Metcalfe A, Dryden C, Johnson, M., Owen, J. and Shipton G (2009) ‘Fathers, Food and Family Life’ in Jackson, P. (Ed) Changing Families, Changing Food London: Palgrave MacMillan

Forero, O, Ellis, K, Metcalfe, A, and Brown, R, (2009) ‘Institutional Dining’ in Jackson, P. (Ed) Changing Families, Changing Food London: Palgrave MacMillan

Crewe, L., Gregson, N. and Metcalfe, A. (2009). The screen and the drum: on form, function, fit and failure in contemporary home consumption. Design and Culture, 1(3), 307-328

Gregson, N., Metcalfe, A. and Crewe, L. (2009) Practices of Object Maintenance and Repair: how consumers attend to consumer objects within the home. Journal of Consumer Culture, 9(2) 248-272

Metcalfe, A, Owen, J, Shipton G, and Dryden C. (2008) ‘Children’s Lunchbox Practices’, Children’s Geographies 6(4) 403-412

Gregson, N, Metcalfe A and Crewe L (2007) Identity, Mobility and the Throwaway Society Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(4) 682 – 700

Gregson, N, Metcalfe A and Crewe L (2007) Moving Things Along: The conduits and practices of divestment in consumption. Transaction of the Institute of British Geographers 32(2), 187-200

Metcalfe, A (2006) ‘It was the Right Time to do it’, Moving House, the Life-Course and Kairos, Mobilities. 1 (2) 243-260.

Cwerner, S and Metcalfe A (2003) Storage and Clutter: Discourses and Practices of Order in the Domestic World, Journal of Design History. 16 (3) 229-240

Non-academic publications (Article)

Chartered Institution of Wastes Management Magazine (June 2010) ‘Incineration Transformation’ 2000 word article and two maps

Times Higher Educational Supplement (2006) Men, Children and Food project