Research Overview

My teaching and research are interdisciplinary, working across sociology, media and cultural studies, and gender studies. My research focuses on issues of inequality, and the overarching themes of my research are around institutions and power. I consider how inequalities are represented in media culture, and the systemic relations between media culture and political and economic formations of inequality. My research has two strands: 1) the cultural politics of the British monarchy and the aristocracy; 2) cultures of digital hate.

1) The cultural politics of the British monarchy and the aristocracy

My first monograph, Running the Family Firm: how the royal family manages its image and our money, was published with Manchester University Press in 2021.This analyses the contemporary British monarchy (1953-present) in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies - the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle - it contends that The Firm's power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. The book was shortlisted for the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best sole, first-authored book. My second book, What is the Monarchy For? will be published with Bristol University Press in 2025. This public-facing book breaks longstanding myths around the monarchy to demystify and evaluate its place in the world today, and makes the case that social justice movements need to include abolishing the monarchy.

My current research is focusing on sociological understandings of the British country house in the context of an urbanised, corporatised world. Country houses are assumed to be crumbling, nostalgic edifices with no relevance to contemporary formations of elite wealth, but in fact, they have been remarkably resilient, adapting and diversifying to keep up with contemporary markets (e.g. with safari parks, hosting weddings and television productions, running popular social media accounts). The project is interested in the survival of these properties and the economic, social and cultural means through which estates are remade.

2) Cultures of digital hate

This project focuses on academics who, encouraged by their employers to have a visible, public profile to disseminate research, might find themselves subject to online abuse, harassment and/or misrepresentation. We illuminate the ways that the risks of visibility are unequally distributed and how digital hate functions to keep certain voices out of public debate. We have developed resources, and are developing training, to improve institutional support within the higher education sector, and lobby the sector to take this seriously as an issue of workplace health and safety. You can read two journal articles from our project here and here, and resources are available on our website https://culturesdigitalhate.wordpress.com/

I was shortlisted for the AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers Scheme 2023.

My writing and research has been featured in international media outlets, such as BBC Newsnight, The New York Times, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, BBC2, BBC News, BBC Radio 4, Novara Media, ABC Australia, BBC 5 Live, Sky News, NBC News, CNN, France24, the Washington Post, Red Pepper, Tribune, openDemocracy, the Independent, the i, the Sunday Times, the Australian, Al Jazeera, La Figaro, Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo Chunichi Shimbun, Tortoise Media, South China Morning Post.

I am Co-Editor of the Routledge Transformations series, and on the Editorial Board for Cultural Sociology.

You can find more information about my research on my website https://laura-clancy.com/