The research team
Professor Sarah Neal
University of Sheffield
Sarah is the Principle Investigator on the project. Sarah is based in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Sarah's key areas of research are: everyday social life in urban and rural environments; ethnicity, multiculture, race and migration; community, belonging and place; leisure practices, inequalities and urban and rural greenspace; education, citizenship and school worlds and the politics of Brexit and identity. Sarah primarily focuses on people's experiences and perspectives of social life and the places they live in and she has expereince of using qualitative research methods to listen to these. Sarah has been involved in a range of social research projects in rural and urban settings and she has published a range of books and journal articles from these.
Dr. Anna Gawlewicz
University of Glasgow
Anna is a Co-Investigator on the project. Anna is based in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Her work focuses on migration-driven urban and rural diversities, encounters between migrant and long-settled populations, and everyday responses to increasingly hostile immigration regimes. She is particularly interested in Polish and Central and East European migrations to the UK. Alongside researching rural communities and Brexit, she is currently working on the UKRI/ESRC-funded project exploring the impacts of Covid-19 on migrant essential workers in the UK. Recently, she completed the Urban Studies Foundation-funded fellowship looking at migration and Brexit in the East End of Glasgow. She is a qualitative researcher with an interest in reflexive and intersectional methodologies and issues surrounding researcher positionality and translation of data.
Dr. Rhys Dafydd Jones
Aberystwyth University
Rhys is a Co-Investigator on the project. Rhys is a social geographer at Aberystwyth University. His research interests are around migration, religion, and diversity in rural regions. He has worked on a number of rural projects including an exploration of everyday lives and place-making activities of Muslim people living in western Wales and looking at European migrants’ contributions to civil society. This project also ended up focussing on the unsettling experiences associated with the uncertainty and hostility associated with Brexit, as the referendum campaign began as data began to be collected. Rhys continued with research on this field as part of the Horizon2020 IMAJINE project (2017-2022), which examined the experiences of people moving to and continuing to live in the ‘less-popular’ region of West Wales and the Valleys.
Dr. Jesse Heley
Aberystwyth University
Jesse is a Co-Investigator on the project. Jesse is based in the department of Human Geography at Aberystwyth University and his research is situated within the broad fields of regional governance and community studies, being particularly concerned with processes of rural restructuring, volunteering and identity politics in the countryside. He also has a longstanding interest in the challenges and opportunities for exploring rural community change, and particularly in respect to ethnography and the concept of rural assemblages. He has published extensively on these themes and is a theme leader in the ESRC WISERD Civil Society Research Centre.
Dr. Kelsey Weber-Lawson
University of Sheffield
Kelsey is the Research Associate on the project. She joined the Department of Sociological Studies at Sheffield in 2024, having previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Roehampton in the anthropology department (2023-2024). Kelsey is broadly interested in entanglements of belonging, affect, and the body, especially among minority communities and within Central/Eastern Europe. She completed her PhD in Anthropology at UCL and successfully passed her viva in 2023.
The research team are supported by the expertise and experience of the Project Advisory Group (PAG). Names and organisations of the members can be found here.