I am a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia. Previously, I completed my ESRC White Rose Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of York's Politics Department. My primary research interests focus on (1) the lived experiences of military families around deployments, (2) welfare policies and militarism, (3) support seeking and stigma, (4) qualitative methodologies, and (5) critical military studies and feminist theory.
My Fellowship was titled ‘Bringing the Homefront to the Forefront: Examining policy through centring lived experiences of military families in welfare provision’. It involved a critical analysis of current military family welfare provision, focusing particularly on military-organised provision. Specifically, my project considered how non-serving army partners are framed within welfare providers' policies and outputs, and how this framing is interpreted and lived by army partners.
This project was a significant extension of my previous work conducted during my PhD at Lancaster University's Sociology Department (2015-2019). Here, I explored army partners' navigation and negotiation of coping strategies after the return of their serving partner from deployment. This included in-depth semi-structured interviews with non-serving army partners and formal support providers. Notably, I found that gendered militarised constructs of role-expectations limited the likelihood of their support seeking when required - particularly affecting perspectives of eligibility for military-organised welfare.
Previously, I worked as a Policy and Research Officer at the Army Families Federation (2019-2020). I have also undertaken various Research Associate/Assistant roles at Lancaster University (Military Lives and Transformative Experiences, Community Vulnerability and Well-being in a Rural Village, and Situational and Structural Risks in Gambling) and the University of Lincoln (Breadwinning Mums, Caregiving Dads: Transforming Gender in Work and Childcare?).
Email: e.huddlestone@uea.ac.uk
Twitter: @emmalong120
Research Website: https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/persons/emma-huddlestone-was-long