Robin James Smith

Biography

Robin has been an active member of the School of Social Sciences, notably the Ethnography, Culture, and Interpretive Analysis research group, since his postgraduate training at Cardiff University and has taught on several modules including Introduction to Anthropology, Sociology of Culture, Power, Culture, and Identity and Advanced Qualitative Methods for the MSc SSRM program delivered by the Research and Graduate School in the Social Sciences, Cardiff University.

Research Interests

Robin’s central interests are the documentation and analysis of the everyday life of the city and areas of urban regeneration. He is informed by Symbolic Interactionist and Ethnomethodological understandings of social order and organisation; in particular Goffman’s notion of ‘interaction order’ and his spatial concepts of frames, setting, and region. Substantively his research interests coalesce around empirical concerns with the everyday organisation of urban spaces and street-level practice. His research interests are summarised below:

•The ordering of public space
•Identity, interaction, accounts
•Spatial and mobile practice
•Sociology as social practice
•Urban theory
•Membership Categorisation Analysis
•Ethnography

Current Research

Current research involves the ethnographic documentation of urban street based professionals whose roles are understood as mobile and spatial practices that relate to forms of ‘care and repair’ (both material and social) in the city centre. Working with Dr. Tom Hall as part of a series of qualitative projects designed to investigate the production and application of local knowledge in context; the program of fieldwork involves participant observation with a range of diverse patrols such as outreach services attending to vulnerable adults (rough sleepers, street drinkers, sex workers) street cleansing crews, and Police Community Support Officers.

The analysis focuses upon the practices employed by various patrols and how each involves a form of knowledge of the city centre produced by sustained and routine engagement with it. In documenting and analyzing spatial practices he uses traditional ethnographic methods alongside visual analysis and contemporary GIS/GPS techniques and seeks to provide a critical commentary on mixed-method approaches to understanding and representing practices associated with the provision of welfare to, and regulation of, vulnerable and problematic street populations.

PhD Thesis: ‘The Social Actor in the Landscapes of Regeneration?’ (Cardiff University: 2009)

Robin’s doctoral research entailed an Interactionist analysis of the regenerated landscape of Cardiff Bay. The research employed ethnographic methods alongside visual analysis and photo-elicitation interviews that were then analysed using a combination of membership categorisation and frame analysis. The thesis focused on the construction and replication of the ‘smooth narrative’ of regeneration and the identification of common sense geographies within the sociological contours of ‘Cardiff Bay’.