Simon Stewart
Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change
Simon Stewart is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for European and International Studies Research at University of Portsmouth, UK. He is the Principal Investigator on the ESRC/UKRI funded project, 'Homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic: homeless migrants in a global crisis'. Before arriving at Portsmouth in 2008, he worked as a Fellow in the department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He completed his doctorate at University of Sussex (2006), where he also taught a wide range of courses. Prior to that, he was awarded a Master of Arts degree in Postmodernism, Literature and Contemporary Culture (1996, Royal Holloway), and a Bachelor of Science degree in Sociology (1995, Portsmouth). In 2015 and 2017, Simon was the external examiner for PhDs at La Trobe University (Australia).
Simon's research expertise has two main strands: first, his research on migrant homelessness, which is informing policy in the sector. Second, as a cultural sociologist, he has longstanding expertise in the sociology of evaluative judgements and taste, i.e. examining how and on what basis people make aesthetic and ethical judgements and how these judgements play out over time.
Simon is the author of Culture and the Middle Classes (Ashgate, 2010). His second single-authored monograph, A Sociology of Culture, Taste and Value (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), explores sociological debates in relation to culture, taste and value.