Janet Fink

Biography

I joined the University of Huddersfield as Professor of Childhood and Personal Relationships in November 2014. I began my academic career as a mature student at the University of Essex, where I gained my undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees. Between 1996 and 1998, I was Senior Research Officer at the ESRC Qualitative Data Archival Resource Centre (Qualidata); a post funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to create a National Social Policy and Social Change Archive based at the University of Essex. I had responsibility there for archiving Peter Townsend’s life work, including his seminal studies on poverty, the family life of old people and long-stay institutional care for old people, as well as other ‘classic’ post war sociological studies. From 1999 to 2014, I worked as lecturer and senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The Open University. During this period I led the development of various strands of the undergraduate and postgraduate social policy curriculum, and also held the roles of Associate Dean for Qualifications and Awards and Co-Director of the Families, Relationships and Communities Programme in the University’s Research Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance. My research interests in childhood and personal relationships span the disciplinary boundaries of history, sociology and social policy and have been supported by the British Academy and the ESRC. Most recently I was Co-Principal Investigator on a two-year ESRC funded study, Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century (www.enduringlove.co.uk) and lead Co-Investigator on an ESRC Seminar Series, Visual Dialogues: New Agendas in Inequalities Research (www.visualdialogues.co.uk). These built on and complemented my historical research into the meanings of childhood and ‘troubled’ family relationships through the 20th century and the nature of their representation in feature films, documentaries and photography. They were also informed by my comparative work with Scandinavian colleagues, through which I examined the histories of family policy-making in British, Sweden and Danish welfare states and the gendered legacies and norms that continue to inform policy and practice into the 21st century. Publications based on my historical research cover such issues as teenage girls’ sexuality, children in care, child abduction and child migration, while my research on contemporary Britain has focused on questions of childhood poverty and disadvantage and also the methodological and ethical challenges of such work. My most recent book is Couple Relationships in the 21st Century: Research, Policy and Practice, co-authored with Jacqui Gabb and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.

Research Interest

My research remains focused on childhood and personal relationships, in the recent past and the present day, and is overlaid with questions about research ethics and a commitment to public engagement in the research process. I continue to work with Professor Jacqui Gabb (The Open University) on qualitative data from the Enduring Love? study. We are currently examining how the history of emotions has shaped contemporary understandings of marriage and couple relationships. I am collaborating with Professor Helen Lomax (University of Huddersfield) on research concerned with the ethical dilemmas of working with children and young people using participatory visual research methods and also the methodological challenges of working with ‘found images’ in the media. Using data gathered as part of a project funded by the University of Huddersfield, titled Portraits of School Life, I am exploring the nature of children’s emotional interactions across their schools’ internal and external landscapes.