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London Social Science
Students Entering 1 October 2011
Claude Jousselin
Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths
Research title: Remembering turbulent times: accounting for Adult ADHD through the reconstruction of childhood.
Claude Jousselin obtained an MA in Anthropology of Health at Goldsmiths in 2010. He works and lives in London. In collaboration with a national patient organisation, Claude’s research will explore the role and influence of clinicians, scientists and patients in constructing legitimate medical evidence of an emerging disorder in the UK. This will involve contrasting narratives of past symptoms constructed through the diagnostic process with life stories and exploring how the development of alternative forms of diagnostic tools through imaging, may obviate the need for life reconstruction.
David Moats
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths 
David Moats completed his BA at UCL in History of Art and his MSc at LSE in Sociology. He has worked as a researcher for an architecture firm and as a film and music journalist and editor. David's research focuses on how public opinion is formed on the internet – specifically how key 'facts' may be disseminated, shaped, manipulated or suppressed by various interests on platforms like Wikipedia. He will be employing large scale quantitative techniques in conjunction with small scale, Actor-Network Theory style ethnography and hopes to develop new web-based software tools and techniques to facilitate future research.
Emma Hunt
Department of Geography, Queen Mary
Emma Hunt graduated in 2010 with a BA in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently completing her MRes year in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Her PhD research will look at urban agricultural projects in Detroit, Michigan; environmental justice, the politics of public space, and emerging discourses of sustainability. Interests include land and property rights, economic anthropology, food security, participatory mapping, and a focus on anarchist, feminist and queer approaches to social research. Keywords: urban farming, food deserts, food security, environmental justice, public space, future cities, sustainability, Detroit
James Scott
Department of Geography, Queen Mary 
After studying Human Geography at the University of Liverpool and Development Studies at the University of Manchester, James Scott spent two years as a management trainee with Greenwich Council, focusing on housing regeneration, internal corporate affairs and local political engagement. His PhD will examine emerging forms of communitarianism within the Labour Party, and in doing so attempt to locate these developments within the history of the British labour movement and trade unionism, highlight their significance for wider debates about the nature of good governance, and document the impact that new community organising techniques are having on the ground.
Maja Rodic
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths 
Maja Rodic was awarded a BSc Psychology degree from Birkbeck College, University of London 2009 and a MSc Research Methods in Psychology from Goldsmiths 2011. The principal goal of her PhD research will be to increase the knowledge of the links between early (untaught) numerical development and later (taught) mathematical skills, and to identify factors that contribute to individual and cross-cultural differences in numerical ability, mathematical ability, motivation, and achievement. She has also been involved in studies which compared children across two genetic disorders, Down and Williams syndrome on numerical ability and face processing at the CBCD, Birkbeck College.
Mark Hanna
Department of Law, Queen Mary
LLB (Essex); PGCE (Huddersfield); LLM, Public International Law (Leiden); Attorney-at-law (New York).
Mark’s thesis focuses upon public international law as an evolving legal system of a complex global society. His research applies sociological theory (in particular the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann) in critical assessment of the fragmentation and specialisation of international law in a world of increasing integration and complexity. In highlighting the difficult questions global society asks of the international legal system, and considering some practical mitigation of the problem, his thesis will explore whether institutions of global civil society and democracy beyond the unit of state offer any potential means for promoting the viability and social relevance of the international legal system.
Mark Rainey
Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths
Mark Rainey’s research aims to construct a notion of urban justice that provides methodological and thematic significance for the use of post-Euclidean modelling within urban planning. In particular, it seeks to do so with reference to the London Plan and the work of spatial planners developing models at different scales. He also intends to draw on the work of Alain Badiou and Walter Benjamin, as well as recent utopic formulations, to provide a theoretical notion of urban justice that is responsive to the post-Euclidean modelling of cities.
Panagiotis Papaeconomou
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths
Panagiotis Papaeconomou holds a 4 year BA in Human Development (honours in Psychology), an MSc Research Methods in Psychology from the University College London, and an MPhil in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh. His MSc thesis dealt with methodological developments in measuring risk perception and his MPhil thesis explored individual differences in instance-based decision making under risk and uncertainty. His PhD research aims to examine how affect, personality, and genetic endowment predict risk-taking behaviour in lab based and real world financial transactions.
Keywords: Anomalies in economic behaviour, behavioural economics, bounded rationality, cognitive bias, consumer behaviour, decision theory, formal rationality, framing, heuristics and biases, prospect theory, loss aversion, risky choice, intertemporal choice theory, present bias, time inconsistency and procrastination, risk preferences, risk perception, substantive rationality, reinforcement sensitivity theory, emotional processing, risk as feelings, uncertainty.
Classification of interests: Individual differences and financial decision-making under risk and uncertainty, learning and social influence in financial transactions, descriptive models of human decision behaviour, relation of behavioural economics to other disciplines and how they can inform public and economic policy, information security.
Sofia Gradin
Department of Politics, Queen Mary 
Sofia Gradin has a BA in International Relations from the University of the West of England and an MSc in International Development from the University of Bristol. Her PhD research focuses on British organisations that import products from the developing world as a form of ‘D.I.Y.’ political activism against global poverty and inequality. The aim is to explore how and to what extent the developed world’s importing practices could prevent poverty at the root by shifting value-added tasks to the South and promoting value chain upgrade, organising democratically, and replacing private profit with collective long-term gain.
William Wheeler
Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths
William Wheeler completed his BA at Oxford and his MA at The School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. His research concerns social memory in the Aral Sea region of Kazakhstan, the site of a major ecological catastrophe stemming from Soviet irrigation policies. In particular, William is interested in the intersection of local memory formation at individual and group level, and post-Soviet state discourse - in which Aral continues to occupy a peripheral space. William has spent a total of eighteen months living in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. He speaks Russian and is currently learning Kazakh.