Visiting Researchers

Martin graduated with a MSc degree in Social and Cultural Theory from Bristol University in 2012 and received a PhD in Sociology from Tallinn University in 2018.

Since February 2020, he is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow from the Estonian Science Agency at the University of Nottingham. He has professional experience in Social Theory, Basic Income Studies, Utopian Studies and Sociology of Higher Education. 

His work in Nottingham focuses on the relation between the university and public sociology, which emphasises the university as a public site for the practice of public sociology. Martin is interested in how public sociology can make a difference in the academic realm and in the transformation that the university as an institution is undergoing. 

As well as Visiting Fellow at Nottingham, Robert MacDonald is currently Professor of Education and Social Justice at Huddersfield University. He also holds Visiting Professorships at the Department of Sociology, Monash University, at the Danish Centre for Youth Research, Aalborg University and at the School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol.

He previously worked and studied at the universities of Durham and York, and was Professor of Sociology at Teesside University from 2002-2017, where he worked with colleagues to develop the Teesside Studies of Youth Transitions and Social Exclusion. He is Editor in Chief (joint) of the Journal of Youth Studies. He has researched and written widely about young people, youth, unemployment, work, poverty, crime, class, inequality and the significance of place.

He has authored, co-authored and edited a series of books on these issues including: Risky Business? Youth and the Enterprise Culture (1991); Youth, the Underclass and Social Exclusion (1997); Snakes and Ladders: Young People, Transitions and Social Exclusion (2000); Disconnected Youth? Growing up in Britain’s Poor Neighbourhoods (2005); Drugs in Britain (2007); Young People, Class and Place (2010); Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay, No-pay Britain (2012).

He is currently working on research about: youth, inequality and youth policy; about young adults and the ‘gig economy’; about precarity, generation and class; and on comparative studies of youth in the UK and the MENA (Middle East and North African) countries.