Keynote 4: David Maguire

David Maguire is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL in the IoE.

David’s research draws on his own lived history and practice based work. Alongside his practice based work with ‘hard to reach groups’, David completed a Masters in Gender, Sexuality, Culture and Politics from University of London’s Birkbeck College in 2009. In 2016 he was awarded his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford for his research focusing on the interplay between masculinity, education, (un) employment, crime and imprisonment. After holding Associate Lectureship positions in Criminal Justice, Criminology and Sociology at various universities, he joined Oxford Brookes as a Lecturer in criminology in April 2017. Shortly after he was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCL’s Institute of Education (Centre for Education in the Criminal Justice System).

David’s research employs ethnographic methods to explore with marginalised men (including prisoners) the cyclical interrelations between cultural representations of masculinity, place, schooling, employment, crime and imprisonment. Before taking up an ERSC funded D.Phil. in the School of Geography at the University of Oxford, he worked for almost two decades with hard to reach groups across homelessness and housing, mainstream and alternative education and the youth and adult prison estate.

David’s DPhil focused on the classed, gendered and criminal trajectories of (young) men from deindustrialised regions and impoverished neighbourhoods in the UK. This research explored how boys and young men navigate masculinities across interconnecting sites of exclusion such as deprived housing estates, under resourced and ‘failing’ schools, residential children’s or ‘care’ homes and prisons. A major concern of this research was to explore if and how constructing or ‘doing’ masculinity across these sites leads many to contribute to their own economic exclusion, imprisonment and continued disadvantage. The most important aspect of this study was to uncover how these sites of exclusion play an active role in reinforcing and recreating the same masculinities they exclude and incarcerate.

David’s British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship research focuses on the prison to employment transitions of ‘undereducated’ and underemployed ‘revolving door’ prisoners. Many ‘underachieving’ working class (young) men have been found to be struggling to secure and sustain employment in increasingly ‘feminised’ service-dominated UK labour markets. Turning the lens on those engaged in prison training/education and post-prison ‘inclusive’ business led service based employment schemes may offer insights into how marginalised men might ‘do deference’ to labour. The focus of this study is less on the cycle of school ‘failure’, unemployment and imprisonment, and more on if and how from sites of extreme exclusion men are adapting prison masculinities fit for sustaining service-based employment.