Professor Peter Somerville has a wealth of experience practising in multidisciplinary research. With psychologists and sociologists at the University of Salford on multiple exclusion homelessness research, as well as with practitioners working for homelessness organisations; Somerville has also co-edited a book (with Bosworth in the Lincoln Business School) on Interpreting Rurality (Routledge, 2013), with chapters from disciplines that include economics, social policy, criminology, tourism, business studies, history, literary criticism, and rural sociology.

Within these chapters, contributors present research across a range of subjects allowing critical reflections upon their personal and disciplinary interpretations of “rural”. This resulting volume means that chapters give an emergent sense of how the notion of “rural” changes and blurs as the disciplinary lens is adjusted. Somerville’s contribution will draw from a wide range of research including housing, community (including rural community, community enterprise, and community policing), cooperatives, equalities, homelessness, participation and social theory.

You can find out more by visiting the Rural and Regional Research blog: