After being awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship grant, Dr Abi O’Connor will join the Centre for Research into Accounting and Finance in Context, based at Sheffield University Management School.
Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowships are awarded to early career researchers with a research record but who have not yet held a full time permanent academic post. The fellowships are granted to enable the researcher to undertake a significant piece of publishable work.
Dr Abi O’Connor is an urban sociologist whose expertise centres on understanding the relationship between urban governance, local politics and the (re)structuring of place via stigmatisation. She received her PhD in May 2024 from the University of Liverpool which explored how financial capital is extracted from housing markets in communities deemed to​ ‘lack value’, focusing on the role of the local state in enabling this process. Abi is currently a researcher at the New Economics Foundation where she undertakes extensive place-based empirical research on land, housing and local economies, and regularly responds to current issues in national media and contributes to policy development locally and nationally. Alongside her research, Abi has a keen interest in democratising knowledge through grassroots movements. She is a co-founder of Liverpool Residents Action, a board member of Vauxhall Community Law Centre and a trustee of the Housing Studies Association.
Abi’s research at CRAFiC will explore how and where publicly owned assets, namely land and housing, are transferred into the hands of private interests to enable private profit extraction from cities. To do so, she will undertake an interdisciplinary study of three distinct but interconnected port cities that continue to experience acute urban decline: Liverpool, Glasgow and Pittsburgh. By combining urban sociology with critical accounting methods, Abi’s work aims to make visible the implications of asset transfers on democracy and the social power networks that underpin these processes.
Abi’s work will support the CRAFiC project ‘Accounting for the City’, which Management School academics collaborate with colleagues from the Urban Institute on. Throughout her three years at Sheffield, Abi will be mentored by Professor Adam Leaver, Head of Accounting and Financial Management, and Dr Richard Goulding, Lecturer in Accounting.