CRESC’s research on socio-cultural change addresses the instabilities and inequalities of our contemporary world. We ask:

• How unstable is capitalism?  How do elites govern? What is left of democracy? What is at stake in a shift from a politics of growth to a politics of sustainability? How much actually changes at times of sudden rupture?
• What are the unforeseen and unintended consequences of public policy initiatives? How are such consequences recognised? Who takes account of them? How are they folded into future plans and projections?
• How are the inevitable inconsistencies and incoherences of organisational logics and technological systems kept in view, made relevant and understood?  What difference do the specifics of place, time and general context make?
• How are social difference and inequality perceived, experienced, made public and accounted for? How do we understand the changing boundaries of disengagement and participation? What social and material relations are marginalised, devalued or made imperceptible in conventional accounts of social transformation?
• What is the role of expert knowledge in mediating processes of social change? How is such knowledge legitimated and contested in uncertain and changing times? What is the role of cultural performance, narrative form and normative procedure in producing authoritative knowledge?
• What part do social science methods play in actively shaping the world and the relations that we seek to describe and understand? Do we need new methods to meet the challenge of understanding socio-cultural change?  We are the political and ethical implications of our research methods?