Dr Kathy Hamilton
senior lecturer
5.11 STENHOUSE
Tel : +44 (0)141 548 3240 (Ext. 3240)
- Glasgow school days remembered (Co-investigator)
- Workshop on 'Nostalgia' (Co-investigator)
- ESRC Vulnerable Consumers Seminar series (Co-investigator)
- ESRC Festival of Social Science 2011 (Co-investigator)
- ESRC Festival of Social Science 2010 (Co-investigator)
- Nostalgia in the Twenty-First Century (Co-investigator)
Dr Kathy Hamilton completed her PhD on “Low-income Families: Coping with Consumer Disadvantage” at Queen's University Belfast. She joined the Department as a Lecturer in April 2006. and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010.
Research Interests
Kathy’s research interests fall within the area of Interpretive Consumer Research or Consumer Culture Theory. All of her projects are aimed at understanding and theorising consumer culture.
One of Kathy’s main research areas is consumer disadvantage and consumer vulnerability. In particular, she has conducted research related to low-income families and coping strategies employed in response to consumer culture. She is also interested in gender issues and poverty. A current project relates to economic development and materialism within the city of Glasgow.
Kathy has secured ESRC funding with Dr Susan Dunnett (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Maria Piacentini (Lancaster University) for a seminar series around the theme of vulnerable consumers. The central aims of the series are firstly to provide a space to critically engage with the notion of consumer vulnerability in order to promote dialogue and interchange between researchers, practitioners and policy makers; and secondly, to create a supportive forum through which to foster methodological good practice and encourage collaborative research projects. The seminars will begin in November 2012.
Kathy is also involved in a long term project, with Dr Matthew Alexander, which aims to enhance understanding of the role of the community in contemporary culture. It centres on local community involvement in the regeneration of social spaces. Key themes relate to place transformation, volunteering and place nostalgia.
Kathy is interested in interdisciplinary research and was co-organiser of the recently completed ESRC seminar series on “Nostalgia in the 21st Century” which aimed to encourage dialogue between different disciplinary approaches in order to promote further enquiry into the uses of nostalgia in contemporary culture.
Kathy is also part of an interdisciplinary team who initiated Strathclyde Solutions Exchange (SSE). SSE is an innovative opportunity for interdisciplinary interaction and knowledge exchange between organisations from a range of different sectors, including charity, government, health, and industry, and researchers from the University of Strathclyde. The second SSE workshop will be held in August 2012.
Her work has been published in journals such as European Journal of Marketing, Sociology, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Journal of Marketing Management and Advances in Consumer Research.
