麻豆精选

PhD in Sociology 2005 (Cardiff University)

Neil completed his PhD in 2005 at Cardiff University School of Social Sciences. He then continued to work within that department as a researcher within the ESRC Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen), where he stayed for the next ten years. Following this, he moved to Brunel University London, where he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship to pursue his research on ‘Big Tissue and Society’. Neil moved to Birmingham in 2021 to take up a Senior Lectureship in Technology and Society.

Neil Stephens teaches on the modules The Sociological Imagination, and Technology and Society, as well as supervising dissertations at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

He has previously taught qualitative research methods at MSc, Professional Doctorate, and undergraduate levels, Science and Technology Studies at MSc and undergraduate level, and Medical Sociology, Cultural Sociology and Social Theory at undergraduate level. He has also convened an MSc Tissue Engineering module on social aspects of tissue engineering.

Neil is interested in supervising a broad range of doctoral projects, but has a particular interest in projects engaging with the relationships between science, technology and society. Areas of interest include health, digital, environmental and food technologies. Projects that look to critically engage with existing or emerging technology, and/or explore the cultural framing of technology and science are of particular interest.

Research interests

• Innovation in biotechnology
• Political and cultural aspects of science and technology
• Qualitative methods

Current projects:

Neil's core research focus is on the social and cultural politics of cellular agriculture and cultured meat. These are technologies that seek to produce traditionally farm-based products, such as meat and leather, in an entirely different way, growing cells in bioreactors. He has been researching this since 2008, publishing a variety of outputs. He currently has two grants supporting this work, an APEX grant from the Royal Society and as part of the seven year Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub () funded by the EPSRC. His research in this area is multifaceted, and includes interviews with stakeholders including cellular agriculture professionals, focus groups with publics, and media analysis. His core interest is in how meanings, practices and institutions are produced and mobilised by the cellular agriculture sector, and how these are adopted, contested or reconfigured by others.

Neil’s broader related project, Big Tissue and Society (previously funded by the Wellcome Trust), is an analysis of ‘Big Tissue’: the promise and accomplishment of significant upscale in human and animal tissue production. It recognises Big Tissue as a novel socio-technical practice that crosses multiple sectors (e.g. biomedicine, agriculture, conservation) and has a distinct economics, politics and ethics. The project involves interviewing and engaging with scientists, entrepreneurs, and activists in three case-studies: tissue engineered skin, blood, and meat. The aim is to map and analyse the socio-political context of each case-study in turn, and an accumulative analysis of Big Tissue as a novel overarching category.

Neil has worked on multiple other research projects, many in the sociology of biomedicine. Key interests include:

Robotic Surgery: Neil’s earlier project at Brunel University London (2015-2018) was a laboratory ethnography of a team developing tools for application in surgical robotics, with a particular focus upon cochlear implant surgery. This work has explored three key themes: (i) the robotics surgery lab as a sensory space in which knowledge production is an embodied practice, (ii) the development of a sociological understanding of robot autonomy in the surgical setting, and (iii) the representation of futures and politics of robotic surgery as found in both surgical robotics conferences and popular cinema.

Mitochondrial Donation: While at Cardiff University in 2014-15. Neil worked with Dr Rebecca Dimond (Cardiff University) to conduct interviews with organisations and individuals active in the policy debate that led to the 2015 legalisation of the mitochondrial donation technique in the UK. The technique uses a form of IVF to remove faulty mitochondria from the germline and prevent subsequent generations of a family inheriting mitochondrial disease. The project mapped the policy activity of key actors in the debate, and resulted in a book published in 2018 titled .

Stem Cell Science: Neil has conducted multiple projects on stem cell science. During 2005-09 Neil worked with Prof Paul Atkinson and Prof Peter Glasner (Cardiff University) to conduct an ethnography of the UK Stem Cell Bank: an institution that holds all human embryonic stem cell lines that are legal for use in the UK and decides who can use them for what purposes. His work explored the standardisation of both technical and ethical aspects of regulatory practice. During 2011-2014 Neil conducted an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of stem cell scientists, engineers, physicians, and chemists to understand how interdisciplinary groups operate in practice. In 2014-15 Neil conducted an ethnography with a team of bioinformaticians, biologists, and musicians to explore how sound can be added to bioinformatics software to better facilitate the capturing of cell culturing knowledge.

Biobanking: In addition to the ethnography of the UK Stem Cell Bank, Neil conducted an interview study with an anonymous biobank during the two year period that the bank closed. This allowed him to produce a distinct analysis of what happens as biobanks close and how the tissue holdings are dispersed. 

Other STS projects Neil has engaged in include an ethnographic study of the March for Science through London in 2017, the accomplishment of Big Data science (specifically in biology), and his PhD (Cardiff University) that explored the social construction of macroeconomic knowledge, specifically the ‘Phillips Curve’ relationship between unemployment and inflation between the 1950s and 1980s.

Outside of STS, Neil has contributed to a major piece of research conducted with Dr Sara Delamont (Cardiff University) on the African-Brazilian martial art/game/fight Capoeira, in an ongoing project since 2004. The team uses UK based Capoeira classes to explore issues of embodiment, teaching, and globalised culture. During this work Neil adopted the role of the embodied ethnographer – doing the basic steps, kicks, and cartwheels, and playing the musical instruments - of Capoeira while Sara Delamont recorded observational fieldnotes. The project was published as a book in 2017 titled ‘Embodying Brazil: An ethnography of diasporic capoeira’. 

Finally, Neil also has multiple publications on qualitative methods related to his studies in STS, the sociology of biomedicine, and capoeira.