Jack Newman

Jack Newman is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. He is a qualitative researcher specialising in discourse analysis and the analysis of policy documents. In his PhD thesis, passed in May 2019, he developed an innovative approach to policy analysis, mapping the underlying assumptions of the UK’s social security reforms, with a particular focus on human agency, social structures, and ‘theories of change’. The thesis received a Recognition of Research Excellence from the University of Leeds and was nominated for Thesis of the Year in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Some of the theoretical innovations made in the thesis have since been published, including an intervention in the structure-agency debate and a recent paper on critical discourse analysis. Jack has previously spent four years at the University of Leeds teaching politics and sociology, and co-leading the postgraduate research methods module. His wider research interests include British politics, the UK Conservative Party, welfare reform, discourse analysis, and social ontology.