Rosie Cox

My research sits broadly in the area of household consumption and social inequalities. For over 15 years I have been researching domestic employment in London, in particular the growth of au pair employment and how this relates to inequalities in gender, class and race/ethnicity.  In May 2012 I began a new ESRC Funded project on this topic ‘Au Pairing After the Au Pair Scheme’.  The project will run until May 2014 and is investigating the effects of the ending of the au pair visa in the UK in 2008 and the consequent deregulation of au pairing.

Some of my recent work in this area has been examining the commoditisation of male labour in the home and the use of paid handymen to replace household members. I have been carrying out fieldwork with homeowners in New Zealand and with ‘Hubbies’ from the franchise home repair company ‘Hire A Hubby’.  This project has explored how national identity and gender identity come together when we work on the fabric of home.

In 2006 I published my first book on paid domestic work, The Servant Problem: Domestic Work in a Global Economy (2006, I.B. Tauris, London), which explores the growth of paid domestic employment in contemporary Britain.  Building on this interest I have published an edited collection, with Ben Campkin from UCL Bartlett, titled Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (2007). This collection draws together geographers, historians, sociologists and art historians to examine the ways in which our conceptualisations of dirt have shaped space and our relations within it.  More recently I was also involved in writing the section on ‘home’ in the multi-authored collection Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life (2011: Profile Books).  This was produced in collaboration with the Wellcome Collection to accompany an exhibition of the same name.  Together these books explore the relationship between our understandings of dirt and cleanliness and the relationships and conditions that shape paid domestic labour.
With colleagues from geography at Coventry University and sociology at the University of Warwick, I was also involved in an AHRC/ESRC funded project as part of the 'Cultures of Consumption' programme. The project ' Reconnecting Producers, Consumers and Food: Exploring Alternative Food Networks: ' examined novel ways in which people access food or retail food outside the main system of supermarkets or established shops. We are interested in why people are now using networks such as box schemes, allotment clubs and adoption projects to provide food and what this means for producers and the food system more widely. Between 2004 and 2007 the project looked in detail at six case study schemes and worked with both producers and consumers to understand their motivations and what they get from establishing these new relationships in food networks.