Katherine Smith

Katherine Smith is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She holds a doctorate from the University of Wales and completed a postdoc fellowship at the University of Surrey's Digital World Research Centre. Her research focuses on fairness, poverty, welfare reform, social class, Englishness, and ethnographic methods. She has conducted fieldwork in North Manchester and Preston, Lancashire, exploring themes like social policy, stigma, and everyday life. Smith is the author of Fairness, Class and Belonging in Contemporary England (2012) and co-editor of Extraordinary Encounters: The Ethnographic Interview and Authenticity (2015). Her recent work includes studies on poverty and dependence, as well as the socio-political impacts of Brexit in 'left-behind' communities.

Smith’s research interests span welfare systems, class dynamics, and the interplay between humor and social morality. She has contributed to debates on public health policy through analyses of tobacco industry practices and global compliance frameworks. Her ethnographic approach emphasizes lived experiences, particularly in marginalized communities, and she has explored topics like self-policing ethics in urban settings and the micro-politics of fairness in local economies.

Smith has received the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (2013) for her monograph on fairness and class. She actively participates in academic networks, organizing conferences like the 2025 Association of Social Anthropologists Conference in Birmingham and contributing to panels on diverse historicities in post-industrial contexts. She supervises doctoral students researching themes related to poverty, welfare policy, and British cultural life.