Helene Snee

Dr Helene Snee is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, based in the Geoffrey Manton Building. She has been a core faculty member since 2014, teaching critical sociology that challenges students' 'common-sense' understandings of social structures while promoting diverse scholarly voices beyond traditional Western canons.

Her academic credentials include a BA(Econ)(Hons) in Sociology (2001) and PhD in Sociology (2010), both from the University of Manchester. Prior to joining Manchester Met, she served as Lecturer and Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Manchester from 2010-2014.

Snee's research centers on cultural class analysis and intersectional inequalities, with expertise spanning social mobility, gender dynamics, youth education, digital sociology, and cosmopolitanism. Her work consistently examines how cultural practices reproduce social hierarchies, particularly through Bourdieusian frameworks. She advocates collaborative feminist methodologies as a member of the 'Res-Sisters' research collective.

Analysis of her 15 most recent publications reveals two dominant trajectories: (1) Contemporary class analysis in 21st-century Britain using the Great British Class Survey, and (2) Nursing education as a critical site for examining class/gender barriers ('class ceiling'). Her methodological innovations in digital research ethics and blog analysis provide foundational tools for online sociological inquiry.

Key recognitions include:

• Shortlisting for the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (2015) for her book 'A Cosmopolitan Journey?'

Snee secured British Academy funding (COV19\201055) as Principal Investigator for her Covid-19 nursing education impact study. She currently supervises PhD candidates Sophie Harris (quantifying habitus in mathematics education) and Beatrice Tailby Hardstaff (youth engagement in working-class movements), welcoming new doctoral researchers in social class, gender, and educational inequality.

She actively contributes to the 'Res-Sisters' feminist collective, which develops intersectional approaches to studying systemic inequalities through collaborative knowledge production.