Professor Tina Miller

BA, MSc, PhD

Professor of Sociology

School of Law and Social Sciences

Role

Tina Miller is a Professor of Sociology. Her research and teaching interests include motherhood and fatherhood transitions, constructions of gender and identities, masculinities, reproductive health, narratives, qualitative research methods and ethics and she regularly publishes in these areas. Tina has lived and worked in the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh as well as Oxford and has a particular interest in cultural dimensions and the situated nature of everyday experiences. Tina has been engaged as an expert advisor by the World Health Organisation (Geneva), think tanks and political parties in the UK, most recently giving evidence to the Parliamentary Women and Equalities Committee hearing on Fathers in the Workplace (March, 2017) and at the EU (October 2018). She has presented her work in many countries, including Chile, Australia, India and Argentina. She regularly participates in TV and radio programmes in relation to her research and publications on motherhood, fatherhood and managing paid work and care in contemporary family lives. 

Tina was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2015, which focused on the topic of 'Managing modern family lives: public understandings and everyday practises of caring and paid work'. Her CUP monongraph based on the findings from this project was published in August 2017 (Making Sense of Parenthood:Caring, Gender and Family Lives). Tina is currently completing a new research project on 'Transition to First Time Motherhood: A New Generation' and beginning a new BA funded project, Being a father and a refugee: Comparing men’s fatherhood and family ‘integration’ experiences in the UK and Sweden.

Teaching and supervision

Courses

Modules taught

  • U26173 'Gendering Intimate Relationships'
  • U26125 'Sociology of Health and Illness
  • U26199 Undergraduate dissertation supervision
  • PhD Supervision

Supervision

Tina is currently supervising PhD students who are working in the following areas:

  • Equality duty and lone mother experiences
  • Migration experiences with a focus on legal and social statuses and disrupted/continued familial practices

Research Students

Name Thesis title Completed
Luke Holmes Exploring experiences of Vietnamese labour migration in the UK and Vietnam: dominant discourses and migrants’ lived experiences Active

Research

Tina Miller is Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Her research expertise includes a focus on significant transitions in family lives, including transitions to motherhood, fatherhood and parenthood. Using qualitative, longitudinal research and narrative analysis, her research has contributed to theorisations of gender through paying particular attention to temporal dimensions in everyday family practices. Tina has written four Cambridge University Press monographs, edited other sociological and methodological collections and published multiple journal articles focused on unfolding experiences of motherhood, fatherhood, and more recently refugee experiences in new country settings. Her work traces and challenges the often taken-for-granted structural and gendered constraints which pattern everyday expectations and experiences across familial caring and working landscapes. In 2019 the British Academy project on which Tina was PI ‘Being a Father and a Refugee’ was shortlisted for ‘Research project of the Year: Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences’ in the national Times Higher Education (THE) Awards.

Tina has worked in advisory roles with political parties and think tanks in the UK and Europe (EU) as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO). She regularly presents her research at invited Keynote sessions in international conferences, including in Australia, Chile and the US.

Tina’s research has been shared with public audiences through collaborations with the BBC, where she has recently authored and presented three Radio 4 Analysis Radio Programmes, based on her research:

Research impact

Tina has submitted Impact Case Studies to:
REF 2014 UoA 21 'Gender, Parenthood and Public Policy'
REF 2021 UoA19 'Shaping national and international policy on gender, family caring and parental wellbeing'

Projects

Publications

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Media appearances

CoP Show: Expert Women

The BBC Academy’s Expert Women events are part of a campaign to increase the number of expert women presenters and contributors appearing on TV and radio in key under-represented areas including science, history, politics, business, engineering, architecture and technology. The project is a collaboration between the BBC Academy and Broadcast Magazine, with support from BBC DiversityCreative SkillsetChannel 4SkyITV and the wider broadcast industry.

“The BBC Academy’s Expert Women events are part of a campaign to increase the number of expert women presenters and contributors appearing on TV and radio in key under-represented areas including science, history, politics, business, engineering, architecture and technology. The project is a collaboration between the BBC Academy and Broadcast Magazine, with support from BBC Diversity, Creative Skillset, Channel 4, Sky, ITV and the wider broadcast industry.”