Andri is a Research Fellow at TSRC, as well as Theory and Method Stream Lead at the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRIS) at the University of Birmingham.

Research interests

Andri’s current interests are in social and civic actions that go beyond traditional (yet contested) understandings of the Civil Society Sector, with a particular interest in grassroots groups that transcend organisation and sector boundaries.

Andri developed and piloted TSRC’s ‘street-level’ mapping methodologies to identify social and community activities that do not appear in government administrative records. Findings show that there are a diverse range of self-organised activities not captured by surveys that use official government records for their population lists, and concludes that there are policy implications flowing from this.

Taking the street-level mapping work further, Andri is exploring ways in which mapping methodologies can be used with cutting-edge technology to build better and evolving empirical knowledge on social and civil activities. This can help to understand their role and function, the different ways in which they resource themselves, and their relationship (if any) with formal organisations, sectors and the state.

Andri is also committed to building self-sustaining tools that can engage citizens in generating information that is useful to them. These tools have the potential to be used by the public, practitioners and policy-makers, as well as building the groundwork for systematic academic enquiry into less formal aspects of civil society.

Andri now works on TSRC’s qualitative longitudinal research project, Real Times, and on the Below the radar work stream. She also acts as co-ordinater for TSRC’s Equalities Cross-Cutting Work Stream to bring together others’ work in this area.

Experience

Andri has worked as a researcher on third sector issues for more than a decade on a variety of projects with third sector partners. These include research on volunteering and the faith sector, volunteer retention, and the funding climate on women’s voluntary organisations in the 1990s.

With the view to taking her career forward in a more academic setting, she moved to the University of Manchester where she obtained funding by the ESRC for a CASE Studentship to examine the extent to which voluntary organisations can successfully sustain engagement with government employment initiatives. She was later awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship to take this work forward, and was subsequently awarded the Campbell Adamson Prize for best paper for this work at the VSSN/NCVO 2008 Annual Research conference.

Additional information

Andri is Secretary to the Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN): a member organisation for researchers committed to promoting understanding of the UK voluntary sector through research.

Qualifications

BSc., MSc., PhD

Contact

Tel: 0121 414 3086
Email: a.soteri-proctor@tsrc.ac.uk

Third Sector Research Centre
Park House
University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT