Steven Roberts

Steve Roberts is Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, Monash University.  Since obtaining his PhD in Social Policy at University of Kent (UK) in 2010, Steve has been an ongoing academic at the University of Southampton and then at the Univeristy of Kent, before joining Monash in Ferbuary 2015.

Steve is an internationally recognised expert in research on young people’s transitions to adulthood and the changing nature of men and masculinity.  In both cases he is concerned especially with issues of social class, social change and social continuity, and the attendant implications for social inequality. Steve’s research on masculinity pertains mostly to youth and social class, but includes men’s engagement with sexting; emotionality; domestic labour; education; and employment, and, most recently, risky drinking. He has published widely in a variety of esteemed international journals on these topics, including Sociolgy, British Journal of Sociology and New Media and Society.

Steve is Editor of Sociological Research Online, Associate Editor of Journal of Youth Studies, and International Advisory Editor of Men and Masculinities and a member of the scientific advisory group of the Australian Institute for Family Studies ‘Ten to Men’ study.  His recent invited high profile talks include the keynote speech at the 2017 European Commission and Council for Europe youth Symposium in Prague.  

Steve has been awarded competitive funding for numerous projects, including as lead CI for the recent successful and much publicised Men’s Risky Drinking project funded by VicHealth, and also as sole CI for VicHealth’s evidence review of healthy masculinity interventions. As a mixed methods researcher, Steve has expertise in conventional and, particularly, social media-led qualitative research approaches as well as experience of analysing large scale quantitative data sets. He reviews proposals for the UK, Austrian, Polish and Portuguese research councils and for major pubishing houses, including Policy press, Routledge, Palgrave and Yale University Press.   

Steve is keen to hear from prospective research students who are interested in projects focussing on some aspect of either (broadly speaking):

1) men, masculinity, inequality and social change – this might be changes and continuities in masculinity, men’s risk taking, men’s friendships, homophobia, sexuality, drinking practices.

2) young people’s transition to adulthood and their experience of the contemporary world - this might be gender identities (especially masculinity), housing, family formation, leisure lives, risk taking, cultural consumption education or work, for example. He is especially interested in researching projects aiming to unpack how these issues are impacted by social class, ‘race’ and gender.