Dr Robert Deakin
I joined Westminster in 2026 as a Research Fellow on the project 'Social and spatial encounters over time: Revisiting Katharine Buildings'.
I have a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London and previously held research posts at Goldsmiths and Loughborough.
My research is broadly concerned with people’s experiences and responses to urban and social change in contexts of structural inequality.
My PhD explored the entanglements of urban regeneration, heritage, whiteness and class in Poplar, east London’s former docklands. Extending critical accounts of the class injustices of regeneration as gentrification, my PhD attended to urban regeneration’s intersecting class and racial inequalities. Through 18-months of ethnographic and multimodal fieldwork alongside residents involved with community and heritage projects - including a micro-museum, a pub and a collaborative film making project - it analyses heritage as a modality through which intersecting inequalities are both reinforced and resisted.
My work on pubs as part of my PhD led onto postdoctoral research at Loughborough alongside Dr Thomas Thurnell-Read on the Leverhulme-funded project 'After Last Orders?: A biographical approach to the impacts of UK pub closure'. Through seven in-depth pub closure case studies and a media analysis, this project situates pub closure as an important lens through which people make sense of social and urban change. I am currently co-authoring a monograph based on this research, under contract with Bloomsbury Academic.
I joined Westminster in 2026 as a Research Fellow, attached to the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Social and Spatial Encounters Over Time: Revisiting Katharine Buildings’, led by Prof Val Gillies. This project uses a unique set of archives to uncover experiences of living with difference in an East End housing block from the 1880s to the 1960s. I am leading the project’s public and media engagement activities.
Selected publications
MONOGRAPH:
Thurnell-Read, T. and Deakin R. ‘Last Orders: The story of Britain’s disappearing pubs’. Book contract with Bloomsbury Academic, expected 2027
JOURNAL ARTICLES:
Deakin, R. ‘Between melancholia and conviviality: The pub as transitional infrastructure in regenerating east London’. In preparation.
Thurnell-Read, T., and Deakin, R. (2026). ‘The End Has a Start: The timeliness of endings and the affects of closure’. Sociological Research Online.
Deakin R. and Thurnell-Read, T. (2025). ‘The last of England: Banal nationalism and communities of loss in British pub closure media narratives’. The British Journal of Sociology. 76(4), pp. 861-872
Deakin, R. (2024) ‘Ambivalent decay: Regeneration anxieties in east London’, Roadsides, Collection no. 012: Infrastructural Anxieties.
Deakin, R. and Nicolescu, G. (2022) ‘Socialist fragments East and West: Towards a comparative anthropology of global (post-)socialism’, Critique of Anthropology, 42(2), pp. 114–136.
FILM
Deakin, R. and Watters, J. (2025) ‘Jimmy’s Archive’. 25 minutes. Journal of Anthropological Films, Vol. 9 No. 02.