Dr Emma Long
ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow

Profile

Biography

Emma Long’s main research interests are around military families, deployments, support-seeking, and state-provided welfare. She is particularly interested in concepts of militarisation, stigma, liminality, and feminist theory.

Emma completed her PhD with the Sociology Department at Lancaster University in 2019. Through the thematic analysis of interviews with army partners and formal support providers, her PhD explored partners’ navigation and negotiation of coping strategies during the period of post-combat-related deployment. Notably, she found that gendered, militarised constructs of role-expectations limited the likelihood of support-seeking when required.

After completing her PhD Emma worked at the military charity Armed Families Federation as the Policy and Research Officer. She has also undertaken various Research Associate/Assistant roles at Lancaster University (Military Lives and Transformative Experiences, Community Vulnerability and Well-being in a Rural Village, and Situational and Structural Risks in Gambling) and the University of Lincoln (Breadwinning Mums, Caregiving Dads: Transforming Gender in Work and Childcare?).

Research

Overview

Emma Long has been awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and will therefore continue her work started during her PhD exploring military family welfare – her project is titled ‘Bringing the Homefront to the Forefront: Examining policy through centering lived experiences of military families in welfare provision’. Particularly she will be considering how army partners are framed within welfare providers’ policies and outputs, and how this framing of eligibility is interpreted and lived by army partners.
She is focusing primarily on army partners’ experiences due to the different challenges and structures of welfare provision across each of the Services.

Publications

Full publications list

• Long, E. (2019) ‘Living liminal lives: Army partners' experiences and perspectives of navigating and negotiating avenues for support’. Doctoral Thesis, Lancaster University.
• Brewster, L., Clark, S., McWade, B., Long, E., Giga, S. and Fletcher, I. (2019) ‘Military Lives and Transformative Experiences: Exploring narratives and aged veterans’ well-being’. Final Project Report. 
• Long, E. (2019) ‘The spirit of community, the Army family, and the impact on formal and informal support mechanisms’. In Moelker, R., Andres, M. and Rones, N. [Eds.] The Politics of Military Families. London, Routledge: 184-197.
• Long, E. (2017) Military Partners Need Empathy, Not Pity. The Conversation 9/11/17. [Accessed 12th April 2018] 

Teaching

Undergraduate

Emma is delivering a guest lecture on Everyday Militarisms for the undergraduate course Gender, War, and Militarism. She is also supervising undergraduate students for their final year dissertations.