Miranda Armstrong

Biography

After working in various jobs for ten years and starting a family, Miranda completed an Access to Higher Education Diploma. She went on to study sociology at the University of Surrey and completed a master’s in social research methods at the LSE. As an ESRC funded-doctoral student at Goldsmiths College, she researched the retrospective experiences of black women who have single-parented sons and young men raised by them.

Miranda joined the department in January 2021, having previously worked as an Associate Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths and as a Research Assistant on projects at the Open University and the University of Cambridge. She works with Dr Gareth Millington on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project, Archiving the Inner City: Race and the Politics of Urban Memory. The project examines how and by whom the twentieth century inner city is remembered, narrated and represented, focusing on sites in London, Paris and Philadelphia.

You can find out more about Miranda's research and writing on her personal website.

Research

Miranda’s main research interests are:

• Family and women’s relationships
• Intersectional inequalities
• The life course

Her work critically analyses the ways inequalities impact families, women and marginalised Londoners. This is done while paying close attention to the ways race, gender and class work together to shape lives. One constructive question she is interested in is how people in oppressed groups live lives with pleasures, stability, well-being and justice. Miranda’s approach involves using qualitative methodology and working with research participants as co-creators of knowledge, to try to ensure their experiences are fully and fairly represented. 

Publications

Armstrong, M. (2021) Menelik Shabazz: 'Our Story is Vital for Us'. The Voice Newspaper. August, p.41.

Armstrong, M. ‘Four (Single Parent) Women’: Using Nina Simone’s Storytelling as a Critical Tool. In peer review process.

Armstrong, M. (2021) Beyond the Myth: Single Black Mothers and Their Sons.

Armstrong, M. (2020) Single mothers deserve better, Motherhood Untold.

Armstrong, M. (2020) The imaginary problem of single black mothers and their sons, Black Ballad.

Armstrong, M. (2020)  The hidden impact of Covid-19 on single motherhood, Discover Society.

Armstrong, M. (2019) When will we stop blaming Black single mother households for violent crime? Media Diversified.