Dr Frances Thirlway

Research Fellow

Sociology Department, University of York

Biography

Frances Thirlway is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of York (UK). She has carried out research on e-cigarette take-up and on intergenerational trajectories of smoking and quitting in the North of England. She is also involved in research exploring tobacco use and cessation in Uganda and Pakistan. Frances combines painstaking qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork with a strong theoretical focus. She explores tobacco use and cessation as cultural practices taken up or discarded according to their compatibility with relational, classed and gendered moral identities. Her approach challenges conventional thinking in a field dominated by behavioural psychology.