Alex Fenton

I’m a sociologist in Berlin. My research interests lie in the uses of science in regulation and government, and particularly in the production and use of statistics and other quantified knowledge. I’m currently a post-doc in a research group on “Reflexive Metrics” in Science Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and also working on a project on the uses of scientific literature in standardisation at DZHW, Berlin.

In 2017 I submitted my PhD thesis on “Official Statistics and the Welfare State”. This was a historical-sociological study of official income and poverty statistics in Britain and Germany since 1970. I investigated the specific forms that the statistics took in the light of the different epistemic norms and structure of the welfare state in the two countries.

Volkseinkommen

This website is only sporadically updated; I’ll keep it here so some of the web material relating to my older work from my time at the LSE and Cambridge in the UK on housing and poverty policy remains available.

Some Publications

The use of scientific literature in ISO Standards

Fenton, A., Blind, K. & Gauch. S. 2018

Umkämpfte Zahlen: Armutsstatistik und Armutsberichterstattung in Großbritannien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1979-1988

Fenton, A. & Haßdenteufel, S. 2018.

History of the British Census [review of Kerstin Brückweh, Menschen Zählen]

Fenton, A. 2018. European Journal of Sociology

Fenton, A., 2016 (CASE Papers No. 195). London School of Economics.

Gambaro, L., Joshi, H., Lupton, R., Fenton, A., Lennon, M.C., 2015. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy.

Public housing, commodification and ‘rights to the city’: the US and England compared

Fenton, A., Lupton, R., Tunstall, R. & Arrundale, R. (2013) in Cities, The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning 35 pp373-378 link

Alex Fenton

Some Publications

The use of scientific literature in ISO Standards

Umkämpfte Zahlen: Armutsstatistik und Armutsberichterstattung in Großbritannien und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1979-1988

History of the British Census [review of Kerstin Brückweh, Menschen Zählen]

Gentrification in London: a Progress Report, 2001–2013

Developing Better Measures Of Neighbourhood Characteristics and Change for Use in Studies of Residential Mobility: A Case Study of Britain in the Early 2000s

Public housing, commodification and ‘rights to the city’: the US and England compared

Some Work

Analysing HBAI using R statistics

Austerity Statistics in Britain

Welfare benefits as poverty proxies

Poverty and the suburbs in London