Rate My Professor Alex Simpson

Dr. Alex Simpson is the Discipline Chair in Criminology in the School of International Studies at Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from the University of York in 2016, with a thesis entitled Neutralising Deviance: The Legitimation of Harm and the Culture of Finance in the City of London, completed under an ESRC studentship. His career centers on ethnographic research exploring power, inequality, and social harm within elite contexts, particularly finance and urban development. Affiliated with Macquarie University's Housing and Urban Research Centre, he also serves as Social Sciences Consultant for the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship since 2016. Simpson supervises postgraduate research students, including two current PhD candidates and having completed supervision of three PhDs and five MRes theses.

Simpson's research specializations include social finance studies, embodiment, gender, zemiology (social harm), elite deviance, cultural production of space, ethnographic research methods, and organisational culture and practice. Drawing on cultural theories from Bourdieu, Foucault, and Derrida, his investigations focus on performative rituals of elite social groups, the maintenance of financial landscapes, and masculinist identities that sustain neoliberal traits such as competition, aggression, and risk-seeking. Current projects examine the erasure and incorporation of Sydney's Barangaroo financial district. He has produced 41 research outputs, including 22 articles, nine chapters, two books, and one edited book. Key publications feature the monograph Harm Production and the Moral Dislocation of Finance in the City of London (Emerald, 2021); co-edited Gendering Place and Affect: Attachment, Disruption and Belonging (Bristol University Press, 2024), with his chapter Affective atmospheres of finance: gendered impacts of financialization within Sydney's Barangaroo development (with P. McGuinness); Hauntology: An Introduction for Criminologists (Routledge, 2026, with P. McGuinness, T. Fredriksson, and M. Fiddler); 'I've seen people on the train, like really weird people': hauntological reflections on the fear of crime (Crime, Media, Culture, 2025, with M. Lee and P. McGuinness); and A relational approach to the ethnographic study of power in the context of the City of London (Ethnography, 2024). Awards include the Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management Paper of the Year Award for Excellence (2013, shared with N. Slutskaya and J. Hughes) and the Work, Employment and Society SAGE Prize for Innovation (2018, shared with J. Hughes, R. Simpson, N. Slutskaya, and K. Hughes). He has contributed to 11 press and media pieces on topics including knife crime, youth crime, and gun violence.