Professor Daniel Briggs

Professor

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

I am an experienced researcher, writer and inter-disciplinary academic who combines ethnographic methods (observation, interviewing) with behavioural analysis and data-driven insights to study social problems. Drawing on over 25 years of immersive fieldwork, I translate complex human behaviours and lived experiences into actionable understanding — working across the boundaries of in depth qualitative and quantitative pattern to reveal what numbers alone cannot capture.

Over the same 25 years, I have built deep expertise in behavioural and data insights — designing and delivering research that helps organisations, policymakers and practitioners understand why people think, feel and act as they do, and what that means for intervention, strategy and change.

My research subjects have included homeless drug users, terminally-ill patients, refugees, sex workers, Gypsies, gang members, young offenders, political activists, protestors, economic migrants, and have also spent the last decade researching tourist behaviours across Spain. Across these communities, I have developed a distinctive methodology: using close observation and testimony to surface the behavioural drivers, social dynamics and systemic pressures that shape human decision-making.

One of my books, Dead End Lives: Drugs and Violence in the City Shadows (2017, Policy Press), won the Division of International Criminology's Outstanding Book Award 2018 (selected by the American Society of Criminology). Other monographs include Climate Changed: Refugee Border Stories and the Business of Misery (2020, Routledge) and Hotel Puta: A Hardcore Ethnography of a Luxury Brothel (2022, RJ4All Publications).

I am also the lead co-author of Researching the Covid-19 Pandemic (2021, Bristol University Press) and Lockdown: Social Harm in the Covid-19 Era (2021, Palgrave). I have just published Sheltering Strangers: Critical Memoirs of Hosting Ukrainian Refugees (2025, Policy Press) and have co-edited The Lost: Life, Loss and Legacy in Criminology (2026, Bristol University Press).

My current research applies behavioural and data insight frameworks to two contrasting worlds: the ultra-high-net-worth luxury yacht industry and low-income patients navigating medical tourism for weight-loss surgery abroad — examining how desire, risk perception and economic calculation shape behaviour across vastly different social strata.

Email Daniel

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Any social problem.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Editorial: Understanding violence: new data and theory, Ellis, A., Winlow, S., Briggs, D. 30 Apr 2026, In: Frontiers in Sociology
Fifteen years later, at the moral crossroads: retaining purpose and direction in the face of academic capitalism, Briggs, D. 18 Jun 2025, Embracing the Unknown, Bristol, Policy Press
Sheltering Strangers: Critical memoirs from hosting Ukrainian refugees, Briggs, D. 28 Mar 2025
The school of hard knocks: Systemic violence and the motivation to harm in boys' youth academy football, Gibbs, N., Briggs, D. 25 Aug 2025, In: Frontiers in Sociology
Clean Conscience from ‘Dirty Luxury’: Compliance, Profitable Unhappiness, and the Handwashing of Social Harm and Sexual Exploitation, Briggs, D. 1 Aug 2024, Compliance, Defiance, and ‘Dirty’ Luxury, Cham, Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan
Critical Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic from the NHS Frontline, Lloyd, A., Briggs, D., Telford, L., Ellis, A. 1 Mar 2024, In: Sociological Research Online
The New Futures of Exclusion: Life in the Covid-19 Aftermath, Briggs, D., Telford, L., Lloyd, A., Ellis, A. 1 Dec 2023
Hotel Puta: A Hardcore Ethnography of a Luxury Brothel, Briggs, D. 1 Dec 2022
Lockdown: Social Harm in the Covid-19 Era, Briggs, D., Telford, L., Lloyd, A., Ellis, A., Kotzé, J. 11 Dec 2021

PGR Supervision

Sarah Lea The Unaffordable Strawberry: A Community Ethnography of Working-Class Families and their Food Habitus in Hebburn and Jarrow Start Date: 20/04/2026
Michael Heyman Epistemic Quarantine: to what extent did British newspapers use 'conspiracy theory' attributions to exclude plausible dissent during the Covid-19 pandemic? Start Date: 01/10/2025
Esme Wragg TikTok Governance: Navigating Conspiracy Narratives and Vaccine Opposition in a Post-COVID World. Start Date: 01/10/2024
Esme Wragg TikTok Governance: Navigating Conspiracy Narratives and Vaccine Opposition in a Post-COVID World. Start Date: 01/10/2024 End Date: 17/10/2025