Katy Wheeler

Katy Wheeler is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex. Her research critically examines how moral and political-economic frameworks shape sustainable consumption, with particular focus on the role of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in producing normative expectations around sustainability, especially for young people. Drawing on the sociology of consumption, she investigates how sustainability is enacted, negotiated, and resisted across everyday practices and institutional settings. Katy is an experienced qualitative researcher and methods educator, specialising in CAQDAS-supported analysis, qualitative interviewing, and survey methods. Her recent work explores the implications of generative AI for qualitative research, advocating for greater technological reflexivity. She is the author of Fair Trade and the Citizen-Consumer: Shopping for Justice? and Household Recycling and Consumption Work: Social and Moral Economies (both Palgrave Macmillan), and has published in journals including Consumption and Society, Sustainability, and the Journal of Moral Education.