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.