Professor Daniel Briggs

Professor

Department: Social Sciences

I am an experienced researcher, writer and inter-disciplinary academic who uses ethnographic methods (observation, interviewing) to study social problems. I have dedicated much of the last 25 years to spending time with and studying homeless drug users, terminally-ill patients, refugees, prostitutes, gypsies, gang members, young offenders and deviant young people, political activists and protestors and economic migrants.

One of my most recent 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 recent 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), and am in the closing stages of finishing The New Futures of Exclusion (2023, Palgrave).

I have just published Sheltering Strangers: Critical Memoirs of hosting Ukrainian Refugees (2025, Policy Press) and have co-edited in press The Lost: Life, Loss and Legacy in Criminology (2026, Bristol University Press).

I am currently researching the luxury yacht industry and obese patients who seek low-cost, weight-loss surgery abroad.