Karen O'Reilly

Karen O'Reilly is Emeritus Professor Loughborough University and Professor II at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NTNU. She is most well-known for methodology textbooks: Qualitative Research Methods for Everyone (2025, Policy Press), Key Concepts in Ethnography (2008, Sage) and her bestselling book Ethnographic Methods (2012, Routledge).

She has been researching migration, using ethnographic methods, since the early 1990s. Starting with British emigration to Spain, she wrote The British on the Costa del Sol in 2000 (Routledge). She then spent several years establishing the field of lifestyle migration and is especially known for the edited volume Lifestyle Migration: relations experiences and expectations (Ashgate 2009, ed with M. Benson). Later she has focused on employing sociological theory for broader understandings of migration processes. This work has been published as International Migration and Social Theory, (Palgrave 2012), and Lifestyle Migration and Colonial traces in Malaysia and Panama (Palgrave 2018, with M. Benson). Karen’s main contribution to migration studies has been to advocate the telling of practice stories to elucidate the structural and agentic aspects of migration processes and how these interrelate over time. This has informed much of her work, including International Labour migration to Europe’s Rural Regions (Routledge 2021, ed with J.F. Rye).

Karen currently works as a freelance research methods trainer and has taught social research methods for over 25 years, including the prestigious Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, the Swiss Summer School in Lugano, and at universities of Aberdeen, Essex, Loughborough and Oxford in the UK, as well as for Universities in Hong Kong, Germany, Netherlands, and Norway. She regularly provides training for professionals via the Social Research Association and has provided training for several UK agencies, organisations, charities, and government departments.