There is a real risk that the transition to ‘senior’ – let alone retired – academic is accompanied by a shift in output towards: (a) quasi-magesterial overviews of literatures, and/or (b) sheer, unadulterated repetition. I may show signs of such shifts but fortunately that’s for others to ascertain (I’m a babyboomer touching 70 after all).
Here’s my quandry. I’m often asked to talk about health inequalities and/or stigma (which is much appreciated). But despite making slow and, I would claim, novel progress on each (see my recent Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society and my forthcoming Sociology of Shame and Blame), it’s increasingly apparent to me (possibly belatedly) that the risk of falling foul of (a) and (b) is growing. So what next?
My interests and reading have since my 20’s been wide-ranging. I could, I think, pick up on ongoing philosophical debates and social theory, as well as the sociologies of politics, welfare, sex work and sport, as well as issues of health and health care. I have also published on ‘café society’, and could – with Norwegian friend Aksel Tjora – expand this to incorporate ‘bar society’ (we have even been invited to do so by a publisher). I have in fact already agreed to work with Aksel on an English edition of his recent Norwegian book on the idea of community.
I’m presently up to listening to any advice (though I confess that time might in due course find me more decided and/or obdurate).
Here are some possibilities as – after attending the annual medical sociology conference in Glasgow – I sit in a hotel bar in Portree on Skye (set in a wondrous landscape):
• returning to philosophy (proper) to tackle issues around either the philosophy of social science in general or (Hegel, Marx and Bhaskar on) dialectics in particular;
• explicating the salience of other philosophers/social theorists for doing sociology well and maximising its effect;
• writing a textbook explicating and commenting critically on 20-30 philosophers and social theorsists salient for medical sociology;
• editing a book on applications of critical realism to the health domain;
• a theoretical discourse on the salience of social class in the 21st century;
• opting for a new and different substantive focus/topic in medical sociology;
• a sociology of photography;
• a piece of autoethnographic research, possibly on forms of familiarity and/or community in a ‘fractured’ society characterised by what I have called ‘disconnected fatalism’;
• a contribution to foresight sociology, that is, the framing of an appealing and evidence-based alternative way of living or doing things, like delivering health care or organising work or further and higher education;
• a sociology of rugby.
They all have some appeal; but then, as I have blogged before, there’s also the question of format: books, chapters, papers, and so on.
As I return to this – in a Northumberland rather than a Glaswegian or Skye bar – I’m improvising perhaps the best way. I’m thinking of a philosophical paper, including worked examples, of an approach to social phenomena that incorporates not only structural, cultural and agential causality but allows for biological and psychological mechanisms and contingency (or happenstance). I attempted something similar in relation to living with epilepsy (recounted in my Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society).
Now I’m in Cambridge and have had another thought. In Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society I also occasionally used fictional case studies to illustrate theoretical arguments. This was in lieu of searching out ‘real accounts’ from extant research reports. The fictional ones seemed – and seem to me now – to serve well as substitutes. The only qualification would seem to be that they ‘must’ ring true, that is, be consonant with real accounts. They should perhaps admit too of role-taking (and ideally allow for empathy). So, following up, I wonder if I might draft a paper on the sociological deployment of fictional lifecourses and narratives, showing how this might credibly and forcefully underpin and/or sponsor imaginative outputs.
Any advice or ideas welcome!