Having grown accustomed to arguing for the sociological importance of social structural analysis, maybe it was unsurprising that I came to turn this lens onto my own and others’ studies of stigma. As early as 2004 I published a paper in Social Theory and Health entitled ‘Re-framing stigma: felt and enacted stigma and challenges to… Read More »
Maggie Archer has distanced herself from a significant post-doc mentor, Pierre Bourdieu, by suggesting that he paid too little attention to agency. It is a disagreement that trespasses on fine-grained philosophical territory, but it also provides a convenient opening here. What did Bourdieu argue? I will be brief and am again resorting to what I… Read More »
In 2005 I was invited to give a plenary lecture at the annual autumn meeting of the Medical Sociology Group of the British Sociological Association. This represented, and represents, a kind of coming of age for medical sociologists in the UK. The title I chose was ‘Social Structure and Health: A Narrative of Neglect?, and… Read More »
To most people reading thus far it will be apparent that my lasting attractions to the works of Habermas and Bhaskar suggests a sympathy with ‘left-of-centre’ thinking. After all, Habermas was once a Marxist, and Bhaskar remained one. Sketch 1 traced my ancestry and established that my parents, Ron and Margaret, were not politically motivated… Read More »
My theoretical deliberations didn’t play out in an institutional vacuum. In 1997 I was appointed a Reader at UCL, and in 2001 a Professor. True to form for one of Margaret Archer’s meta-reflexives, I had rarely shown myself to be proactive in my own interests. My idea of ‘getting on’ was, and remains, largely confined… Read More »
I remarked in passing that I had read and relished Roy Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science soon after it was published in the mid-1970s, and indeed that it was prescribed reading on my ‘conceptual foundations of modern sociological thought’ unit on the Intercalated B.Sc for medical students from London University well before the end of… Read More »
From the 1990s and through the ‘noughties and beyond the main focus of my writing switched from long-term illness and stigma to health inequalities. There was a short interlude, however, during which I conducted or oversaw a few short projects on the sex industry, and these can be briefly summarised before the bulk of this… Read More »
During old friend Terry Boswell’s time as chair of the Department of Sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, he came up with the notion that Annette and I might be invited to be Visiting Professors of Sociology for a semester, putting on hold their replacements for two permanent posts. Knowing Terry as we did, we… Read More »
In 1972 our family had moved into a spacious unfurnished flat in Epsom, 45 Sandown Lodge. Unbeknown to me before the event, Anthony Hopkins had exaggerated my income to satisfy our new landlords, Freshwater. Freshwater symbolised greed and we were to be subject to repeated attempts over the next twenty years to raise our rents,… Read More »
As my original attraction to philosophy and my decision to teach an intercalated B.Sc unit on the conceptual foundations of modern sociological thought might suggest, I have always been drawn to abstruse matters. It was in the 1980s during my tenure at the Middlesex that I first expressed this in print. I was busy enough… Read More »