Much of my thinking/reading/writing since retirement has been focused on two longstanding areas of interest: health inequalities and the sociology of stigma. This has culminated in two single-authored volumes, Sociology, Health and the Fractured Society: A Critical Realist Account (Routledge, 2018) and A Sociology of Shame and Blame: Insiders Versus Outsiders (Palgrave, 2020). To a… Read More »
I have commented several times on the patterns in my reading and writing. These were not chosen but rather emerged over time. Only gradually did I become reflexive about them. Now I wonder if they are forces for good or ill. I remember little of the detail of what I read, though I can generally… Read More »
Shortly after my retirement from UCL in 2013 one of my daughters, Rebecca, suggested that I launch my own website, and maybe do a blog or two. ‘It will give you something to do’, she said. Given her expertise in website design this seemed a sensible option. And so, I think, it has proved. At… Read More »
This second and no less contingent set of memories takes me through my years at university and their immediate sequelae. They are memories, it has to be said, of a very different era and set of student experiences. Nor is the difference merely material, dependent on the fact that we babyboomers were funded for our… Read More »
I resolved from the start of this commitment to sociological and autobiographical fragments not to include/expose my (nuclear) family to public gaze; and this was obviously right. So in recalling once more ‘moments’ from my past I am omitting many vital, intimate and permanent memories. It is often and appropriately said that as you get… Read More »
On retiring, contentedly enough, in 2013, I began to think through my future in more detail. I’d never had any intention of stopping either lecturing or writing/publishing (though I didn’t for a moment presume a flow of invitations for the former or interest/acceptance in relation to the latter). The thing about retiring is that you… Read More »
I retired on 1 October, 2013, a few days shy of 65, and a month short of being entered for the REF. Cunning eh? It brought to an end a solid baby-boomer career, one not without its tribulations, but tribulations carrying a lesser degree of threat than that faced by my successors. For Paul Higgs… Read More »
I had two alternatives titles in mind for this short quasi-autobiographical blog. The first was ‘Prince Charles and I’, the second ‘Me and Prince Charles’. The first strikes as a little courtly – as in the Queen’s routine refrain, ‘My husband and I’ – but accords with a pattern of speech I was taught and… Read More »
From the early 1970s until I retired in 2013 I lectured on ‘death and dying’ to medical students, initially at Charing Cross HMS, then the Middlesex HMS, and finally at UCL Medical School (strange that all but the last no longer exist, having been incorporated into, or swallowed whole by, Imperial College and UCL respectively).… Read More »
I suppose there is an inevitable gap between reading and writing. In the late ‘noughties’ I added reading ‘Maggie’ Archer to a long-term familiarity with the works of Roy Bhaskar. Eventually, if this is the apt phrase, it bore fruit in my published work. (I have blogged about her work in some detail outside of… Read More »