My parents live on as consociates or contemporaries in defiance of their status as predecessors. I have in frames in my bedroom photos of them attending my wedding (back in 1972), plus an assortment of portraits of them singly or together stretching back to the 1930s. While I’ve not yet reached the stage of talking… Read More »
I’m hitting 70 as I’m writing this, though I’ve only actually reached my late 50s in my ‘sociological autobiography’. But I can please myself what I write when: no publisher to satisfy. So in this fragment I’m drawing on Schutz plus some thinking of my own (in a continuing collaboration with Aksel Tjora) on familiarity.… Read More »
There was once a time when I could reasonably be defined as ‘religious’, if in a vague protestant/CofE way: I held my hand up in an earlier fragment. With a degree of embarrassment I suspect it coincided with a phase of my life during which I was a more or less decent human being (though… Read More »
In February 2007 I received an unexpected email from Selwyn College Cambridge inviting me to attend a formal, black-tie dinner and give an after-dinner speech. I had at it happens spoken at an array of Cambridge Colleges, including a formal lecture at St John’s, but only to deliver standard sociological fare. This was different. I… Read More »
The point I’ve reached in this ‘sociological autobiography’ was one of flux and change. I had managed to work my way around what had been presented to me by Stan Newman as an attempt to get me out of UCL – though all was later mired in confusion – and Graham Hart had welcomed me… Read More »
In an earlier autobiograhical posting I offered a ‘ledger’ for the 1990s, giving a tally of a very varied list of publications. 2006 was to prove a turning point in a number of ways. The threat to my job, expedient and unwarranted though it was in my view, now as well as then, had the… Read More »
I have attended my share of international conferences, though I suspect far fewer than my successors. This is partly my fault. For a while – in the easrly and mid- 1970s – I refused to travel abroad unless I had something to say. The consultant neurologist who oversaw my study at the time, if not… Read More »
I was fortunate in 2005 to be asked to give a plenary lecture at the annual BSA Medical Sociology Conference. This represents a kind of coming of age for medical sociologists in the UK. My title was ‘Social Structure and Health: A Narrative of Neglect?’ The central thesis, which I had by then addressed often,… Read More »
On the 1st of September, 2006, I gave a paper on ‘reducing health inequalities’ to the biannual meeting of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology in Krakow. To be honest I was less than impressive. I recall wishing afterwords that I’d been more articulate, more on the ball, not least because old friend… Read More »
2006 was a turning point for me. When I came to what was then the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1978, it was John Hinton’s Department of Psychiatry I entered. After Rachel Rosser’s premature and sad death, Stan Newman climbed a short greasy UCL pole and took over. For one reason or another, he subsequently… Read More »