The title of this blog is one I’ve always wanted to deploy. All being well, I may possibly revisit it in a future publication. The crux of the issue for now is that not only do the theoretical standpoints and analyses of different thinkers and writers often overlap, but that sorting out and coming to… Read More »
I recently posted a photo of myself on Twitter/X with the caption, ’on my way to the pro-Palestinian protest in London’. Unusually for me, it solicited quite some attention, with 7.6 thousand likes and 1.2 thousand retweets. It also provoked a considerable number of responses (which I didn’t bother to count). Many of these were… Read More »
I have increased my rate of reading since retirement. I now read a couple a week on average. For anyone with nothing better to do, here’s my reading over the last seven years. 2017 Dexter: Ted Dexter declares Simenon: Maigret, Longnon and the gangsters Talbot & Weaver: Flight of the martlets Rutherford: Unexpected Simenon: Maigret… Read More »
While Stuart Hall was not a sociologist his work has a clear and lasting relevance to practitioners of the discipline, especially to those interested in culture. Along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams he was a founder of a school of thought known as ‘British Cultural Studies; he was a founder too of the New… Read More »
Arlie Russell Hochschild is a pioneer of theory and research on ‘emotional labour’, in the process opening up a novel field of enquiry. Resisting any temptation to ‘reduce’ the emotions either to biological or social phenomena, she argues that they are uniquely related to both action and cognition. Emotions for her, as Simon Williams summarises… Read More »
I have over time reached the conclusion that as a teacher I communicate best with undergraduates, and that as a writer I communicate best with academic colleagues. I rarely teach now, but I have continued to write a decade or more into retirement. Recently a colleague has quite rightly raised the issue of why we… Read More »
Garibaldi Square Old men lean to each other gesticulating their opinions, each like a frustrated lover taunted by fretful minions. The shaded seats are gone, as if permanently selected, a citizen assembly that’s won the right to reward its elected. We accept our lot and hunch, back to the piercing sun, pasta… Read More »
The motivation behind blogging was for me the opportunity it afforded to ‘think aloud’. It was unnecessary to be concerned about reviewers and editors. I could say what I wanted, as it were, uncensored. 400+ blogs later, I took a time-out to write my latest book on the idea of a healthy society. Now I’m… Read More »
The chances of me being invited to choose eight records to pack away for the life of a castaway on an otherwise uninhabited island remain, well, negligible is to put it too positively. So I thought, okay, I’ll interview myself, if only for my own amusement. Like most ‘real’ invitees to ‘Desert Island Discs’, I… Read More »
I have just now sent off a draft of my next book, to be called ‘Health: Policy, Practice, Obstacles’. While I am awaiting comments from reviewers and the series editors, and to pass the time between writing projects – in my local, the King Willie – I thought I’d say something about a concept that… Read More »