Sociology

As with most academics, I’ve researched and taught sociology at a number of places. I arrived at Keele having spent two years at Royal Holloway-University of London, teaching on and helping to run its MSc in Medical Sociology. Before that, I was at Colorado College (a teaching university) in the USA, where I hail from; there I taught many of the modules I teach at Keele (The Sociology of Everyday Life, Human Health and Society), but also The Sociology of Deviance and Social Control. Before that I spent 2 years as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Kentucky Medical School, having received my PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Los Angeles in 1999.

Because I’m interested in capturing people’s lived experiences in social context and over time, I became a qualitative sociologist (I conduct interviews, primarily, but have also done observational ethnographic work), mainly interested in the lived experience of health and illness and in ageing and the life course, but also researching gender and sexuality, and an abiding interest in self and identity informs all my work. These areas, of course, intersect – for example, I’m writing a grant proposal on ageing and AIDS; I’ve published extensively on older lesbians and gay men, and on how medical agents use the life course as an interpretive resource when they interact with patients; I was lead editor of a volume entitled Medicalized Masculinities, the first book to question and critique the recent (and growing) construction of masculinity as a health risk; and much of my research into the experience of chronic illness and disability centers on their implications for self and identity (particularly those chronic illnesses and disabilities that are invisible to others – this introduces very interesting issues of self-presentation). Serving on the editorial boards of Social Theory and Health and the Journal of Aging Studies helps me see overlaps between these areas.

How did I develop these interests? While studying for my doctorate, I became interested in ageing, not as a problem (how most scholarship constructs it), but as the product of a life already lived, with complex memories, resources, relationships, and engagements with historical events over the course of a lifetime. When reading about ageing, I saw that little had been done on older lesbians and gay men (that has changed now), and secured funding to study their lives and experiences. The interviews (and interviewing process) were fascinating. My thesis and subsequent publications examined my informants’ identity work and social worlds, specifically, how their early experience of a stigmatized homosexuality, and of the emergence of gay liberation, shaped their identity and social relations across the life course. This produced several articles and book chapters, and book (see below). While researching ageing at post-graduate level, I realized that I couldn’t really understand the ageing experience without understanding the experience of health and illness, so I began to study that, and quickly became hooked, particularly as the sociology of the body began to take hold.

I’m currently finishing an article on adherence to medical regimes, and working on two grant proposals (one on ageing and AIDS, and one on older Irish migrants to Manchester). Instead, I’ll list some of my favourite publications – but I’m always happy to discuss my research, and students’ research, with students.

I’ve taught on a range of modules over the years ( Introduction to Sociology, Ageing and the Life Course, The Sociology of Deviance and Social Control, The Sociology of Health and Illness, The Sociology of Everyday Life), but at Keele I teach the following modules:

• SOC 00001 Lifecourse and Society - Module Leader
• SOC 10009 Social Inequalities in the Contemporary World - Module Leader
• SOC 20044 Human Health and Society - Module Leader

I’ve also supervised MSc students (here and at Royal Holloway), as well as many undergraduate dissertations, and PhD students to completion. I’ll be co-supervising a PhD candidate in Sociology, funded by the ESRC, starting next year, and am always happy to discuss PhD ideas and plans with students at any level.