I have recently been involved in a new edited collection of personal stories by gay men. The Everyday Lives of Gay Men draws on the expertise of 12 contributors from different countries and fields, writing from an auto-ethnographic first-person approach. Putting the power of personal stories at the centre of the construction of sophisticated narratives of gay…
Author: kenplummer
NARRATIVE NOW An interview with Ken Plummer
Earlier this year I was interviewed by two dynamic sociologists, Ashley Barnwell and Signe Ravn – both at the University of Melbourne (see picture below). They run a regular podcast series NARRATIVE NOW. These look at different approaches to narrative and‘how to employ them. For episode 4 they interviewed me about my engagement over the…
SOCIOLOGY: THE BASICS 3rd edition is now published
. Yesterday, the third edition of Sociology: The Basics was published. It started life back in 2010, and has been translated into six languages: in South Korea, Indonesia, Portuguese / Brazil, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish/Mexico. The new edition of Basics updates everything but keeps the structure very much the same. It might even be called the Covid-19…
Books, Articles & Research, Imagining Better Worlds, Insipirations, Living Humanity, Politics and change, Sociological Imaginations
CRITICAL HUMANISM: An interview with Ken Plummer
Critical Humanism: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (2021) Polity Press has just been published and here Ken is interviewed about the book. This was published on the Polity Press Blog on 27th September 2021. See https://politybooks.com/blog/ Q: I’ll start by asking you just what you mean by Critical Humanism? KP. The words human, humanity and…
Pioneering Social Research: Zoom Launch
Pioneering Social Research: Life Stories of a Generation by Paul Thompson, Ken Plummer and Neli Demirevacame out with Policy Press in the beginning of the year. It is a doubly unusual book: it does not argue a single hard-shaped account of how British social research developed, but a way into exploring its diversity; and it does not stand alone as a book,…
Sociology: The Basics 3rd edition
A new third edition of this book will be published in September 2021 A lively, accessible and comprehensive introduction to the diverse ways of thinking about social life, Sociology: The Basics has been translated into six languages. The volume is packed with thought-provoking summaries, questions, quotations and activities. It offers an absorbing narrative about what we mean…
Critical Humanism
Publishing on September 24th 2021 in UK We live in a mutilated world and our humanity seems irrevocably damaged. Many critics suggest we have reached the end of humanity. In this challenging book, Ken Plummer suggests that such claims may be premature; instead, what we need is a new transformative understanding of humanity. Critical Humanism critically…
Pioneering Social Research
Pioneering Social Research: Life Stories of a Generation is out now from Policy Press. Presenting the landmark Pioneers life stories project, this one-of-a-kind book documents how modern social research in the UK was shaped. It sheds new light on the lives, methods and motivations of men and women who helped develop a new world of research methodology, pioneered…
Narrative Power
NARRATIVE POWER: A SHORT INTERVIEW In this short interview, Ken Plummer tells a little about his new book. Q: Why did you write Narrative Power? Narrative has become a contemporary buzzword: everybody’s talking about it. There’s now a vast amount of writing by academics in all kinds of different disciplines from literature and the…
12th Anniversary of Liver Transplant
THE WAY IT ISby William Stafford There’s a thread you follow. It goes amongthings that change. But it doesn’t change.People wonder about what you are pursuing.You have to explain about the thread.But it is hard for others to see.While you hold it you can’t get lost.Tragedies happen; people get hurtor die; and you suffer and…