A new article was published in November last year. I have just put a working version on line. See “Narrative Power, sexual stories and the politics of sexual story telling“
Author: kenplummer
Today is the 10th anniversary of my transplant!
Everyday, for the past ten years, I have quietly celebrated the joy of a human life. When, on February 18th 2007, I was wheeled into the operating room at King’s Hospital for a liver transplant, my life was saved. Two years earlier I had been diagnosed with liver cirrhosis and had increasingly come…
I am lecturing social psychology for a few weeks
When I started teaching at Essex in 1975, one of my main courses was Social Psychology. This year I am returning ti give four lectures on this course. 40 years on! And the subject has moved on You can find this by clicking here SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY SC213-5-FY 2017 SUPPLEMENTARY HANDOUT FOR WEEKS 17-20, LECTURES 12-15…
The little book of humanist quotes- January
This year I start a new monthly series of quotes I like from my little humanist dictionary! January What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? George Eliot, “Middlemarch” Progress is not an illusion; it happens but it is slow and invariably disappointing. George…
Madrid Lectures
Thanks to all the good folk at Madrid, Here are some nice photos. My handout can be found at:Lectures in Madrid, November 2016
2017: A new dawn is broken
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
Vote for a Cosmopolitan and Caring World
The horrors of the Daily Mail
The day Jo Cox was murdered, the Daily Mail ran a shrill front page story about migrants, stoking fear and hate in the referendum campaign. The story was plain wrong — but instead of remorsefully retracting it, the Mail just buried a tiny correction in the paper. Our democracy relies on media that tells the…
Sociology: The Basic 2nd Edition
Sociology: The Basics 2nd edition will be published on May 31st This lively and compact introduction to sociology provides a stimulating and critical guide to the ideas and debates that shape the discipline. The reader is invited to develop a sociological imagination relevant for today’s troubled world. It introduces theory, methods and the history of…