It has become a cliché that Sondheim was a powerhouse of change for the contemporary musical in the last half of the twentieth century. He remade it anew, brought fresh possibilities, gave it a new prominence – and, not least, he gave it a wider credibility as an art form. There were many earlier people…
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…
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…
STORYTELLING CONFERENCE 10th and 11th July 2018 University of Suffolk, UK We are excited to announce that the call for papers for our Storytelling Conference is now open. We invite papers that theoretically and empirically engage with a broad range of disciplines reflecting the diverse nature of storytelling and stories substantively and methodologically. Keynote Speakers…
On Thursday February 11 2016, my dear friend, mentor and guru John Gagnon died at the age of 84. He had experienced problems with his leg and his eye, but the final period starting in October brought a terminal pancreatic cancer. He has been an inspiration and will be loved and missed by many.…
STRANGERS DROWNING LARISSA MACFARQUHAR This has to be the best book I have read so far this year! It is the story of ‘extreme do – gooders’, obsessed altruists who push their lives to ‘moral extremity’, wanting above all to solve the world’s problems in a directly practical way – and to be…
Wivenhoe
8am January 1st 2016
Click here for the UN World Aids Day Website The latest news from the United Nations came out on November 24th ( in anticipation of World AIDS Day on December 1st). 1.2m people died from AIDS in 2014, down from 1.3m the previous year and from a peak of 2m in 2005. But the…
A new book has been launched this week. The Ashgate Research Companion to Lesbian and Gay Activism provides scholars and students with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of the current research in this subject. Each of the twenty-two specially commissioned chapters develops and summarises their key issue or debate in…