Over 40 years ago, in 1981, a group of us based at the University of Essex published the book, The Making of the Modern Homosexual. And very recently, one of the contributors – Gregg Blachford – has written a very lively reflection on this book, and his own engagement, in his wonderful new blog: A…
Today, I have updated my publications and articles section. See All Publications 1973-2022. The opening listing now provides a coverage from 1973, my first published article, to 2022, where several forthcoming publications and listed. There are around 170 publications in all, listed by type and date. This is more or less complete. Beyond this All…
White. A-blank-page-or-canvas. So-many-possibilities. Sunday in the Park with George I have long been fascinated with Sondheim’s lyrics, writings, and musicals. They help bring alive an inspiring sense of a deeply human relational, moving, and contingent world stuffed full of everyday precariousness and ambiguity. Here we can sense negotiated social structures formed through fragile human beings…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Whose side are we on? Power, Stigma, Transgression and Exclusion in Everyday Life 4,5,6 July 2018 University of Lancaster For more info: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/sssi2018/ Ken Plummer: “Whose Side Are We On?” Revisited: On Narrative Power, Inequality and Hope ‘To have values or not to have values: the question is always with us’. And so Howard S.…
To mark the 50th Anniversary Changes in the law…… a recent little piece written for the British Sociological Association Web site at: British Sociological Association: News: July 27th 50 Years of Decriminalization? Still Queer After All These Years On 27th July 1967, the Sexual Offences Act, ‘an act to amend the law of England…