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…
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…
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…
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“
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…
And now: for my 160th blog, something completely different……. The White Feather and The Smallest Show on Earth Last week I had the joy of seeing not one but two brand new British musicals. One was at the tiny Union Theatre in Southwark – a dramatic tale of the First World…
Last week I attended an exciting Summer School at Durham University for the Centre for Sex, Gender and Sexualities Centre. Here is the abstract of the lecture I gave. More details can be found at Telling Sexual Stories Twenty Years On: Narrative Power and Narrative In this lecture I will briefly revisit my study Telling…
Cosmopolitan Sexualities is now published My latest book was published in May 2015 by Polity Press. You can find details and a study guide for it by clicking here or the tab at the top: Cosmosexualities It is reviewed in the Times Higher Education here, along with my ‘full profile, at: Review’ From the cover:…
Today, March 9th, marks the 10th anniversary of my ‘illness’. It is this day in 2005 I was rushed to hospital in Santa Barbara, diagnosed with ‘alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver’, told to give up drink or die. It was also the day I first heard the word ‘transplant’ It…