RGS

Biography

Biography

I was previously a part-time Professor of Social/Cultural Ethnography at Keele from May 2003. Trained in literary criticism at Cambridge, I received my PhD in 1972 from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University where I remained as Senior Research Fellow until 1981. During the 1980`s I served as youth policy adviser to Wolverhampton Borough Council in the English Midlands. There I produced The Youth Review (published by the Council and Ashgate) which formed the basis for youth policy in that city and for the formation of the democratically elected Youth Council, both still functioning. During the 1990`s I served first as Head of the Division of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and then as a member of the Professoriate at the University of Wolverhampton. In 2000 I co-founded the Sage Journal, Ethnography .

My work has focussed on the mainly, but not exclusively, ethnographic study of lived cultural forms in a wide variety of contexts, from highly structured to weakly structured ones, examining how practices of `informal cultural production` help to produce and construct cultural worlds `from below`. Currently I am working on conceptual and methodological ways of connecting or re-connecting a concern with identity/culture to economic structure, with particular reference to `shop floor culture`.

I have held a variety of consulting posts including: membership of the Youth Policy Working Group of the Labour Party (1989-90); at the English Arts Council (1992-3); at the Tate Gallery of the North (1995-6). I am a Board member of the journal Youth Studies and jointly edits Ethnography . I review widely for publishers and journals, have externally examined a wide range of PhD theses and am currently the external examiner for the Sociology degree at Loughborough University.

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