Chris Whitmore

Biography

• Former trade union full time officer (BMA, AUT, NASUWT, NAHT)
• Now HR Director in a consultancy service for Schools
• MA from Keele in Industrial Relations and employment law
• Biker and advanced rider, qualified Observer for IAM
• Triumphaholic

Known unknowns:

Whether it’s possible to own too many books on trades unions and the labour movement

• How many more books I can get in the house before my wife notices

Unknown unknowns:

•  Why I’ve added this madness to the existing madness in my life

• Whether it’s do-able

Research and scholarship

Main research interests

• Employment law impact on trades unions
• Individual vs collective rights (rights?)
• Professional collectivities, collectivism and voice
• Labour movement/ trades unions/ left history
• Narratives of justice
• Militancy, organising and mobilisation theory
• Activism and social citizenship
• Professions; formation, closure, contestation
• Power

I really could go on, you know.

Thesis plans/thoughts/dreamery

How did the “we” go from there? The individualisation and atomisation of collective resistance and rights-assertion within educational professional TU collectivisms in the 21^st Century.

Or

From blowing the whistle to whistleblowers: a tale of rights, reductionism and receding radicalism within educational trades unionism

Focus - on the impact on narratives of collectivism within a comparator study of education professionals across sectors and time (and possibly too much research ambition) of the late 20^th and early 21^st C suite of individual employment rights.

A study of where the “we” went and how TU lay and FTO structures and conceptualisations of the individual vs collective boundary are influenced and constrained by an individual rights discourse.