Abstract
Elizabeth Bott Spillius did her first degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto, where she was born, and then an MA at the University of Chicago in anthropology. She came to the London School of Economics to teach anthropology – American Indians actually – in 1949, then worked as an anthropological field worker at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations on a study of ordinary London families from 1951 to 1957. She published her part of the research as Family and Social Network in 1957. She also did a protracted study of social change in a mental hospital called ‘Asylum and Society’, published in 1976 in the British Journal of Medical Psychology. She started to train as a psychoanalyst in 1956, but interrupted the training to do a field trip with her husband, James Spillius, in the Kingdom of Tonga, from 1958–1960, which she wrote about in 1982 in a book called Tonga at the Time of Captain Cook's Visits, and in a paper called ‘Authority and rank in the kingdom of Tonga’. Since that time she has worked as a psychoanalyst, editing a book on Kleinian psychoanalysis and writing various papers in psychoanalysis which she hopes to combine into a book eventually.
Nickie Charles is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick. She has recently completed a restudy of research into the family and social change carried out in the 1960s in Swansea and is currently working on the book of the project. She is about to start work on a new, ESRC-funded project, ‘Gender and political processes in the context of devolution’ which will take devolved government in Wales as a case study. This work is being undertaken with colleagues in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wales Swansea. Recent books include Gender in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Feminism, the State and Social Policy (Palgrave, 2000).
Anthony Cohen undertook fieldwork in Newfoundland (1968–70) focusing on issues of local-level politics and community development; and then in Whalsay, Shetland, from 1973–1990, looking especially at social and personal identity and cultural change. He taught at universities in Canada (1968–71); at Manchester (1971–89) and Edinburgh, where he held the Chair of Social Anthropology, 1989–2003. He was a leading figure in the so-called ‘second wave’ of anthropological studies of Britain. He is now Principal of Queen Margaret University College, and Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Charlotte Aull Davies is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology, the School of Environment and Society, University of Wales Swansea. She has researched and published on many areas of Welsh society and culture including: feminism and nationalism; the Welsh language and identity; equal opportunities and Welsh women in senior management; performance and ritual in the Welsh National Eisteddfod; and education and national identity. She is the author of Reflexive Ethnography (1999) and co-editor of Welsh Communities: New Ethnographic Perspectives (2003).
Cathrine Degnen is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle. She is a medical anthropologist with research interests in ageing, self, and experience; social memory and place; and public understandings of genetics. Upcoming publications include ‘Softly, Softly: Comparative Silences in British Stories of Genetic Modification’ in Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology and ‘Back to the Future: Temporality, Narrative, and the Ageing Self’ in Cambridge Anthropology.
Elizabeth Hart is Senior Lecturer in social anthropology in the School of Nursing at the University of Nottingham. Since completing her Doctoral research in the pottery industry in the 1980s, she has conducted anthropological fieldwork in a variety of organisations in the National Health Service and has written about the application of anthropology to the health services, including stroke services in the community. She is a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute's Medical committee. After almost twenty years she is returning to the Potteries to conduct research into the impact of the decline of the pottery industry on women's family and working lives.
David H.J. Morgan came to Manchester in 1962 to work on a study of a local factory. It was here that he first met Ronnie Frankenberg. He is now formally retired after over 35 years at Manchester University. Recent publications include Clare Holdsworth and David Morgan (2005) ‘Transitions in Context’ (Open University Press) and David Morgan, Berit Brandth & Elin Kvande (Eds) (2005), ‘Gender, Bodies and Work’ (Ashgate).
Judith Okely is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Hull and Honorary Research Associate, Oxford Brookes. Her books include: The Traveller-Gypsies (1982), Simone de Beauvoir: a re-reading (1986), Anthropology and Autobiography (1992) and Own or Other Culture (1996). Recently published articles appear in Ethnos (2001), Anthropological Quarterly (2003) and The Journal of Mediterranean Studies (2003). She is on the Editorial Boards of Anthropology Today and Ethnos. She previously held a Chair at Edinburgh University and has been visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen and CEU, Budapest.
Ray Pahl is Visiting Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Keele and Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. He has just completed a five year project on Re-thinking Friendship with Liz Spencer and they are now both working with David Lockwood and David Rose at ISER on a project on Social Comparisons and Relative Deprivation.
Pnina Werbner is Professor of Social Anthropology at Keele University and author of the Migration Trilogy (The Migration Process, Berg 2002; Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims, James Currey 2002; Pilgrims of Love: the Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult, Hurst 2003). She has written extensively on cultural hybridity, multiculturalism, ethnicity and ritual and religion in the context of migration. Her current research is on a manual workers’ union and women's non-governmental public action in Botswana.