I joined The University of Glasgow as Head of Sociology in 2022. Before that I was the Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. I started out my journey into sociology as a youth worker in London in the 1980s where young people were creating a new kind of culture of expression in language, music and identity in the face of discrimination, racism and hatred. That experience really shaped my intellectual and political commitments. I worked as a social researcher at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education London and Birkbeck College, London. I taught in the Department of Cultural Studies, University of Cultural Studies before returning to Goldsmith in 1993.
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Hope in Dark Times: The politics and practice of lived experience
November 16, 2026
9:00 am
GMT
ComplexitySalon comes to Oxford. A day for lived experience practitioners with Professor Les Back and Professor Chris Mowles at Rhodes House.
Most organisations value quantities over qualities, claiming to be more 'evidence-based'. In institutions grounded in natural science, the appeal to evidence can silence the particular, the personal, and the experiential. This is why lived experience testimony and narrative can present powerful challenges to orthodox ways of managing and making policy. But bringing lived experience into an organisational setting is beset with difficulties. It is also a political act, and is likely to be resisted. So what are the strengths and limitations of lived experience? What possibilities are there for developing the approach as method? How might we learn from one another?
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