Posts Tagged life-course and midlife
Daniel Nehring, BA 2002, MA 2003, PhD 2008
Posted by stories of essex sociology in Alumni, Around the world on September 1, 2012
I began my studies in Germany and Mexico and came to Essex in 2000 to finish my BA. I enjoyed my studies at Essex, made many friends, and in the end decided to stay for my MA and PhD as well. My PhD research looked at transformations of intimate life among young middle-class people in Mexico City. It was inspired by a class on gender issues in Latin America I had taken with Diane Elson when I was an undergraduate. This goes to show, I think, that inspirational teaching can have a major and lasting intellectual impact. It’s this kind of experiences at Essex that really made a difference for me.
After leaving the university in 2008, I held a number of appointments in the UK, the USA, and the Caribbean before recently settling down in a permanent position as Research Fellow at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. My current research, on the whole, examines transformations of personal life under conditions of neoliberal globalisation and rapid social change. In addition to my persistent interest in Latin America, I have recently also started research in China. At the moment, I involved in two research projects. One is a comparative study on therapeutic culture and neoliberal discourse in five societies. A respective monograph is due to be published by Palgrave next year. In addition, I have begun a project on transnational dating and marriage among young professionals in urban China, together with colleagues at Beijing Normal University and Middlesex University. Apart from these two projects, I have almost completed work on an edited volume on transformations of intimate life in contemporary Mexico (Ashgate, 2013) and an introductory textbook for undergraduates in sociology (Pearson, 2013).
At the moment, I spend my time mainly in the Americas and in China. I am still in touch with former colleagues at Essex, though, and I remain interested in developments in British academia. One of my ways of staying involved is a blog at SAGE’s Social Science Space (below). Here, I write regularly about issues of interest to postgraduate students and early-career sociologists.
My Links:
Blog at SAGE Social Science Space: http://www.socialsciencespace.com/members/danielnehring/
Bethany Morgan, BA 2002, MA 2003 and 2005, PhD 2011
Posted by stories of essex sociology in Alumni on August 7, 2012
I started at The University of Essex in 1999 as a Linguistics student with an outside option in Sociology. I then found I loved sociology so changed over in the second year to the sociology degree scheme. I finished my BA in 2002. This was followed by an MA in Sociology 2002-2003. I then took a gap year doing social research work and returned to do a second MA from 2004-2005 on the ESRC 1+3 scheme. I then started my PhD in sociology in 2005 and completed in 2010, graduating in 2011.
I am currently now in paid employment at the University of Essex through the UK Data Archive in the ESDS Qualidata section. I train researchers (in the UK and Internationally) in secondary analysis skills and in research data management. I also create teaching resources for social science teaching. Long term I am looking to work as a lecturer or researcher in the area of social psychology.
My main academic interests are in psychosocial studies, social psychology, qualitative secondary analysis, psychoanalysis, inter-generational relationships, ageing, the sociology of death and dying, the life-course and midlife. My thesis was entitled ‘The Negotiation of Midlife: Exploring the Subjective Experience of Ageing’. It is archived with the British Library http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.531545. In it I explored the subjective experience of ageing with a particular focus on midlife. The three central themes of this thesis included the way the ageing process is experienced physically and how this in turn, affects the individual psychologically, the way personal and family relationships change during this period and the impact this has, and finally how people evaluate their lives and compared to an evaluation of their imagined futures.
I have also recently co-authored and published an article on some work I did on the Living and Working on Sheppey Project which explored the way in which young people living on Sheppey imagined their futures back in 1978 and this was then compared to the aspirations of young people in 2010.
Lyon, D., Morgan Brett, B., and Crow, G., (2012) ‘Working with Material from the Sheppey Archive: Exploring Formal and Contextual Data’ in Special Issue of International Journal for Social Research Methods: Perspectives on Working with Archived Textual and Visual Material. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2012.688314
You can find me on facebook here!
https://www.facebook.com/#!/bethanymorganbrett
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