The complex interconnections of sexual abuse, greed, power and influence, and the unholy mix of financiers, politicians, royalty, celebrities, the military, intellectuals and others with actual or perceived ‘power’ that we can all see in the release of the Epstein files, is a site for sociological analysis as well as political and legal commentary. One…

Since the early 2000s, I have devoted considerable time to reworking, reconsidering, and revisiting legacy studies in sociology. Be it Elias, Jephcott, or many others, one of the things that intrigues me is the connections between academics and academic communities. Of course, at the time of the studies that interest me – 1940s-1960s – the…

Visual work allows us to see the ongoing and embodied practice everyday life, productions that are multidimensional and chaotic: skills and performances that cannot be reduced to words and which words alone cannot represent. Visual work embeds its’ sociological subjects in context. It places the unfolding of action in space and time, in particular material…

Image 1: Students In Amsterdam or Leiden circa 1930, (c) John Goodwin Collection At a Sunday market near the old Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam in 2018, there were many stalls selling photographs, artwork, paintings, and vintage pin badges in various designs, colours, and patterns. One photograph struck me as particularly interesting. I inquired about the…

Coming soon. One of the very first things I wrote was an account of having asthma. I wrote this aged 12 in 1982 at the request of my paediatric consultant. I had been hospitalised on and off for over a year, and I told him ‘he didn’t understand’ what having asthma was really like. He…

So we go inside and we gravely read the stonesAll those people, all those livesWhere are they now? With loves, and hates and passions just like mineThey were born and then they lived and then they diedIt seems so unfair, I want to cry* Cemeteries might not be the first place that springs to mind…

I have received funding from the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and the LIAS Archives and Special Collections Fellowship to undertake research on Norbert Elias and Illya Neustadt in Ghana during the 1950s and 1960s. They were both Head of Sociology at the University of Ghana, Accra. (c) John Goodwin, University of Ghana, Accra, 2008. My dear…

Goodwin, J. (2023) Slower Sociologies for the Sociology of the Future, Sociology. Vol/57, No. 2, https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385221127106