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Professor John Brewer

Professor John Brewer The University of Aberdeen School of Social Science Professor John Brewer Chair in Sociology work +44 (0)1224 272171 work fax +44 01224 272552 http://aberdeen.academia.edu/JohnBrewer   pref Department of Sociology University of Aberdeen Old Aberdeen AB24 3QY United Kingdom

Chair in Sociology

BA, MSSc, HDSocSci, MRIA, FRSE, AcSS, FRSA

Professor John Brewer

Personal Details

Telephone: +44 (0)1224 272171
Fax: +44 01224 272552
Email: j.brewer@abdn.ac.uk
Personal website: http://aberdeen.academia.edu/JohnBrewer  
Address: Department of Sociology
University of Aberdeen
Old Aberdeen AB24 3QY
United Kingdom
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The Leverhulme Trust-funded 'Compromise after Conflict' research programme http://www.abdn.ac.uk/compromise-conflict

United Nations Roster of Global Experts http://www.theglobalexperts.org/experts/expert-location/west-europe-expert-location/john-brewer

Honorary Vice President of the British Sociological Association http://www.britsoc.co.uk/

General Editor of Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict book series

http://www.palgrave.com/products/SearchResults.aspx?s=PSCAC&fid=96276&sort=or_0

 


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Biography

John David Brewer was born in Ludlow, Shropshire, and lived amidst the rolling Shropshire countryside in Cleobury Mortimer until he left for university. He retains a deep affection for the Shropshire countryside, the poetry of A.E. Housman, and the music of Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He studied at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham.

He joined the University of Aberdeen in 2004 as Sixth-Century Professor in Sociology. Formerly he held  positions at Queen’s University Belfast, the University of East Anglia, and, while doing research in South Africa, at the University of Natal, Durban. He has held visiting appointments at Yale University (1989), St John’s College Oxford (1992), Corpus Christi College Cambridge (2002) and the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University (2003). He was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2007-2008 to write up research for his book on the sociology of peace processes.

In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, in 2003 an Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences and in 2004 a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, at that point only the third sociologist in the Academy’s 217-year history. In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is one of only a handful of people world-wide elected to both the Royal Irish Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

He is a Honorary Vice President of the British Sociological Association after being President between 2009-2012. He has been Chair of the British Sociological Association (2004-2006), and sat on its National Executive Committee (2001-2007). He has formerly been on the National Committee for Economics and Social Science of the Royal Irish Academy (1997-1999), and a member of the ESRC's Training and Development Board (2005-2007) and its Viritual Research College (2006-2010). He was a member of the International Assessment Panel of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2002-2007) and sat in its Council between 2008-12. 

In 2012 he was appointed to the new Irish Research Council and to the Council of the Academy of Social Science.

In July 2012 he was awarded a honorary degree from the University of Brunel for services to social science (for the citation see http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/people/honorary-graduates/2012/john-brewer).

 

 

 

 

With respect to teaching, in 2001 he became a member of the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. 

He is author and co-author of fifteen books, including: Inside the RUC (Clarendon Press, Oxford), After Soweto (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Black and Blue (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Crime in Ireland 1945-95 (Clarendon Press, Oxford), Police, Public Order and the State (Macmillan; now in its 2nd edition), Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland 1600-1998 (Macmillan), Ethnography (Open University Press) and C. Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence (Palgrave). He is also editor of Can South Africa Survive? and Restructuring South Africa both with Macmillan and co-editor of the A-Z of Social Research with Sage.

His latest books are Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach, published by Polity Press (2010) and Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland, published by Oxford University Press (2011), which is the outcome of his ESRC-funded project on the role of the churches in Northern Ireland's peace process.

In 2013 he will have published The Public Value of Social Science: An Interpretative Essay (Bloomsbury Academic Press) designed to move the debate in British higher education beyond the narrow notion of impact, and Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: The Role of Religion in Transitional Justice (Palgrave), which is the outcome of his NIAMH-funded project on religion and ex-combatant prisoners in Northern Ireland. 

On 17 August 2011 he became a grandfather for the first time, his son Gwyn and daughter-in-law Lori having a daughter named Matilda.

 

 

In his spare time, he enjoys the company of family and friends, classical music, opera, fly-fishing, walking his dogs and watching Worcester County Cricket club and Aston Villa; in his schoolboy days he was Head Boy at Lacon Childe School, Cleobury Mortimer and played football and cricket for Shropshire and considers life to have gone down hill since. He is married to Caitriona and has three children, Bronwen, Gwyn and Fiachra, to whom he is committed emotionally and financially.


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Research Interests

Sociology of peace processes and post-conflict social adjustments; sociology of religion, especially religion as a site of conflict and reconciliation and the sociology of the Bible; history of British sociology, especially the impact of the religious beliefs of the early founders; history of Scottish social thought, especially Adam Ferguson and Robert MacIver; qualitative research methods, especially ethnography; social control in divided societies, especially policing, crime, sectarianism and racism.


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Current Research

1. Compromise after conflict

Based on a Leverhulme programme research grant of £1.26 millions over five years, this project looks at the nature of compromise, its emotional parameters, behavioural expressions and links to other affective-relational stress responses, such as hope, forgiveness and memory. The focus is on the development of compromise amongst victims of communal conflict as a case study in compromise. We address three contemporary arenas of conflict (Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka) and three historical cases (the social reintegration of child soldiers in Sierra Leone, war, recovered memory of the Spanish civil war, and memory and memorialisation of massacres in Colombia) as well as exploring the verbatim evidence of witnesses during truth recovery procedures. This is a mixed-method programme, involving surveys, qualitative interviews, and historical and documentary research. The work is being done with Professor Bernadette Hayes and Dr Francis Teeney and involves collaboration with colleagues in Northern Ireland (Yvonne McGivern), Sri Lanka (Asian Institute of Missiology) and South Africa (Fr Michael Lapsley).

I am General Editor of Pagrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict book series, which is loosely based on this programme of research. For details of the series see

http://www.palgrave.com/products/SearchResults.aspx?s=PSCAC&fid=96276&sort=or_0

2. The sociology of peace processes

Issues of war and peace are topical concerns. If new kinds of war help to define global society, late modernity is also marked by new kinds of peacemaking. The attention in social science has been on the changing character of organized violence rather than peace. What work there is on peace processes is from a ‘good governance’ and human rights perspective. This work addresses peace processes from a sociological perspective. It focuses on sociology’s contribution to understanding peace processes as it contrasts with governance and human rights approaches. This involves developing a taxonomy of the different types of post-violence society, contrasting the ways in which peace is achieved. Attention is focused on post-violence societies based around negotiated peace processes. The work explores the sociological features of peace processes, such as civil society, gender, emotions, memory, truth recovery, victimhood and citizenship education and draws heavily on the experiences of societies like Northern Ireland, South Africa, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and various South American countries. 

3. Religion and civil society in Northern Ireland’s peace process

a) Religion, civil society and peace

Based around an Economic and Social Research Council award (number RES-000-23-1258), which ran between 1 September 2005-31 August 2009, the research focuses on the role of the church and para-church organizations in Northern Ireland’s peace process as a case study of the strengths and weaknesses of civil society in divided societies. Even though religion is not the substance of the conflict in Northern Ireland, we are familiar with the role its plays in representing the groups between whom there is conflict. Religion is the form through which the conflict is experienced even though it is not about religion. The research focuses on religion as an arena of reconciliation. Some churches and para-church organizations have tried to obstruct reconciliation, and some have used religion as a resource to mobilize against peace, but it is part of folklore that some key churchmen and women have been hugely instrumental to the peace process. This contribution is systematically explored by means of in-depth interviews with churches and para-church organizations, politicians and paramilitary groups, and peace activists. Northern Ireland is used as a case study to explore the role of civil society in political transformation and, in particular, to address its ambivalent role in divided societies and in settings where religion is the form through which social conflict is experienced. Oxford University Press is publishing the results of this research in 2011 under the title Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland.

 

 

b) Religion and ex-combatant prisoners in Northern Ireland

In conjuction with Professor Gerard Leavey, Research Director of Compass, an NGO exploring mental well-being, and funded by the Northern Ireland Association of Mental Health (NIAMH), this project ran from November 2010 to October 2011 and examines the impact of religion on the post-prison lives of ex-combatant prisoners in Northern Ireland. Covering ex-prisoners from a broad spectrum of paramilitary organisations, qualitative research will be used to explore the role of religious conversions in prison and their maintenance thereafter, the impact of religion on social relations with erstwhile opponents and on their attitudes towards, and practices of, reconciliation. The book based on the project, Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland: The Role of Religion in Transitional Justice, is to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2013.

  

 

 

 

4. Space, texts and the sociological imagination

This work focuses on the influence of space on the meaning and interpretation of texts. There are three specific parts to this research.

a) Space and intellectual biography in the history of sociology.

This develops the idea of ‘spaces of selfhood’ that I have used to understand C. Wright Mills’s intellectual biography and applies it to other key sociologists in the history and development of British sociology. In earlier writings I have argued that intellectual biography needs to be reoriented in order to address the sociological spaces in which authors lived, worked and wrote as a better way to connect their life with their major sociological works. This includes the spaces in which they narrated their own accounts of the connection between their life and their sociological writings. This approach is currently being extended to understand Adam Ferguson and his famous An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) as a way into exploring the strengths and weaknesses of eighteenth-century sociology in Scotland. I am also interested in the work of Robert MacIver, a native Scotsman who first taught sociology in Aberdeen in 1907 but who went on to work in Toronto and New York, in order to explore the impact of these various ‘spaces of selfhood’ on his sociological writings.

b) Religious sociology and the origins of British sociology

This explores the impact of Christian sociology on the early development of sociology in Britain, and the way this was mediated by: i) the survival of belief amongst some of the founders of the Sociological Society in Britain, and ii) the impact of Christian socialism on early British sociology. I am analysing the 19-year run of a British journal called Christendom: A Journal of Christian Sociology, various pamphlets and other writings with an avowdly Christian sociology ethos, as well as the Branford and Le Play archives on early British sociology at Keele. The deliberate isolationist strategy of religious sociology in Britain compares markedly with the way Christian sociology in the US tried to engage with mainstream sociology but mainstream, professional sociology in Britain also engaged in disciplinary closure in an attempt to marginalise what it considered unacceptable ideas.

c) The sociology of the Bible.

This develops earlier work and seeks to apply the sociological imagination to help us understand the Bible as the key Christian text. In the past I have explored the way in which Scripture is used to justify anti-Catholicism and is thus part of the social process of sectarianism. I have also explored the way in which space impacts hermeneutical issues in the interpretation of Biblical texts to give import to the debate about homosexuality in the Church. I intend to extend this to a broader discussion of the sociology of the Bible, by which I mean three things: a) the socio-spatial factors that affect the hermeneutical issue of how to interpret Biblical texts; b) the sociological processes involved in the production and publication of the Bible as a text and the hegemony of particular translations, such as the King James’s Authorized Version; c) and the sociological dynamics involved in the use of the Bible in various social and political projects, such as homophobia, slavery, patriarchy, apartheid, sectarianism and the like.

I have organised a series of six public lectures at the University of Aberdeen to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible in 2011.

 

5. The public value of the social sciences

Drawing on my long experience of undertaking socially relevant research, much of it focused on public policy reform in divided societies, my engagement with users in Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka, and the work done with the BSA and HEFCE in developing a discipline specific notion of impact for sociology, I have been commissioned by Bloomsbury Press to write a book in 2013 on the public value of the social science. This reflects a wider interest in what is called 'public sociology', which fits neatly with my interest in C. Wright Mills's notion of the sociological imagination. I have written in 2011 short reflective pieces on impact for Research Evaluation ('The Impact of Impact') and Methodological Innovations Online ('From the Public Impact to the Public Value of Sociology'). The book will appear in January 2013 and is entitled The Public Value of the Social Sciences: An Interpretative Essay.


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Research Grants

Current research grants are:

Leverhulme Trust Programme Research Grant, Compromise after Conflict (2009-2014), £1.267 million

Northern Ireland Association of Mental Health, Religion and Ex-Combatant Prisoners in Northern Ireland (2010-2011), £30,000


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Teaching Responsibilities

Teaching

I am convenor for and teach the following modules:

SO4056 The Sociology of Peace Processes (UG 4th year option course)

SO5011 Qualitative Sociology: Philosophy and Methods (PG MRes)

 

Postgraduate supervision

I am keen to supervise students in any of my above listed research interests, and wider. My current responsibilities as first supervisor are:

Dave Magee (FT CASS) The deconstruction of violent masculinities in Loyalist paramilitaries (start 2009)

Laura Fowler (FT Leverhulme) The role and function of victim groups and victim group leaders in Northern Ireland (start 2010)

Sandra Rios (FT Leverhulme) Memory and massacres in Colombia (start 2010)

Clare Magill (FT Leverhulme) Recovered memory in post-Franco Spain (start 2010)

Rachel Anderson (FT Leverhulme) The social reintegration of child soldiers in Sierra Leone (start 2010)

Aimee Smith (FT ESRC) Post-conflict Catholic youth identity (start 2011)

Duncan Scott (FT International Commonwealth Studentship) Religion and transitional justice in South Africa (start 2012)

 

Recently completed PhDs as first supervisor include Catholics in the PSNI, community policing in Saudi Arabia, funeral practices in modern Scotland, and police reform in Thailand.


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External Responsibilities

My current external responsibilities are:

External Examiner in Sociology (UG/MA), University of Kent (2008-)

External Examiner in Sociology (UG), University of Plymouth (2010-)

Member of the Edtorial Boards of: 21st Century Society: The Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences; International Bibliography of Social Science; Memory Studies

Member of the United Nations roster of global experts (2010-) http://www.globalexpertfinder.org/

I sit on the Advisory Board of the Social Science Research Centre at University College Dublin (2010-)

I sit on the Council of the Irish Research Council (2012-)

I sit on the Council of the Academy of Social Science (2012-)


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Admin Responsibilities

 


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Other Information

He was Head of the Department of Sociology at Aberdeen (2004-2007), Deputy Head of the School of Social Sciences (2005-2007) and a member of the College Research Committee (2005-2006)


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Selected papers for downloading

Below is a selection of papers for free downloading. I have selected papers that are more difficult to access, which means mostly that they are works in progress or represent seminar papers and public lectures, although occasionally I have included the PDF file of a few recent items, as well as some chapters in edited collections, already in the public domain. Normal copyright conventions apply to everything listed here.

Compromise after Conflict

Compromise After Conflict (Public Lecture at the Lecture Series on Justice and Love, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia at Charlottesville, 30 September 2010)

The sociology of peace processes

Memory, truth and victimhood in post-trauma societies.doc (from G. Delanty and K. Kumar, The Sage Handbook of Nations and Nationalism, London, Sage, 2006)

Post violence as a sociological category.doc (Seminar paper, Research School of Social Sciences, Australia National University, Canberra, November, 2003)

Justice in the context of racial and religious conflict.doc (from Logos, vol. 41, 2004 [Sri Lankan])

Dealing with emotions in peacemaking.doc (Seminar paper, International Institute of the Sociology of Law, Onati, Spain, September 2004)

Religion and civil society in Northern Ireland's peace process

Religion, conflict and peace in Northern Ireland.doc (Inaugural lecture, University of Aberdeen, November 2007)

Peacemaking amongst Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.doc (from M. Cejka and T. Bamat, Grassroots Peacemaking, New York, Orbis Book, 2003)

Ensuring equality of religion and belief.doc (Address to the ESRC/Northern Ireland Equality Commission joint seminar, Public Policy, Equality and Diversity in the Context of Devolution. Equality House, Belfast, 18 February 2005)

Space, texts and the sociological imagination

Sexuality in the Church: toward a sociology of the Bible.doc (from Sociological Research Online, vol. 8, 2003)

Sociology and theology reconsidered. Religious sociology and the sociology of religion in Britain.pdf (from History of Human Sciences, vol 20, 2007)

C Wright Mills, the LSE and the sociological imagination.doc (Seminar paper at the LSE, January 2007)

The public and private in C. Wright Mills's life and work.pdf (from Sociology, vol. 39, 2005)

Imagining The Sociological Imagination: the biographical context of a sociological classis.doc (from British Journal of Sociology, vol 55, 2005)

Putting Adam Ferguson in his place.pdf (from British Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, 2007)

Adam Ferguson's epistolary self.doc (from E. Heath and V. Merolle, Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature. London, Pickering and Chatto, 2007)

Robert Morrison MacIver as sociologist and Scotsman.doc (Seminar paper, Institute for Irish-Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen, May 2006)

An Introduction to MacIver at Aberdeen.doc (Introductory address to the Robert MacIver Centenary Conference, University of Aberdeen, May 2007)

 

Methodology

Ethnography.pdf (from C. Cassell and G. Symon, Essential Guide to Qualitative Methods in Organizational Research, London, Sage, 2004)

 

Northern Ireland

Contesting Ulster.doc (from R. Robin and B. Strath, Homelands: Poetic Power and the Politics of Space, Brussels, Peter Lang, 2003)

Continuity and change in contemporary Ulster Protestantism.doc (from Sociological Review, vol. 52, 2004)

The roots of sectarianism in Northern Ireland.doc (from O. Hargie and D. Dickson, Researching the Troubles, Edinburgh, Mainstream Publishing, 2004) With Gareth Higgins begin_of_the_skype_highlighting     end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Landscape of Spires.doc (from F.W. Boal and S. Royal, Enduring City: Belfast in the Twentieth Century, Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 2006) With Maragret Keane and David Livingstone


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Publications

Contributions to Journals

Articles

Editorials

Chapters in Books, Reports and Conference Proceedings

Chapters

Books and Reports

Books

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