Prof. George William Brown OBE, FBA (1930–2026)

"George Brown was a huge figure in sociology and social psychiatry. At a time when social science and psychiatry were so riven with conceptual differences they could not work constructively, George’s approach was collaborative, courageous and imaginative. His work addressed real-world problems and in so doing greatly enriched mental health research."

Professor Matthew Hotopf, Executive Dean, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/professor-george-william-brown-obe-fba-19302026

Starting in Warrington School of Nursing (Winwick Hospital) as a student mental health nurse in October 1977 you can how that curriculum and programme of study came about; and influences on Brian Hodges' early career.

 

Hodges' Health Career - Care Domains - Model

 

 An individual's 'health career' is impacted by their life chances and life events.

 

 

individual

|
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES             

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL   

|

group

Individual Psychology Life events PSYCHIATRY psycho-	Life events EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHIATRY
social Group Psychology Life events SOCIAL & CULTURAL  PSYCHIATRY	LIFE EVENTS  PSYCHO-POLITICAL PSYCHIATRY

See also:

Wing, J.K., & Brown, G.W. (1970). Institutionalism and Schizophrenia: A Comparative Study of Three Mental Hospitals 1960–1968. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press. 

Brown, G. & Harris, T. (1978) Social Origins of Depression. A Study of Psychiatric Disorder in Women. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar 

Brown G.W. & Harris, T. (1979) Social origins of depression: a study of psychiatric disorder in women, London: Tavistock Publications.

Brown, G. W., & Harris, T. O. (Eds.). (1989). Life events and illness. The Guilford Press.

My source: Patrick Kidd. Forum, Obituary, The Observer. 20th September, 2026, p.42.
https://observer.co.uk/profile/obituary/article/george-brown-the-former-post-office-boy-who-unlocked-the-mystery-of-depression

Previously: 'social sciences' : 'psychiatry' : 'determinants'

Sociology: Open access resources and course materials - BUP

As an introduction to our publishing in Sociology -

 https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/subject/SOC-Taster-Collection 

 

- we curated a collection of free and open access books and chapters that we think will contribute to your reading lists. Our growing list has a global outlook featuring high-quality research across emerging and established areas in the field, such as migration, gender, education, ageing, science and technology, death and culture, activism and organizing, race and ethnicity, decolonization, public sociology and children and families.

Highlights from the collection include:

• Permanent Racism: Race, Class and the Myth of Postracial Britain
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/display/book/9781447360193/ch001.xml?rskey=3Kdr6W&result=21?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026

• The Politics of Intersectional Practice: Representation, Coalition and Solidarity in UK NGOs
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollchap/book/9781529247220/int001.xml?rskey=L6cpzn&result=1?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026

• Welcoming Cities: How Newcomers Shape Urban Policy Making
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/monochap/book/9781447378457/int001.xml?rskey=L6cpzn&result=4?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026
  
  
• Emotions in Crisis: Youth and Social Change in Spain
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/monochap/book/9781529235050/int001.xml?rskey=NiTJML&result=20?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026
  
  
• Navigating Contemporary Fatherhood in Europe: Care and Involvement in Everyday Life
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollchap/book/9781529247220/int001.xml?rskey=L6cpzn&result=1?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026
  
  
• The Digital Transformation of the European Border Regime: The Powers and Perils of Imagining Future Borders
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/monochap/book/9781529235227/ch001.xml?rskey=CvpInL&result=18?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026

Please feel free to share this collection with your network and your students. Chapters that are not perpetually open access will be free to download until end of March 2026

Our aim is to ensure that the vital work of our authors reaches the lecturers, researchers and policymakers who can use it to drive meaningful, real-world change.

You can request access to our full Sociology Collection

https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/subject/SOC-Collection?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026 - via your institution’s library. 

We offer tiered pricing on our collections tailored to smaller organisations and their libraries. For more details, institutions can contact our team at bup-digital AT bristol.ac.uk.

You may also be interested in our Sociology journals - 

https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/page/journals?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026 - including:

• Open access Global Social Challenges Journal
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/gsc/view/journals/gscj/gscj-overview.xml?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026
  
  
• Consumption and Society
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/consoc/consoc-overview.xml?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026
  
  
• Gender and Justice
  https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gj/gj-overview.xml?utm_source=listserv&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026
  <https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/view/journals/gj/gj-overview.xml?utm_source=CRM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sociology-2026 ​​​

Publish with us: If you are writing in this field, consider publishing your work with an ethical university press. To discuss your publishing projects, please contact our editor emily.ross AT bristol.ac.uk.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Kind regards,

Bahar Celik Muller - Senior Marketing Executive

Bahar Muller - Senior Marketing Executive

New books

Liberation and Corruption: Why Freedom Movements Fail

by Peter Hain
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/trade/liberation-and-corruption?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=BUP-email-signature

Reckoning: Creating Positive Change Through Radical Empathy

by Terri Givens
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/trade/reckoning?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=BUP-email-signature 

Mind the Inclusion Gap: How Allies Can Bridge the Divide Between Talking Diversity and Taking Action

by Suzy Levy
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/trade/mind-the-inclusion-gap?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=BUP-email-signature 

White Privilege: The myth of a post-racial society

by Kalwant Bhopal
https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/trade/white-privilege-1?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=BUP-email-signature 

Our charity for 2025 is Bristol Refugee Rights. Find out more and donate here
https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/charity?utm_source=signature&utm_medium=signature&utm_campaign=BUP-email-signature

 

My source: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=EUROPEAN-SOCIOLOGIST

Scholarship in Arnold Wesker's 'The Friends'

... n'just t'lethee know that's, scholrship up int North ...

'MANFRED. Our trouble, Crispin, us lot, the once-upon-a-time bright lads from up north, is that we've no scholarship. Bits and pieces of information, a charming earthiness intelligence and cheek, but-not scholarship. Look at these books here. (He picks up a pile and throws them round him.) Renan, Taine, Kirkegaarde, Wittgenstein, Spengler, Plato, Jung, Homer, Vico, Adorno, Lukacs, Heine, Bloch-you've not heard of half of them, have you? And half of them, two-thirds, I'll never read. Do you know, new knowledge disrupts me. Because there's no solid rock of learning in this thin, undernourished brain of mine, so each fresh discovery of a fact or an idea doesn't replace, it undermines the last; it's got no measurement by which to judge itself, no perspective by which to evaluate its truth or its worth; it can take no proper place in that lovely long view of history scalloped out by bloody scholarship, because each new concern renders the last one unimportant. No bloody scholarship, us. And when I sometimes get a feeling that two people in love or one man afraid of death might be a supreme consideration, along comes this man with his 'we are moving into phases of creative disorder' and his 'everywhere the lines are blurred' and I've no defence. He sounds so right, I think, and besides-he's got scholarship. What's 'silly loving' and 'banal dying' in all that? Evil? You want me to confess to the knowledge of evil? I confess it. I say it-evil! So? And what  shall I do with that bit of knowledge?' p.18.

 WESKER, Arnold. The Friends. London: Jonathan Cape, (1970). Hardcover. First edition.

Invitation: Health and Health Care Inequities – Book Launch (June 27)

Hi everyone,

You are warmly invited to the Toronto launch of Health and Health Care Inequities, taking place on Friday, June 27, 2025, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM EDT.

This event is free and open to the public, with both in-person and online attendance options.

👉 Please register in advance:

Select tickets – Health and Health Care Inequities - Toronto Book Launch – Friends House

The launch is co-hosted by the Leo Panitch School with the support of Fernwood Publishing.

Featuring the author Arnel Borras and guests:

• Wendy Panagopoulos
• John Clarke
• Carles Muntaner
• Dr. Freida Chavez
• Errol Sharpe

We hope to see you there!

Warm regards,
Arnel

Arnel Borras
*****************

My source: Politics of Health Group Mail List Messages

Visit the PoHG website for lots of interesting links and publications: http://www.pohg.org.uk/

Follow us on Twitter: @pohguk

You can subscribe to / unsubscribe from the PoHG mail list here: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/POHG

Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity

“Race matters in England. So too does class. So too does voice.”


INDIVIDUAL
|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity	Race Class Voice
Race Class Voice	Voice Class Race

Aladesuyi, O. (2021) A map of pain and privilege. Life&Arts. FTWeekend. 6-7 March 2021. p.10.

 

Owusu, N. (2021) Aftershocks: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Identity. London: Sceptre.

See also:

https://mixedracestudies.org/?p=60498

https://gal-dem.com/nadia-owusu-aftershocks-extract/
(site available but now closed).

Book: "Systems convening"

A crucial form of leadership for the 21st century

"Social learning across complex landscapes requires a certain kind of leadership, which we have called systems convening. Many people do this kind of work without any label, often unrecognized, and sometimes not even particularly aware that they are doing it. 

A systems convener or systems convening team sets up spaces for new types of conversations between people who often live on different sides of a boundary. For example, a geographic, cultural, disciplinary, political, class, social boundary. These conveners see a social landscape with all its separate and related practices through a wide-angle lens: they spot opportunities for creating new learning spaces and partnership that will bring different and often unlikely people together to engage in learning across boundaries. A systems convener takes a “landscape view” of wherever they are and what they need to do to increase the learning capability of that entire landscape – rather than simply the capability of the space they are standing in. Importantly, a systems convener is someone who has enough legitimacy in different worlds to be able to convene people in those different worlds into a joint conversation."

 

My source:

https://twitter.com/WengerTrayner/status/1423577543152656384?s=20

Previously on W2tQ: 'landscape'

A window on social history ...

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

Ask a child to draw a house ..?	Light Air*
A row of coal miners' houses with no windows to the street, Halifax, 1937 by Bill Brandt	HUMAN RIGHTS

 

Source:

A row of coal miners' houses with no windows to the street, Halifax, 1937 by Bill Brandt. Nostalgia is a seductive liar. pic.twitter.com/zrpzQySRjt

— Davenant 📸 (@MarcDavenant) March 29, 2021

 

https://www.billbrandt.com/bill-brandt-archive-print-shop/sp03-coal-miners-houses-with-no-windows-to-the-street-c1937

*and its quality

2 + 2 = ?

individual - self

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group- population

	2 + 2 = 5 a notice put up in Moscow during the first Five Year Plan, indicating the possibility of getting the job done in four years, if workers put their backs into it Burgess, A. "1985", 1978

2 + 2 = 5 - stands out in three other senses:

Firstly, it stands politically for the healthcare enterprise as a whole, that is, the NHS, private sector, organisations of various kinds, volunteers, carers; plus theory, practices, management and being political let's add policies. This is due to the ongoing nature and level of political healthcare dialogue and debate. The Left, the Right, funding, history, public engagement, the electoral cycle and associated political party advertising.

The arithmetic above is a dialogue. A dialogue that lurches from politician's promises, to their knowledge that health care staff will still deliver. The health care workforce knows the logic very well: it is summed up in what is termed workforce planning.

Second, what I have previously referred to as 'legacy issue', those health care, health systems problems that have been ongoing problems across several decades as experienced (wrestled with) by successive professionals and today's new students and trainees. These are 'problems' by virtue of being:

• poorly defined (often by their cussedness, not for want of efforts)
• What is the history, the root of 'care' and 'caring'?
• the siloed nature of knowledge;
• by subjects, i.e., sciences, history, economics, sociology
• dichotomised knowledge and concepts, i.e., mind-body, subjective-objective, quality-quantity ...
• being universal;
•  spanning the individual and group
•  being national and global
•  being global in Planetary terms
• the need for multiple disciplines with the standpoints and interests that arise;
• the dynamics of time: history, present, future;
• The meaning of 'progress' - scientifically, technically, socially and politically;
• Identity and personhood in the health context
• Well-being
• Ill-being
• Integration of the above.

Thirdly, Hodges' model has four explicit care - knowledge - domains. In healthcare we must always have due regard for the spiritual dimensions of our patients, carers, community and the communities of practice that we work within. So, in Hodges' model, or more accurately encompassing the whole model and extending beyond it we must contemplate and be cognizant that 2+2 does indeed equal '5'.


Source: Burgess, A. "1985", London Hutchinson (1978).
Spotted in Sam Read's bookshop Grasmere.

India: Health needs of manual scavengers: Does our health system care?

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

SELF “In India, a man is not a scavenger  because of his work. He is a scavenger because of his birth irrespective  of the question whether  he does scavenging or not.” – Dr. B.R. Ambedkar	WORLD other Three forms of manual scavenging: 1. removal of human excrement from public streets and dry latrines; 2. cleaning septic tanks; 3. cleaning gutters and sewers. Health risks & risk of death  Reported: 1 death every 5 days Infectious diseases Respiratory diseases Musculo-skeletal Carbon monoxide and methane poisoning Safety, Protective equipment?
OTHERS "Dalits of specific sub-caste and is an archetype of the oppressive legacy of the  hierarchical Hindu varna system"	WORLD others International Labour Organisation The Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act (1993) Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act (2013) International Dalit Solidarity Network National Safai Karmachari Commission Rashtriya Garima Abhiyan Ministry of Health and Family Welfare

Original source: twitter
https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2018/12/health-needs-of-manual-scavengers-does-our-health-system-care

Quadratic Social Erosion..?

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic --------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

(a) lived experience	mobility
SOCIAL MOBILITY	SOCIAL MOBILITY COMMISSION

Please see (for context):

BBC News

Social mobility board quits over lack of progress

"Mr Milburn, a former health secretary, took up his role at the commission in July 2012, under the coalition government led by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, he said divisions in Britain were becoming wider - pointing to the ongoing squeeze on wages.
The government lacked the "bandwidth" to tackle social division while also dealing with Brexit, he said, describing his task as being like "pushing water uphill". [My emphasis]

As can be seen, in broad terms, above, Hodges' model can help to promote awareness of holistic bandwidth, facilitating reflective practice, critical and transdisciplinary thinking and person-centeredness. Social mobility is clearly sociopolitical.

"The problem that the concept of ‘x’ describes is 'y'."

"The problem that the concept of ‘class’ describes is inequality."
Tyler (2015) p.493.

Tyler, I. (2015), Classificatory struggles: class, culture and inequality in neoliberal times. 

The Sociological Review, 63: 493–511. doi: 10.1111/1467-954X.12296

The problem that the 
concept of ‘care’ describes is 
.....?

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ---------------------------------------  mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

dependency	evidence
demand	supply

signs and symptoms	assessment
roles	funding

self-knowledge	research
family carers	work-force

beliefs - education	systems
expectations	organisations

counselling	treatments
community care	appointments

care	care
care	care

?	?
?	?

person	person
person	person

The Scope of Nursing::And other things

individual
|
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ---------------------------------------  mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL
|
group

"Scope Resolution Operator (::) 

The Scope Resolution Operator (also called Paamayim Nekudotayim) or in simpler terms, the double colon, is a token that allows access to static, constant, and overridden properties or methods of a class.

When referencing these items from outside the class definition, use the name of the class.

As of PHP 5.3.0, it's possible to reference the class using a variable. The variable's value can not be a keyword (e.g. self, parent and static). 

Paamayim Nekudotayim would, at first, seem like a strange choice for naming a double-colon. However, while writing the Zend Engine 0.5 (which powers PHP 3), that's what the Zend team decided to call it. It actually does mean double-colon - in Hebrew!"

Source: http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.paamayim-nekudotayim.php 

Scope of Nursing: (Interpersonal, Sciences, Sociology, Political & Spiritual)  actions, procedures, responsibility, accountability, governance, whistle-blowing, transparency, competency, candour, quality, safety....

Self-care?

Spot image: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~cpinciroli/extra/h-414/one_spot.png