Chris Shilling

I am Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR). See the rest of the Sociology team. My main teaching interests are in the areas of the body in culture and society, and in sociological theory. PhD students are currently studying with me in areas such as the sociology of private spaces, tattooing, evangelical church membership, women's drinking, and sight loss. Becoming increasingly dissatisfied with cognitive conceptions of agency and identity, and disembodied models of structure, society and social relationships in the late 1980s, I began working on issues concerning the body and embodiment (in education, consumer culture and social and cultural theory), and since that time have become one of the main figures in the establishment of the interdisciplinary field of body studies. Issues relating to embodiment have become increasingly important across the social sciences and humanities and have stimulated a major reconstruction of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary work, as the limitations of linguistic turns have become apparent and as scholars interrogate, once again, issues pertaining to materiality. The generative, receptive, permeable and performative characteristics and capacities of embodied subjects and inter-corporeal relations are key to these concerns. My best known book is probably The Body and Social Theory (Sage Press, Theory, Culture & Society series, 1993) which has been translated widely. The second edition was published in 2003, and has also appeared in a number of different languages, and I completed the third edition recently which is scheduled for September 2012 publication. My other main books include: The Body in Culture, Technology and Society (Sage / TCS, 2005) Changing Bodies. Habit, Crisis and Creativity (Sage / TCS, 2008) Embodying Sociology (Editor, Blackwells / The Sociological Review Monograph Series, 2007) (with Philip A. Mellor) Re-forming the Body: Religion, Community, Modernity (Sage / TCS, 1997) (with Philip A. Mellor) The Sociological Ambition (Sage / TCS, 2001). I am the current editor of The Sociological Review Monograph Series.