Professor Alan Radley
biography : publications : workshops & talks : links
Alan Radley is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough, and one of the founders of the undergraduate programme in Social Psychology that received its first intake of students in 1974.
His research interests during this time have centred upon the social and psychological aspects of health and illness, particularly the ways in which people live with the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease. He has worked on a number of funded projects, including family response to one of its members receiving coronary bypass graft surgery, women living with heart disease, the role of counsellors in GP surgeries, the needs of patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in the outpatient consultation, and recovery in hospital using photo-production as a technique. Recently he has studied the experience of homelessness using photo-production techniques, first in London and now in Auckland, New Zealand (in collaboration with Dr Darrin Hodgetts).
His work has been published in a range of journal papers and chapters, as well as in his own books that include, Prospects of Heart Surgery (Springer, 1988); The Body and Social Psychology (Springer, 1991); and Making Sense of Illness (Sage, 1994). He has also published a text, In Social Relationships, (Open University Press, 1991), edited the volume Worlds of Illness (Routledge, 1993) and contributed to Ideological Dilemmas (Sage, 1988), with colleagues in Social Psychology at Loughborough.
His present research activity focuses upon the aesthetics of illness representation, both visual and narrative, and the implications of developing this line of theory for understanding health and illness in general, (with Professor Susan Bell of Bowdoin College, USA). This work builds upon his interest in ‘the body’, in the philosophy of art, and in questions of representation and materiality.
He is Founding Editor of the journal health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, which he edited from 1996 until 2006.
Some recent articles that can be downloaded in PDF format - (you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader and it can be download free from here).
On health and illness:
On illness, aesthetics and abhorrence:
On the study of cases:
On the use of photo-production in research settings:
Radley, A. and Taylor, D. (2003) Images of recovery: a photo-elicitation study on the hospital ward, Qualitative Health Research, 13, 77-99.