I am attached as an emeritus  professor to the Wales Institute of Economic and Social Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) which I established in 2009. At the Institute I have been involved with Steve Davies, Rhys Davies and Helen Blakeley in several on-going projects dealing with aspects of social and economic change in the South Wales valleys.  These involve questions of social memory and changing patterns of trade union membership and collective understandings.

In the nineteen seventies and eighties when I was in Durham I was involved in several projects relating to coal mining. While there I also helped to set up a community publishing group called Strong Words at that time which produced books, pamphlets and exhibitions based on the words and experiences of local people.

Recently I have been archiving and analysing much of the material collected in those years. The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain (with Ray Hudson) came out of this, providing  an historical analysis of the changes that have affected the coalfields of Durham and South Wales since the miners’ strike of 1984-85.

The Masters Now is a a sequel to an earlier volume (Masters and Servants) and  the building blocks of this book have been there for some time. It examines the way in which mining trade unionism in the Northeast of England adapted to and influenced post war changes.

More recently, as I explain in my blog, I have discovered photographs that I took during the miners’ strike and I am working of these as a part of a personal account of that strike. It’s called Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I have an on-going interest in the development of the trade unions and questions of a strategy for labour in the UK and in the ways in which strategies have involved collaboration with researchers and intellectuals, relating this to current debates on “public sociology”. Some of this has been sketched in the paper “Engaging Labour”.