Books
The Hidden Case
of Ewan Forbes
The hidden history of how trans people lost their human rights in the 1960s, told through the life of trans man Sir Ewan Forbes, whose legal case was considered so threatening the media was gagged, those involved sworn to secrecy, and all records of it concealed for decades.
Journeys in Postgraduate Medical Education
My colleagues and I wrote Journeys in Postgraduate Medical Education to showcase the new approaches we’d created and to share them with others working in the field. It includes chapters on the national Careers for Doctors initiative which we created; on our curriculum-led approach to medical simulation; the faculty system we developed for our hospitals; ground-breaking work on supporting patients with learning disabilities; our narrative approach to certificating doctors as teachers; and our work in medical humanities.
Democratic Management in Primary Healthcare
Democratic Management in Primary Healthcare is the research report of working with the Fairfield Centre, one of the new primary health centres that were set up at the start of this century, requiring doctors, midwives, health visitors, community nurses, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists to work for the same organisation, under the same roof, for the first time. I used emancipatory educational philosophy to manage the acute change in working practices and professional relationships required to operate this new system and went back a year later to evaluate the change.
Sexuality Repositioned
Diversity and the Law was a collaborative work, in which I joined the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group to contribute a chapter on lesbian, gay, and trans activism, problematising the separatism which had divided efforts in the past, identifying commonality – ‘intersecting oppressions’, as the title has it – and thinking about the gap that seemed to opening up between queer/gender/cultural theory and the activist practices aimed at legal and administrative change: ‘Intersecting Oppressions: Ending Discrimination against Lesbians, Gay Men and Trans People in the UK’ tried to catch something of the historical moment of activism in 2004.
Buffy
I started watching Joss Whedon’s television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while I was sitting with a friend’s children, and became intrigued by its underpinning ideas. Chatting about this with Roz Kaveney, she invited me to contribute a chapter to her new critical companion to Buffy, and it became the most popular thing I’ve ever written, making me keynote speaker at an international conference on ‘Reading the Slayer: Bring Your Own Subtext’. The chapter had to be shortened for the publisher, but you can click here to read the full version ‘Religious imagery and its political significance in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ and here to read my conference keynote ‘Apocalypse Now and Again: Hero myths in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.