Suki Ali is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the LSE. She previously taught at Goldsmiths College, the Institute of Education and University of Greenwich. Her main interests focus upon feminist postcolonial theory, research methodologies, visual culture, and theories of racialisation and embodiment. Her work centralises the interplay between gender, sexualities, 'race' and class. She is author of Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices (Berg 2003).

Milind Arolker is a medical doctor specializing in palliative medicine, studying for a PhD at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary, University of London. His PhD work is a qualitative study of decision-making about the use of sedation in end-of-life care.

Chetan Bhatt is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has previously been Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and has taught at the universities of Essex and Southampton.  He has undertaken research in a range of areas, including religious violence, nationalism, discrimination, health and human rights.  He is the author of Liberation and Purity (Routledge, 1997) and Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Berg, 2001).

Alice Bloch is Professor of Sociology at City University London. She has carried out a number of research projects relating to forced migration. Recent publications include Race and Ethnicity in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 co-edited with John Solomos) and No Right to Dream: The Social and Economic Lives of Young Undocumented Migrants (Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2009 with Nando Sigona and Roger Zetter).

Duncan Branley is Training and Information Officer at Goldsmiths, University of London and a part-time relationship therapist and bereavement counsellor. He has been a research student in sociology at Goldsmiths looking at religious and sexual identities through a Foucauldian lens. He provides research training to students carrying out literature reviews or planning presentations of their research work as well as teaching a range of specialist software for academic research.

Bridget Byrne is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. She has previously worked at Goldsmiths College, LSE and the University of Sussex. White Lives: The Interplay of Race, Class and Gender in Contemporary London was published in 2006 (Routledge) and she has published several papers based on qualitative interviewing. In 2010 she had a Leverhulme Fellowship to investigate Citizenship Ceremonies in Britain and is also Principal Investigator on an ESRC study on School Choice.

Miran Epstein MD, PhD, MA, is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Ethics and Law at Queen Mary, University of London. He studied medicine and history and philosophy of science at Tel Aviv University. He has published widely on the ethics of organ transplantation, end-of-life, and human research, and is currently writing a book on the history of the bioethical transformation.

Ben Gidley is a Senior Researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. He has extensive experience of social research, using archival, ethnographic, visual and other methods, working on issues around ethnicity, urban culture and migration. His most recent book, co-authored with Keith Kahn-Harris, is Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today (Continuum, 2010).

Ann Griffin has a portfolio role as a doctor and an educator. She is a Clinical Senior Lecturer at UCL School of Life and Medical Sciences and an Honorary Consultant Enfield Primary Care Trust where she works clinically as a general practitioner. She is involved in all aspects of medical education and training. Educational research, with a particular emphasis on methodology, is an area of personal interest. She is a student at Institute of Education in the final phase of her own educational doctorate investigating the training to work transitions of new GPs.

Moira Kelly is Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology at Queen Mary, University of London, where she teaches medical students and undertakes research.  She has worked as a researcher in palliative care, health promotion, mental health and primary health care and has a particular interest in social interaction in health care settings.  Her publications cover a range of health research topics and methods.  She is currently working on a study of communication between clinicians and patients in diabetes consultations. 

Vanessa May is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. 
She has conducted research on lone motherhood, post-divorce parenting and intergenerational relationships, using a variety of methods including biographical, narrative and mixed methods. Her most recent work focuses on belonging. She is currently editing a book called Sociology of Personal Life and writing a book entitled Connecting Self to Society: Belonging in a Changing World, both to be published by Palgrave.

Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology of Science and Technology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His interests include the relation of everyday life to technoscience, and biotechnological and biomedical innovation and culture. Current research projects include examination of the ethical aspects of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (with Marsha Rosengarten), and the interdisciplinary exploration of energy demand reduction through sociological and speculative design techniques.  Two recent publications are Technoscience and Everyday Life (Open University Press, 2006) and (with Lynda Birke and Arnie Arluke) The Sacrifice: How Scientific Experiments Transform Animals and People (Purdue University Press, 2007).

Constantinos Phellas is Professor of Sociology and Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Science and Law at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. His research interests include sociology of health and illness, ageing and sexualities. His publications focus upon the intersection of gender, culture, and issues of sexuality among ethnic minority communities, HIV/AIDS, social & psychological aspects of public health domain. He is the President of the Cyprus Sociological Association. He is currently editing two books: Aging in European Societies (Springer) and Researching Alternative Sexualities (Ashgate).

Tim Rapley is a Staff Scientist at the Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University.  He is a medical sociologist with particular expertise in qualitative studies of medical practice and research. He is interested in understanding the everyday, taken-for-granted, aspects of medical and research work. His publications include Doing Conversation, Discourse and Document Analysis (Sage, 2007) and his 2001 article on ‘The art(fulness) of open-ended interviewing’ (Qualitative Research 1(3): 303-323) has been reprinted in several edited collections.

Carol Rivas is a research fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and was previously based at St Mary’s Hospital, London.  She has worked as a photographer, medical journalist and writer of health communications and clinician training materials. She currently lectures in medical sociology and teaches qualitative research methods to undergraduates and postgraduates.   She has undertaken several studies of access to healthcare and its improvement involving various approaches to data collection, mostly using thematic content analysis and grounded theory.   Her special interests are ethnicity, communication and mental health.  Her current project is a video-based exploration of communication in medical consultations.

Clare Rutterford After completing an MSc in Statistics with Applications in Medicine (Southampton University, 2004), Clare has spent six years working as a medical statistician and joined Queen Mary, University of London in March 2009.  Clare has been involved in a wide variety of trials including a large HIV prevention trial, a trial to improve the safety of women experiencing domestic violence and several trials in mental health. Clare also leads one of the core modules for the distance learning MSc in Clinical Trials provided by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Clive Seale is Professor of Medical Sociology at Queen Mary, University of London. He has previously been Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths and Brunel University. He has carried out many social research projects relating to health, involving a variety of methods. Most recently, he has been working on projects investigating communication in medical consultations, decision-making in end-of-life care, and mass media reporting of health issues. His books include Constructing Death (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Media and Health (Sage, 2002) as well as a number of methods texts, several of which are referred to in this book.

David Silverman is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College and Visiting Professor, Management Department, King’s College (both University of London) as well as Visiting Professor, Business School, University of Technology, Sydney.  His research interests focus on medical encounters, conversation and discourse analysis. He is the author of Interpreting Qualitative Data (Fourth Edition, 2012), Doing Qualitative Research (Third Edition, 2010) and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research (2007). He is the editor of Qualitative Research (Third Edition, 2011).

Neil Spicer is a lecturer in global health policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He has previously worked as a researcher at Goldsmiths College, London and the University of Birmingham and has a PhD in Geography from the University of Glasgow. His interests include global health policy, HIV/AIDS, maternal and child health, health services research, and qualitative and mixed methods research. Most recently his work has focused on global HIV/AIDS initiatives and civil society advocacy in Central Asia and Eastern Europe and community-based maternal and child health programmes in Nigeria, Ethiopia and India.

Fran Tonkiss is Reader in Sociology and Director of the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has previously taught at Goldsmiths and at the City University, London. Her research interests are in urban and economic sociology . Her work includes books on Contemporary Economic Sociology: Globalization, Production, Inequality (Routledge, 2006), Space, the City and Social Theory (Polity 2005), Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Theory (co-authored with Don Slater, Polity 2000), and Trust and Civil Society (edited with Andrew Passey, Macmillan, 2001).

David Walsh was a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths until his retirement in 2002. He died in 2008 and tributes and fond memories of him can be found here, some from people who have contributed to this book: www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/dave-walsh

With others at Goldsmiths, he published the influential New Directions in Sociological Theory (MIT Press, 1972) which presented a critique of positivist sociology and outlined the basis for sociological work that embraced phenomenological and ethnomethodological approaches. More recently, his interests drew on his extensive knowledge of opera and musical theatre, resulting in Musical Theater and American Culture (Greenwood, 2003) written with Len Platt.