Brian Alleyne Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, University of London, UK
Brian Alleyne is a sociologist interested in social movements, information technology, and ethnographic and narrative research methods. He worked as a computer programmer before studying sociology and development studies at the University of the West Indies. After a period in New York, where he studied sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and then worked as a research assistant at the CLR James Institute, he moved to the United Kingdom. He gained a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1999 and began teaching sociology at Goldsmiths in that same year. For some years, he was a volunteer at the George Padmore Institute, in Finsbury Park, North London. That Institute is made up of a collective of activists, writers, and activists about whose work he wrote a book, Radicals Against Race (Berg, 2002), which was awarded the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best new single-authored sociological text published in 2002. More recently he published Narrative Networks: Storied Approaches in a Digital Age (Sage 2015). He maintains his interest in new technologies by hacking code and exploring Linux and other Free Software, and considers himself to be part sociologist and part geek.