Chris Rhodes

Dr Chris Rhodes

I’m on my third career here at Londonmet.

My first career was as a social worker, first as a trainee, then as a qualified social worker after I got my CQSW at what was then Birmingham Polytechnic. Then I worked for Birmingham Probation Service, and next for Hampshire County Council Social Services, mainly with youths in trouble with the law, and the mentally ill. (Hampshire is my home county, and that partly explains my accent – the rest of the explanation is Stoke-on-Trent.)

After two or three years I got bored, and went to study sociology at the London School of Economics. That was fantastic, and I got particularly interested in the sociology of political issues. I was good at it, and got invited to do a PhD. Of course I took up the invitation, and eventually got my PhD, despite a two-hour grilling from Anthony Giddens, the external examiner. I was now ‘Dr Chris Rhodes’.

I’d planned to return to social work, but I found that I was now over-qualified: no-one wanted me; I got one interview for a job that mixed practise with lecturing but I wasn’t picked.

So my second career was social research. I worked as a research associate for what was then called Social and Community Planning Research, SCPR, (which was responsible for the British Social Attitudes Survey). I enjoyed my role as a qualitative researcher, the stimulation from very clever colleagues, and was involved in some very interesting projects. But, they way things are, most of the traffic was quantitative and hum-drum. That was not very interesting: for example I can remember walking the streets around Heathrow Airport, trying to match the Civil Aviation Authority’s map of helicopter noise footprints with house numbers, in order to produce a sampling frame for a survey on just how much people were annoyed by helicopter noise.

So I got bored again and, when I was offered some part-time teaching at what was then City Polytechnic, I took it up. I enjoyed it. That’s my third career. Eventually I dropped my role at SCPR, and ended up as a full-time tutor at what is now Londonmet. And I’m still not bored, after 18 years!

Now I’ve re-connected with the work on my PhD, and I specialise in the criminology of political violence, from policing protests against the G20 to the 1995 London Underground bombings. This interest has taken me to some ‘strange’ places: I was one of the first party of British academics to go to North Korea; I’ve been to Libya, and talked to Gaddafi’s second-in-command (I got the brush-off from Gaddafi himself), and been to Cuba as well.

I’m also spreading my expertise as a qualitative researcher, which was consolidated in my time at SCPR. This dovetails with my interest in political violence, but you’ll have to attend my courses to find out how!

For more details on what I teach, which reflects my interests, go to my site at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/kingsroad/