Elected for their substantial contributions to social science, this autumn’s cohort of Fellows includes David Abbott, Professor of Social Policy at the School for Policy Studies (SPS). David is also Associate Director of NIHR SSCR. He joined the Norah Fry Research Centre at SPS in 1999 and much of his work has focused on issues for disabled children, young people and adults as well as their families and the services that support them.
David’s research interests span transition to adulthood; multi-agency working; young disabled people who live away from home in residential settings; gay, lesbian and bisexual people with learning difficulties their experiences, the barriers they face and the ways in which they overcome them; and how young people with long term health conditions do or do not access good quality social care support.
The Academy’s Fellowship comprises over 1,500 leading social scientists from academia, the public, private and third sectors. All Academy Fellows are selected through an independent peer review which recognises their excellence and impact, including their wider contributions to social sciences for public benefit.
David Abbott said,
“I’m such a fan of social science. I’m a fan of the social, of the collective, of the community. Think of the words not just as the name of an academic discipline. I’m a fan of other (sometimes derided) terms with social in where it also pays to pause and imagine them as a force for good - social security, social housing, social care, social work.
“And I feel this way about social science – that it helps us understand the social world in all its complexity and nuance and mess and wonder. And yeah, my allegiance is partly born of how other types of science have sometimes thought of us as very much in the lower tier of things and been unafraid to say so.
“Most of my career I have pitched up in the sitting rooms and kitchens of strangers, turned on my recorder, and asked them to tell me something about their lives – often the more personal and intimate. Stories of what it is to live and what they tell us about how we connect or fail to connect, of how we win or lose in the deeply embedded structural inequalities of our times.
“Most of my career I have existed in conflicted spaces. Over a decade on fixed term contracts, physically and systemically outside of the ‘main business.’ Endless picket lines and industrial action buoyed by the beauty of colleagues looking and hoping for better ways of doing things. Working in institutions where social science is rarely sexy or news-making. In the end, a professor from an immigrant, working-class family with parents unschooled in school but rich in other kinds of learning.
We are all social science, right?”