Professor Ian Burkitt

Biography

I am currently Emeritus Professor of Social Identity in the Division of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Bradford. My work is centrally concerned with the formation of human identity within social relations, beginning with my first book Social Selves (1991; 2nd ed. 2008). Over the years my interest in the societal contexts in which we become particular social beings, has broadened to include forms of human embodiment (Bodies of Thought, 1999) and the relational formation of emotions (Emotions and Social Relations, 2014). My recent work has extended the relational approach to emotions into critical considerations of the influence of neuroscience on emotion theory, of ideas about emotion regulation, and the nature of alienation in contemporary capitalism. I have also written about reconceptualising agency through the perspective of relational sociology.