2008 Pavis Lecture

The Sociology Department at the Open University warmly invites you to the 2008 annual Pavis public lecture, "Reflecting upon Reflexivity: is it just idle internal conversation?" which will be delivered by Professor Margaret Archer.

Professor Margaret Archer is known internationally as one of the UK’s leading social scientists and as the major social theorist of critical realism. She served from 1986 to 1990 as the first female President of the International Sociological Association (ISA). She is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Her work has focused on a classic social scientific issue; the structure and agency problem, that is to say the relationship between the social and cultural structures of societies, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how people may reproduce yet also transform such social and cultural frameworks. Most recently she has reflected in particular on the way human agency emerges via "internal conversations". Her books include (2007) Making Our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; (2003) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and (2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge University Press.

See: warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academicstaff/archer
also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Archer


The annual Open University Pavis lecture is organised by the Department of Sociology’s Pavis Centre which undertakes research concerned with the relations between culture and society. It was founded in 1993 with a bequest from former Open University student, the late James Pavis, a keen student of sociology and anthropology who wished to promote their study at the Open University.