Stephen Roberts
Biographic Data
| ID | 5689097 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Roberts |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Roberts |
| SIGNATURE | ROBERTS S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6730-3108 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 109 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Addressing environmental harms in the health sector
In an era of increasing calls for responsible environmental stewardship within health research and care, the concept of environmentality is a productive vehicle to theorise, analyse and critique the changing trends of environmental governance. Despite the usefulness of this approach, little to no literature has explored how this concept could apply to the health sector. In this paper, we examine three examples of emerging environmental governance…
Why ‘inclusive policymaking’ is needed during crises
During the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for unity from politicians and public health experts contrasted sharply with the rising social divisions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Through 127 in-depth qualitative interviews conducted at two time points (October 2020 [n = 72], October 2021 [n = 55]) in Austria, a country with high vaccine hesitancy, this paper explores how and why deepening social divisions around vaccination occurred. Our fi…
Public health disinformation, conflict, and disease outbreaks
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the unpreparedness of global and public health systems to respond to large-scale health crises, while simultaneously revealing the entangled nature of disinformation and poor global and public health outcomes. This research challenges the common treatment of public health disinformation - deliberately false information - as an emergent and technical threat, and instead situates it as a more systemic and nuanced cha…
Co-learning in crisis
This article provides a comparative analysis of digital interventions implemented in Taiwan and the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic to examine how national contexts shaped the rollout and reception of these technologies. Our analysis challenges the simplistic East/West divide often invoked in pandemic response analyses, which arose during and in the wake of the pandemic, arguing that successes or failures of digital health interventions must exce…
El exilio en el Reino Unido
El exilio en el Reino Unido sigue siendo relativamente desconocido en contraste con el de Francia, México o Argentina, y sin embargo un importante número de figuras destacadas de la vida política, cultural e intelectual española acabaría refugiándose en las islas británicas. Este artículo se centrará, primeramente, en la identificación de estas figuras y de las razones por las cuales eligieron al Reino Unido como destino y, en segundo lugar, se r…
Global health security and the health-security nexus
The past four decades have seen a steady rise of references to ‘security’ by health academics, policy-makers and practitioners, particularly in relation to threats posed by infectious disease pandemics. Yet, despite an increasingly dominant health security discourse, the many different ways in which health and security issues and actors intersect have remained largely unassessed and unpacked in current critical global health scholarship. This pap…
Governing digital health for infectious disease outbreaks
How can governing digital health for infectious disease outbreaks be enhanced? In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has simultaneously represented both the potential and marked limitations of digital health practices for infectious disease outbreaks. During the pandemic's initial stages, states along with Big Data and Big Tech actors unleashed a scope of both established and experimental digital technologies for tracking infections, hospitalisatio…
Loss of life at sea from shipping British coal since 1890
There was continuing public and political concern about the loss of life at sea during the second half of the nineteenth century in Britain. New regulatory requirements, introduced to examine the competence of officers, prevent overloading and reduce the risks from hazardous cargoes such as coal, were in place by 1890. However, the effectiveness of these measures was not systematically monitored at the time. This retrospective evaluation reviews …
Democratic research
The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized …
Global health security and islands as seen through Covid-19 and vaccination
Since the declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic in March 2020, significant research and attention has focused on countries' abilities and interests in enacting response measures to the spread of the coronavirus including lockdowns, travel restrictions, and vaccination programmes to contain infections, hospitalisations, and deaths. As the pandemic has continued, much discussion has also centred on the ability of islands to control borders, enact p…
Covid-19 contact tracing apps
In order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers around the globe have increasingly invested in digital health technologies to support the 'test, track and trace' approach of containing the spread of the novel coronavirus. These technologies include mobile 'contact tracing' applications (apps), which can trace individuals likely to have come into contact with those who have reported symptoms or tested positive for the virus and request that…
Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady stream of propositions from tech giants and start-ups alike has furnished us with the idea that GPS- or Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing apps are a vital part of the pandemic response. This commentary considers these apps as ‘corporate contact tracing’, emphasizing the private-sector role that such developments imply. We first discuss corporate contact tracing’s potential to de-center the power …
Faith, hope and love
The main focus of this review is Ray Gaston’s excellent manifesto for a practical theological approach to interfaith engagement. Reviewing it alongside the other texts considered here serves to hig
Digital epidemiology and global health security; an interdisciplinary conversation
Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches - imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public he…
The Dark Side of The Soul
The Dark Side of The Soul: An Insider's Guide to the Web of Sin." Practical Theology, 10(1), pp. 105–106
Roundtable Review of Stephen Pattison’s Saving Face
Book Review of Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology. By Stephen Pattison. 202 +viii pp. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. (Abingdon: Routledge. 2016). £34.99 (PBK) ISBN: 978-1-4094-3692-8 Reviewed by: Stephen Roberts, Modern Theology, University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
Infectious disease mortality in British merchant seamen and Lascars since 1900
Trends in mortality rates from infectious disease in seamen employed in British merchant shipping have been compared with those in the Royal Navy and with the onshore male working-age British population. Merchant seamen, and in particular those recruited from Asia (Lascars), had higher mortality rates than men in the navy and in the population ashore. Mortality declined progressively between 1900 and 1960, thereafter it was negligible; the declin…
Disease diplomacy
The world of the twenty-first century is indeed a world on alert. In the years following the paradigm shift of 11 September 2001, citizens, states, intergovernmental organizations, and civil societ
Catching the flu
How do algorithms shape the imaginary and practice of security? Does their proliferation point to a shift in the political rationality of security? If so, what is the nature and extent of that shift? This article argues that efforts to strengthen global health security are major drivers in the development and proliferation of new algorithmic security technologies. In response to a seeming epidemic of potentially lethal infectious disease outbreak…
The Poetry of Chartism
Michael Sanders announced that The Poetry of Chartism was in the pipeline in a full-page article in The Guardian in March 2007. This was tremendous publicity for the poets of Chartism, even if the article gave the somewhat unfortunate impression that Sanders was a solitary explorer of the unfathomed caverns of Chartist verse. As Sanders acknowledges in his second chapter, a great deal of research and writing has already been done on the poetry wh…
Memories of Dottie
William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics
William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds. Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, pp. xxv + 239, ISBN: 1405113448. Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford, 2006, pp. xviii + 232, ISBN: 1405120142.
Characterization and textural analysis of Middle Bronze Age Transdanubian inlaid wares of the Encrusted Pottery Culture, Hungary
Maps showing the extent of mining, locations of mine shafts, adits, air shafts, and bedrock faults, and thickness of overburden above abandoned coal mines in the Boulder-Weld coal field, Boulder, Weld…
Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies
What is the relation between social class and social justice? This is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. While nobody would deny that the distribution of rewards in industrial societies is unequal, there is sharp disagreement about whether this inequality can be justified. Some see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity. Others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the dis…
Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies
What is the relation between social class and social justice? This is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. While nobody would deny that the distribution of rewards in industrial societies is unequal, there is sharp disagreement about whether this inequality can be justified. Some see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity. Others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the dis…
Social Class and Underclass in Britain and the USA
It is commonly argued that the research programme of class analysis is undermined by its appararent neglect of large numbers of economically-inactive adults who do not form part of the analysis, but are affected by class processes, and form distinctive elements within any class structure. This paper disputes the claim that welfare dependents, the retired, and domestic housekeepers show distinctive patterns of socio-political class formation. Nor …
Intergenerational Social Mobility in Communist Russia
Little is known about patterns of intergenerational social mobility in the former Soviet Union. Extant studies are unrepresentative or methodologically problematic. Using a new national sample from Russia, this paper examines absolute mobility rates for each sex, and relative rates for Russia in relation to Britain. It argues that, contrary to the conclusions reached by many Soviet sociologists during the communist era, Russia was not a `remarkab…
Catching the flu
How do algorithms shape the imaginary and practice of security? Does their proliferation point to a shift in the political rationality of security? If so, what is the nature and extent of that shift? This article argues that efforts to strengthen global health security are major drivers in the development and proliferation of new algorithmic security technologies. In response to a seeming epidemic of potentially lethal infectious disease outbreak…
Characterization and textural analysis of Middle Bronze Age Transdanubian inlaid wares of the Encrusted Pottery Culture, Hungary
Class, Gender, and the Asymmetry Hypothesis
This paper reviews three interconnected issues that have been central to the controversial problem of describing the relationship between class and gender. First, the matter of taxonomy, and whether or not extant class schemes are suitable for the study of women's employment. Second, the question of how sex segregation in the occupational structure relates to regimes of class inequality and class mobility; more specifically, of the connections be…
Intergenerational Class Processes and the Asymmetry Hypothesis
The asymmetry hypothesis is central to current controversy about the unit of class composition. It is argued by those who support a conventional approach to class analysis that marital partners themselves recognise that it is the occupational position of the husband that confers status on the household in modern industrial societies. This paper confirms that the conventional approach better explains observed patterns of socio-political class form…
Digital epidemiology and global health security; an interdisciplinary conversation
Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches - imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public he…
Thesis Report
Elgar
Intergenerational Social Mobility in Communist Russia
Little is known about patterns of intergenerational social mobility in the former Soviet Union. Extant studies are unrepresentative or methodologically problematic. Using a new national sample from Russia, this paper examines absolute mobility rates for each sex, and relative rates for Russia in relation to Britain. It argues that, contrary to the conclusions reached by many Soviet sociologists during the communist era, Russia was not a `remarkab…
Intergenerational Class Processes and the Asymmetry Hypothesis
The asymmetry hypothesis is central to current controversy about the unit of class composition. It is argued by those who support a conventional approach to class analysis that marital partners themselves recognise that it is the occupational position of the husband that confers status on the household in modern industrial societies. This paper confirms that the conventional approach better explains observed patterns of socio-political class form…
Class, Gender, and the Asymmetry Hypothesis
This paper reviews three interconnected issues that have been central to the controversial problem of describing the relationship between class and gender. First, the matter of taxonomy, and whether or not extant class schemes are suitable for the study of women's employment. Second, the question of how sex segregation in the occupational structure relates to regimes of class inequality and class mobility; more specifically, of the connections be…
Social Class and Underclass in Britain and the USA
It is commonly argued that the research programme of class analysis is undermined by its appararent neglect of large numbers of economically-inactive adults who do not form part of the analysis, but are affected by class processes, and form distinctive elements within any class structure. This paper disputes the claim that welfare dependents, the retired, and domestic housekeepers show distinctive patterns of socio-political class formation. Nor …
Social Justice Revisited
This chapter discusses the issues of merit in relation to social justice. It suggests that the justification of class-related inequalities that appeals to the necessity of incentives can be distinguished from the justification that appeals to the idea that people born into different classes are unequally deserving of class-related rewards. It outlines the possibility of an alternative defence of meritocratic justice. However, it should not be und…
Against the Odds
What is the relation between social class and social justice? This is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. While nobody would deny that the distribution of rewards in industrial societies is unequal, there is sharp disagreement about whether this inequality can be justified. Some see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity. Others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the dis…
Lunar Cycle and Consultations for Anxiety and Depression in General Practice
The influence of the moon on patient consultations for anxiety or depression in general practice was assessed through a retrospective survey based on general practice medical records and on lunar records detailing the dates and times of different phases of the moon. Seven-hundred-eighty-two patients continuously registered in a general practice in Beckenham, South London, between 1971 and 1988 were included in analyses. No statistically significa…
Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies
What is the relation between social class and social justice? This is currently a matter of public as well as academic controversy. While nobody would deny that the distribution of rewards in industrial societies is unequal, there is sharp disagreement about whether this inequality can be justified. Some see existing patterns of social mobility as evidence of inequality of opportunity. Others regard them as meritocratic, simply reflecting the dis…
Maps showing the extent of mining, locations of mine shafts, adits, air shafts, and bedrock faults, and thickness of overburden above abandoned coal mines in the Boulder-Weld coal field, Boulder, Weld…
Characterization and textural analysis of Middle Bronze Age Transdanubian inlaid wares of the Encrusted Pottery Culture, Hungary
William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics
William Schweiker, Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds. Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, pp. xxv + 239, ISBN: 1405113448. Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford, 2006, pp. xviii + 232, ISBN: 1405120142.
The Poetry of Chartism
Michael Sanders announced that The Poetry of Chartism was in the pipeline in a full-page article in The Guardian in March 2007. This was tremendous publicity for the poets of Chartism, even if the article gave the somewhat unfortunate impression that Sanders was a solitary explorer of the unfathomed caverns of Chartist verse. As Sanders acknowledges in his second chapter, a great deal of research and writing has already been done on the poetry wh…
Memories of Dottie
Disease diplomacy
The world of the twenty-first century is indeed a world on alert. In the years following the paradigm shift of 11 September 2001, citizens, states, intergovernmental organizations, and civil societ
Catching the flu
How do algorithms shape the imaginary and practice of security? Does their proliferation point to a shift in the political rationality of security? If so, what is the nature and extent of that shift? This article argues that efforts to strengthen global health security are major drivers in the development and proliferation of new algorithmic security technologies. In response to a seeming epidemic of potentially lethal infectious disease outbreak…
The Dark Side of The Soul
The Dark Side of The Soul: An Insider's Guide to the Web of Sin." Practical Theology, 10(1), pp. 105–106
Roundtable Review of Stephen Pattison’s Saving Face
Book Review of Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology. By Stephen Pattison. 202 +viii pp. Farnham: Ashgate. 2013. (Abingdon: Routledge. 2016). £34.99 (PBK) ISBN: 978-1-4094-3692-8 Reviewed by: Stephen Roberts, Modern Theology, University of Chichester, Chichester, UK
Infectious disease mortality in British merchant seamen and Lascars since 1900
Trends in mortality rates from infectious disease in seamen employed in British merchant shipping have been compared with those in the Royal Navy and with the onshore male working-age British population. Merchant seamen, and in particular those recruited from Asia (Lascars), had higher mortality rates than men in the navy and in the population ashore. Mortality declined progressively between 1900 and 1960, thereafter it was negligible; the declin…
Faith, hope and love
The main focus of this review is Ray Gaston’s excellent manifesto for a practical theological approach to interfaith engagement. Reviewing it alongside the other texts considered here serves to hig
Digital epidemiology and global health security; an interdisciplinary conversation
Contemporary infectious disease surveillance systems aim to employ the speed and scope of big data in an attempt to provide global health security. Both shifts - the perception of health problems through the framework of global health security and the corresponding technological approaches - imply epistemological changes, methodological ambivalences as well as manifold societal effects. Bringing current findings from social sciences and public he…
Corporate contact tracing as a pandemic response
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steady stream of propositions from tech giants and start-ups alike has furnished us with the idea that GPS- or Bluetooth-enabled contact tracing apps are a vital part of the pandemic response. This commentary considers these apps as ‘corporate contact tracing’, emphasizing the private-sector role that such developments imply. We first discuss corporate contact tracing’s potential to de-center the power …
Covid-19 contact tracing apps
In order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers around the globe have increasingly invested in digital health technologies to support the 'test, track and trace' approach of containing the spread of the novel coronavirus. These technologies include mobile 'contact tracing' applications (apps), which can trace individuals likely to have come into contact with those who have reported symptoms or tested positive for the virus and request that…
Democratic research
The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized …
Political science (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Economics (12 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Public health (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Global Security and Public Health (8 works) · Global health (7 works) · Politics (7 works)