Mr Herman Gilligan
Honorary University Fellow
In the late 1970s, Herman Gilligan initially conducted postgraduate research on social and economic change in Padstow, Cornwall. In the 1980s he complemented this work within the ethnographic ‘community study’ tradition with research in the US on the local effects of industrial employment downturn in ‘Middletown’, (Muncie, Indiana), location of the first such American community study.
Having mainly worked outside of mainstream academia since then, he is now returning to his original sociological/anthropological interests. He is publishing a reflexive account of the longtitudinal research process to date, ‘Padstow: Doing a Community Study’ (Oxford: Localities Press); and commences a restudy of Padstow in March 2009, thirty years to the month of the original fieldwork.
