Brian worked as a photographer and then a computer programmer before studying sociology and development studies at the University of the West Indies.
Academic qualifications
After a period in New York, where he studied sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and worked as a research assistant at the CLR James Institute, he moved to the UK. He gained a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1999 and began teaching sociology at Goldsmiths in that same year.
For many years he was a volunteer at the George Padmore Institute, in Finsbury Park, North London. That Institute is made up of a collective of activists, writers and activists about whose work Brian wrote a book, Radicals Against Race (Berg 2002), which was awarded the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for the best new single-authored sociological text published in 2002. Brian keeps up his interest in new technologies by hacking code and exploring Linux and other Free Software in his spare time.
Teaching
Brian convenes and teaches the courses Global Development and Underdevelopment and Sociology of Culture and Communication at Undergraduate level. He is also the Programme Convenor for BA Anthropology & Sociology.
Alleyne, Brian. 2021. Hacking. In: George Ritzer and Chris Rojek, eds. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Malden, Massachusetts: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ISBN 9781405165518
Alleyne, Brian. 2006. Cultural Politics and Caribbean Narratives. In: Jean Besson and Karen Fog Olwig, eds. Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity. Macmillan Caribbean, pp. 263-279. ISBN 1-4050-1879-8
Alleyne, Brian. 2006. 'Race' and Racism. In: Austin Harrington; Barbara Marshall and Hans-Peter Müller, eds. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Routledge, pp. 490-492. ISBN 978-0-415-29046-3
Alleyne, Brian. 2021. 'Sketches of Caribbean Geek Culture'. In: Departmental Seminar, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews. Online Event, United Kingdom 12 November 2021.
Globalisation, social movements, social life of information technology, ethnography, narrative, biographical methods.
Brian is writing a book on Narrative Approaches for Sage. That book responds to a growing interest in stories in popular and academic culture, as well as to the pervasiveness of Web 2.0 in the form of Facebook and Twitter (to name just two examples). The ubiquity of social media calls for a reconsideration of the place of narrative in our collective self-understanding, and on a more specific level, in social research programmes. Moreover, the book will address narrative in light of ongoing developments in computer-assisted data gathering and analysis, drawing upon both qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Brian also writes articles on: Free Software; Hacker Cultures; Networked Communities; and Inventive Users.
