Development sociology
Professor Bryan Roberts
Back to list of video interviews Professor Bryan Roberts interviewed by Professor David Morgan Bryan Roberts joined Sociology at the University of Manchester in 1964 and played an important part in developing a programme of urban sociology. An early visit to Mexico City led to a lifetime’s work specialising in […]
17. Teodor Shanin and the sociology of peasants
Teodor Shanin, born 1930, grew up in Vilnius, now Lithuania. When the country came under Nazi occupation during the War he fled first to Russia and then to France before making his way to Palestine from where, increasingly disillusioned by Israel, he came to Britain in 1963 and spent time […]
14. Citizens building cities: Bryan Roberts and the urban poor in Latin American cities
Bryan R Roberts’ book, Cities of Peasants (1978) explores the challenges faced by the urban poor in Latin American cities. Roberts used new sociological methods to understand how these people initially helped make the cities they lived in, building their own houses and creating their own jobs. Roberts was one […]
6. Hamza Alavi and the post-colonial state
Hamza Alavi, who died in December 2003, was a Reader in Sociology at University of Manchester from 1977 to 1988. He had wide range of interests within the area of the political economy of South Asia. He worked on the state in post-colonial societies, on imperialism, on the peasantry and […]
1. The ‘Third World’
The term ‘Third World’ was coined in 1952 by the French anthropologist Alfred Sauvy, in an article in the socialist magazine L’Observateur.  However it was Peter Worsley, first Professor of Sociology at The University of Manchester, who helped define the term as a key sociological concept, and whose work popularised […]