This now revised website has a different function than either Facebook sites of a highly personal nature or more narrowly professional ones for those still closely attached to a university setting of teaching and research. In part, it is a post-retirement response to preserving a public identity after having lived in many different places and losing contact with many people who were previously good friends or potential ones. My own silence should not be taken personally nor discourage such people from saying hello for a personalized update via e-mail.

As implied by the geographic displacements and dates of the academic career outlined in my Home Page, the somewhat erratic and unplanned course of my intellectual and personal development was not particularly conducive to an orderly life plan and conventional family life, despite the belated stability of teaching at the University of Alberta from 1984 to 2010. Since retirement, my life has been split between between two very different places. About half of the year - primarily but not exclusively in the winter - takes place in the small colonial city and international cultural centre (and UNESCO Wolrd Heritage site) of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico (Spanish), about 3 and a half hours northwest of Mexico City. The other half is spent in the Old Strathcona area of Edmonton, Alberta, or at times (summer) in the wilderness lake country of the Canadian Rockies and Prairies.

As evident in the page on Research and publications, I continue to work on a number of older and newer projects. I like to think of this new phase as enjoying an ongoing post-doctoral fellowship without having to worry about applying for funding renewals. As well, such circumstances have made possible a degree of life-work balance that was not possible within the constraints and contradictions of the contemporay research university.

I have uploaded this incomplete version of my website in part because of the long delay - since 2007-8 - in revising the older one. As well, from late 2010 to Feburary 2014 I was inadvertently absent from the University of Alberta, Department of Sociology website, hence neither as part of the regular faculty nor included in either the In Memoriam or Emeritus lists. Like life itselft this site will be permanently "under construction".