Nexus

The Impact of Opportunity: Reflections of a TASA 2024 Bursary Recipient by Tom Short

I’ve been a TASA member since the first months of my PhD but had only attended one in-person TASA event in the last two and half years. A lot of a PhD is sitting alone at a laptop, so I was very glad that my abstract got accepted and that I would be presenting at TASA 2024. The value and joy of an in-person disciplinary conference was apparent from the first HDR session. I think best through conversation and people in a similar position with similar interests, turns out, make pretty good interlocutors.

The session I presented in was the first in the health sociology stream. Throughout the course of TASA, this was a well-attended and vivacious stream, with many people feeling the same joy I did at being able to chat with people in their field. A few of us in the mental health side of health sociology got to academically fangirl over meeting people in the flesh we had only cited before. Given the nature of critical work in sociology, I often feel a bit lonely in my approach to mental health, but having others who approach their work with the same analytical frame was comforting.

The highlight of the conference for me was Claire G. Coleman’s keynote. Knowing she was presenting, I spent the week before TASA reading her novel The Old Lie. Claire’s engaging presentation style paired well with her sociological approach to speculative fiction. As I’m about to begin writing my PhD in earnest, seeing someone who so carefully and passionately thinks about the form ideas are presented in was inspiring and motivating. I’d like to thank Claire for her presentation, the organisers of the health sociology stream, and the whole TASA team for having me at a great conference.