Iain Wilkinson

Iain Wilkinson is a sociologist working in the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, UK.

His research attempts to document and explain how people’s experience of ‘the problem of suffering’ changes through history and between societies. He explores the potential for the incidence of human suffering to operate as a force of social and cultural change. This brings a focus to occasions where encounters with the problem of suffering are involved in changing people’s beliefs and attitudes. It also concerns an attempt to understand how cultural perceptions of human suffering are implicated within the actions taken in response to the needs of others.

Wilkinson also investigates the cultural history of modern humanitarianism and humanitarian social movements. Here he aims to understand the social and cultural conditions that give rise to humanitarian moral feelings as well as the role played by the cultural politics of compassion in public life. This also involves him in tracing the impact of humanitarianism upon the culture of sociology.

These issues are explored in various publications addressed to problems of ‘social suffering’ and in studies that explore the potential for documents of human suffering to be fashioned as a distinct form of social inquiry.