Professor in Sociology
Biography
Dr Darin Weinberg received a BA in Sociology and Communications from the University of California, San Diego in 1984; an MSc in Social Philosophy from the London School of Economics in 1985, and PhD in Sociology from U.C.L.A. in 1998. After teaching for three years at the University of Florida, he joined the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (now HSPS) as a University Lecturer in 2000. He held a Lindesmith Fellowship for Drug Policy Studies, from the Lindesmith Center of the Open Society Institute in 2000-2001. He has been a Fellow of King's college since 2001, and a Reader in the Department of Sociology since 2012.
In 2011 Darin won the Melvin Pollner Prize in Ethnomethodology from the American Sociological Association's Section on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis for his book Of Others Inside and the Outstanding Article Award from the Social Problems Theory Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. In 2018 Darin again won the Melvin Pollner Prize in Ethnomethodology for his book Contemporary Social Constructionism.
Research
Darin’s research focuses primarily on the practical purposes to which concepts of addiction, mental illness, and learning disability are applied in various historical and contemporary contexts. He is particularly interested in how these concepts figure in state sponsored campaigns of social welfare and social control, and in what their uses reveal about how and why people distinguish the social and natural forces held to govern human behaviour. Beyond these specific research interests, Darin is also more broadly interested in social theory, the sociology of science, sociology of health and illness, and qualitative research methodologies.
