me

My name’s Lucy Brown, I’m a PhD student and freelance social researcher currently based in Galloway, Scotland.  My favourite things: people, hills, the sea, music, books, politics, dancing.  I originally trained to be a sound engineer, but I was rubbish at it.  Sociology’s much cooler, anyway!

politics

I’m a keen activist: while in Glasgow I was involved in campaigning around the anti-war and anti-austerity movements, Palestine, feminism and actions to protest the Trident nuclear weapons base.  Now back in Galloway, I’m organising for Radical Independence Dumfries and Galloway.   I also write for the queer feminist blog A Thousand Flowers.

rap&stow

The title rap&stow comes from the Gallowa “rap and stow”, meaning “root and branch” (See John Mactaggart’s (1824) The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, or, the … Curiosities of the South of Scotland … alphabetically arranged).  As well as appealing to my own roots (as a Gallowa ruralach), in English the phrase is usually used to describe some kind of thorough or wholehearted process, often in terms of political reform – which is itself an implicit objective of the kind of public sociology I’m involved in (see my research).  The connection between roots and branches could also say something about the relationships that social ecology seeks to change.  Which maybe just means I am something of an unreconstructed hippie.