User:Thatdrmaz/Michael Hardey

Dr Michael Hardey 1950-2012 (born Lagos, Nigeria, 1950-2012) was one of the UK’s leading sociologists  of medical sociology and social media.

Mike Hardey was a Reader in Medical Sociology at the Hull-York Medical School (HYMS) as well as Associate Director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) in the Department of Sociology based at York.

Life Born in Lagos, Nigeria (his father was in the services), Mike left school at sixteen but later took up academic study as a mature student accompanied by a keen interest in the Labour party and political theatre. His ideas were honed at the University of Essex where he took his first degree in Sociology followed by an MA in Social History, securing his first job as a researcher working with the sociologist Denis Marsden on working class youth and employment, before then moving to Surrey in 1986 as a research associate working on welfare systems. A lone-parent himself, Mike's first book was on lone-parenthood and addressed the particular difficulties faced by lone-parents bringing up their children without a partner in the household.

Mike's work explored the world of Medicine 2.0 and the relationships between health and lifestyle. His early published research on social media and doctor-patient relations was path-breaking, publishing in 1999 the first article about medicine and the internet in the leading international journal, the Sociology of Health and Illness, which later used his paper as a springboard for a special issue on the web and medicine.

Research Through his early work on welfare, Mike became increasingly interested in health inequalities and refocused his interests in the theory and practice of health research, which led to his appointment as head of the Nursing Research Unit at Surrey. Subsequent posts in Southampton (1992-2005) and Newcastle were key to his developing an interest in the web and its relationship to medicine and social media. In 2006 he took up his Readership at HYMS. He had had a long-standing friendship and academic collaboration with Roger Burrows, and, with Roger and other colleagues, established the Social Informatics Research Unit in the Department of Sociology at York which, in 2009, merged with SATSU, as Mike one of the Associate Directors.

Mike was interested in exploring the ways in which the web might empower patients and so challenge professional authority. He was inspired by the potential democratising effects of social media and indeed practised this in regard to his own work, using Slideshare and YouTube as much as possible to make his papers and presentations available to all. His 1999 paper in SHI broke new ground in opening up for exploration the then emerging development of Web 2.0 and how the web became a site for the co-production of knowledge and the redistribution of medical understanding and expertise. He foresaw a number of key, though discrete developments in the Web, each describing a different producer/audience relation and a different sourcing and authorisation of knowledge: data-scraping, crowd-sourcing, and related forms of user-generated expertise created among lay-publics via social networking and mash-ups. This led to an interest in the ways in which we have seen the emergence of new digital cartographies as well as new ways in which consumers of medicine could be empowered through sites such as ‘RateMD’ to create ‘a powerful new global Internet referral network’ among ‘e-patients’. His location in a medical school meant that Mike saw the need to encourage colleagues and students to see such developments as an opportunity rather than a threat and to work with lay and user-generated data and information, and in all this to understand the relationship between online and offline relationships and identities.

Mike never saw the virtual as a means through which multiple identities could be built in some limitless way, but as a place where offline embodied identities could be expressed and enjoined online. This was both made evident and poignantly expressed in Mike’s exploration of patient narratives about their illnesses and disease in his papers published in the early 2000s. His interests here led to international collaboration with his Spanish colleague Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva (based at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, directed by Manuel Castells in Barcelona) and Sue Ziebland (originally at Surrey and now at Oxford) and a major project that had recently completed gathering data via an online panel survey on ‘Citizens and ICT for Health’ in 14 EU countries.

Mike’s work in HYMS was very highly regarded by his colleagues: he was academic co-ordinator of the Phase I Student Selected Components (SSC) programme as well as running his own SSC in ‘Social Bodies and Body Perception - exploring the various ways in which social life and the life of the human body interact’. The School has recently established a student prize in his honour. He also played an important part in the administration of the School. In SATSU he was always available for a coffee and a chat to discuss new ideas or plans for the Unit and his good humour and summery shirts always provided a lift to the demands of everyday academic life.

Mike had a daughter Dr Maz Hardey, who is also an academic and is based at Durham University.

Publications Hardey, M., and Crow, G., (1991) Lone Parenthood - Coping with Constraints and Making Opportunities, UK, Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN: 0745009654 (paperback), ePrint ID:	33837, URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/33837 Hardey, M., (1998) The social context of health. PUBLISHER: Open University Press (Buckingham England and Philadelphia, Pa.). Book (ISBN 0335198635). Hardey, M., (1999), Doctor in the house: the Internet as a source of lay health knowledge and the challenge to expertise. Sociology of Health & Illness, 21: 820–835. doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.00185 Payne, S., Hardey, M. and Coleman, P. (2000), Interactions between nurses during handovers in elderly care. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 32: 277–285. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.01474. Hardey, M., Payne, S. and Coleman, P. (2000), ‘Scraps’: hidden nursing information and its influence on the delivery of care. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 32: 208–214. doi: 10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.01443.x Hardey, M. (2001) 'E-health': the internet and the transformation of patients into consumers and producers of health knowledge. Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 4, Iss. 3. Hardey, M. (2002), Life beyond the screen: embodiment and identity through the internet. The Sociological Review, 50: 570–585. doi: 10.1111/1467-954X.00399 Hawker,S., Payne, S., Kerr, C., Hardey, M. and Powell, J., (2002), Appraising the Evidence: Reviewing Disparate Data Systematically Qual Health Res November 2002 12: 1284-1299, doi:10.1177/1049732302238251 Hardey, M. (2002),‘The Story of My Illness’: Personal Accounts of Illness on the Internet Health (London) January 6: 31-46, doi:10.1177/136345930200600103 Payne, S., Kerr, C., Hawker, S., Hardey, M. and Powell, J. (2002), The communication of information about older people between health and social care practitioners Age Ageing (2002) 31(2): 107-117 doi:10.1093/ageing/31.2.107 Hardey, M. (2004), Mediated Relationships, Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 7, Iss. 2. Nettleton, S. and Hardey, M. (2006). Running away with health: the urban marathon and the construction of ‘charitable bodies’ Health (London) October 10: 441-460, doi:10.1177/1363459306067313 Hardey, M., (2007), The city in the age of web 2.0 a new synergistic relationship between place and people, Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 10, Iss. 6. Hardey, M. (2008), Public health and Web 2.0 The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health July 2008 128: 181-189, doi:10.1177/1466424008092228