About the speakers
Mary Ellen Purkis is the current Dean of the Faculty of Human and Social Development and a Professor in the School of Nursing at Victoria University. She has focused her inquiries on critical and interpretive studies of health care delivery. In her research, she has focused on the impact of organizational efforts to introduce “patient focused care” on the relationship that ensues between care provider and care recipient. Dr. Purkis has written extensively on topics such as how people’s experiences of life quality are impacted by organized systems of health care.
Jaber F. Gubrium is professor and chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Missouri. He has been a visiting professor at Tampere University, Finland, at Lund University in Sweden, and at the Universities of Copenhagen and Odense in Denmark. His areas of specialization are aging and the life course, social interaction, identity, qualitative methods, and narrative analysis. Together with James A. Holstein he has developed a distinctive constructionist approach to everyday life in a variety of projects, including Constructing the Life Course, Ways of Aging, The Self We Live By, Institutional Selves, Inner Lives and Social Worlds.