STUART HALL is one of the founding figures of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, was formerly President of the BSA (1995-97) and is now Professor Emeritus at the Open University, UK. He is widely regarded as one of the leading cultural theorists of our time and is the author of many influential and highly-respected texts, including: The Hard Road to Renewal, Formations of Modernity, Questions of Cultural Identity and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.

CHAS CRITCHER is Visiting Professor in Media and Communications at Swansea University and Professor Emeritus at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He originally studied at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Amongst his most recent publications are Moral Panics and the Media and the edited collection Critical Readings in Moral Panics and the Media.

TONY JEFFERSON is Professor in the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice at Keele University, UK. He spent five years at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Throughout his career he has written many highly-respected texts including Interpreting Policework, Doing Qualitative Research Differently and The New Psychosocial Criminology.

JOHN CLARKE is Professor of Social Policy at the Open University, UK and has been a visiting scholar at a number of other institutions including NOVA in Oslo, the Danish Social Research Institute (SFI) in Copenhagen, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Central European University in Budapest. His publications include Changing Welfare; Changing States, Creating Citizen-Consumers and Publics, Politics and Power.

BRIAN ROBERTS was Principal Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Behavioural Sciences, University of Huddersfield, UK. His writings have included work on time and identity in biographical work, communal change and Welsh labour history.