John Gibbins is currently managing generic skills development for two Faculties as Director of Postgraduate Skills Development at the
University of Newcastle, UK

The development of researcher skills is shaped around the Roberts Agenda which is implemented UKGrad an agency of the Research Councils UK. John provides service delivery, consultancy, and training sessions at Newcastle and other British Universities and through such regional bodies as the Yorkshire and North East Hub of UKGrad
The North East Consortium for Researcher Development.

and such national bodies as the UK Council for Graduate Education

John is currently the External Advisor to the European Unions TEMPUS ADAM project that assists the University of Belgrade in Serbia to professionalize their doctoral and masters programmes in the fields of media and the arts.

Education and employments

John was educated at Aldworth’s Hospital Reading Blue Coat School www.blue-coat.reading.sch.uk/ and then moved to London University as an External Student working at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Graduating with a BSc Honours in Economics (Government) in 1967 he experienced a training in Politics, Philosophy and Economics with such teachers as Noel O’Sullivan

David George and David Manning. John gained an MA in Politics from the University of Durham in 1969 where he focused on political theory with David Manning, Henry Tudor and Charles Vereker and met Andrew Gamble as a student. But it was while browsing in the secondary sequence of old books removed from the normal stacks that John lighted upon Part 1 of John Grote’s Exploratio Philosophica of 1865. How could anyone have produced such a clear and articulate account of idealism in England at this time? How could there have been an idealist philosopher in Britain let alone in Cambridge? The rest of Grote’s corpus were located mostly bequeathed in the library of Joseph Barber Lightfoot, Grote’s old friend and once the Bishop of Durham

A hastily written MA dissertation of 1969 on ‘The Philosophy of John Grote’ examined by Michael Oakeshott, led John to apply for an SSRC Fellowship to study Grote at the University of Newcastle and hence became the first doctoral student to register in the Politics Department. Here he was supervised by David George and Professor Tim Gray and examined successfully in 1988 by Professors Peter Jones and Lord Plant. The two volume thesis was entitled, ‘ John Grote, Cambridge University and the Development of Victorian Ideas, 1830-1870’ and contained copies of letters from Michael Oakeshott to the author.

John became a lecturer in politics at the newly founded Teesside Polytechnic in 1972 helping colleagues to establish honours degrees in Humanities (Politics, History and English) and Social Studies (Sociology, Social Administration and Criminology). Teaching and managing various subject groups led John into inter disciplinary research fields and to co-founding, with Professor Mike Featherstone, the journal of Theory, Culture and Society John remained on the Editorial Board of TCS for its first decade from 1980 to 1990 and remained the Books Reviews Editor, working with such scholars as Bryan Turner, Mike Hepworth and Roland Robertson. The technic became a University and re-organization found john variously in the subject groups of politics, sociology, social policy and criminology.
He moved to becoming a Principal Lecturer in Research Management in 1999 when the School was managed by Professor Pamela Abbott. John was returned in every RAE from its inception.

Cultural theory became a parallel interest in the decades from 1980-2000 with John publishing Contemporary Political Culture: Politics in a Postmodern Age, Sage 1989 and with Bo Reimer The Politics of Postmodernity, Sage, 1999, as well as numerous essays and articles on JS Mill, idealism, sexuality, postmodernism, and John Grote. John helped edit special editions of TCS on Consumer Culture; The FGate of Modernity and Postmodernity. John helped develop the researcher development programme at Teesside before retiring as Principal Lecturer in Research Management in 2004. John was elected to be one of Britain’s members of the Beliefs in Government (BIG) European Project that ran from 1988-1995 and led to a five volume publication in 1995 and contributed to discussions as well as a chapter. Click Here To View

John has provided consultancy services to several professions, professional bodies, organizations and universities in the areas of professional and research ethics, including social workers; nurses; the police, radiographers, academics, managers and research managers. He has provided workshops, training services and plenary lectures to numerous organisations including UKGrad, UKCGE, and the Political Studies Association. This has extended to the international scale with papers to the American Political Studies Association in Washington, College of Psychologists in Girona, the Swiss Government in Montreux and now the Serbian Government. John held visiting posts at History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.