What do you think was the most-discussed topic on Facebook in the UK last year? The World Cup? Cat videos? Ice buckets? The Kardashians? Sociology Lens?… Amazingly, it’s none of those. It was, according to someone who ought to know, Elizabeth Linder – Facebook’s Politics & Government Specialist for Europe – Politics.
(Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Unity#mediaviewer/File:3D_Full_Spectrum_Unity_Holding_Hands_Concept.jpg) In my last post I discussed the problems with juridical changes and practice in real life, problematized ubiquity amongst communities that are at odds with solidarity and posed questions about challenging privilege. Today’s post continues that conversation by asking how does one create change around ideologies? Those who work in the health and human services, who are educators and the like, know that change does not come just from juridical amendments. Change is only created through education and...
In college, I double majored in both women and gender studies as well as sociology, It was not until the spring of my sophomore year, however, that I was introduced to the sociological theory of doing gender, by West and Zimmerman. Since then, I have utilized their theory, along with concepts of “undoing,” “redoing,” and most recently, Kristen Schilt’s concept of “doing heteronormativity.” When I was considering what I should write for my post this week, I was inspired by...
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, studying financial knowledge and practice has become more and more common for sociologists and anthropologists. But the methodological and theoretical approach that has set the terms of engagement for many of these post-crisis scholars predates the crash by at least a decade. Associated predominantly with Michel Callon, Donald MacKenzie, and their students, the social studies of finance emphasizes the extent to which as Callon puts it, ‘economists contribute toward enacting the realities...
This weekend, a House oversight committee announced plans to investigate the Presidential influence over the Federal Communications Commission’s new proposal governing how broadband providers treat traffic on their networks. This investigation is a response to the FCC Chairman’s proposal to subject broadband providers like Verizon, AT&T, Clearwire, and Comcast to regulations similar to those of other utility service companies. According to an op-ed written by Tome Wheeler, the FCC Chairman, the regulations include “the strongest open internet protections ever proposed...
Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines are back in the headlines. After a mass march in central London on January 24th, following the Commons debate on scrapping Trident when David Cameron, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and a shocking 250 other MPs caused a scandal after not even turning up to vote, this long-dormant issue has grabbed the country’s attention. Nukes are now the hot topic of conversation in kitchens, offices and factories across the land, and will surely be a key factor in how...
According to shadow education secretary Tristam Hunt, there are currently 17,100 unqualified teachers, teaching more than 400,000 of our children, in state funded schools. I was one of them. In 2007, burnt out from years working in the care sector, I decided it was time for a change. I needed some hope – to feel I was making a difference. I responded to an advert for a job as a Lesson Cover Supervisor in a local secondary school in my...
(Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:LGBT_rights#mediaviewer/File:Demonstration,_with_Gay_Liberation_Front_Banner.jpg, via Wikimedia Commons) During the trials of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and others, my Facebook newsfeed was filled with a barrage of status updates about the refusal to indict the officers: I had “friends” standing behind the police officers and the law, and “friends” who were in line with protestors and the families of the victims. For the majority of the press coverage, I stayed quiet and did not take a side: but the time has come for the...
Over the past few months, I have been deep in the throes of my thesis- conducting, transcribing, coding, and analyzing interviews- on homonationalism and scripting of student identities in study abroad. While my findings are still very preliminary, there has been a series of answers that have really stuck with me regarding “queer culture” and “queer space.” If you read my post about what homonormativity is, then you know that it involves the depoliticization and privatization of sexuality, while all in...
Many Sociology Lens readers will by now have heard of ‘TTIP,’ the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership currently being negotiated between the EU and the US. The TTIP negotiations are the direct outcome of a transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth established in 2011, and the latest in a string of attempts to create an EU-US free trade zone that date back to the early 1990s. Thus far the two issues garnering the most media attention around TTIP...
When Young (1970) conceived of the meritocracy it was a satirical device to draw attention to a possible dystopian future where everyone is stratified in concrete by their I.Q.: the sub-optimal intelligent condemned to a meaningless existence. The meaning of meritocracy has evolved (Allen 2011) to become a discursive device. Politicians from all major parties now clamour for the moral high ground by claiming making society more meritocratic is their political raison d’etre. The Deputy Prime Minister, for example said...
This week I am teaching framing, the rhetorical construction of social issues. My students learn the most popular framing strategies and how to recognize them. Even though I explain, provide examples, counter examples and practice exercises to impart this concept, it’s difficult. I get it. It’s also important so semester after semester, year after year I continue to teach framing to undergraduate sociology majors. However, last week President Obama lobbed the simplest and clearest example of framing in his speech on...
The new year had hardly begun, and the politicians were off. Just as people were reluctantly returning to work on 5 January, both Labour and the Conservatives struck out with their first bits of electioneering in what is going to be a very long campaign indeed. Ed Miliband argued that only Labour could save the NHS, and the conservatives hit back with a ‘dodgy’ they say is proof that Labour have too many spending commitments and would, if elected,...
Last year I reread one of my favourite books, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, By Robert Tressell. I first read it a few years ago after one of my undergraduate lecturers, Dr Andy Thorpe at the University of Portsmouth, recommended it. I went back to it last year because it was the 100-year anniversary of its posthumous publication and, though it is an account of working class life at the turn of the 20th century in Mugsborough, an aptly named fictional...
*Here is an essay I wrote in 2010 during my undergraduate degree. I have posted it along with my blog this week as it deals with some of the points raised, particularly the idea that society can only exist as a capitalist system. I am aware of its flaws, inaccuracies and limitations (and as I noted in a previous blog, I wouldn’t recommend quoting it!), but I decided to publish it unedited and as I originally submitted it (apart from a few glaring typos)....
On Christmas, my family decided to spend some time at the movies watching the newly released movie Into the Woods, a movie rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s infamous operetta/musical by the same name. The musical begins with an original story involving a childless baker and his wife and their quest to begin a family, though cursed by a witch for stealing magic beans from her garden. The show intertwines the plots of several fairy tales by Brothers Grimm such as Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, and...
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