Author: admin

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Tech companies should employ more social scientists: here's why.

  I don’t want to stereotype computer scientists. I still cringe when I remember clumsily insulting a room of (mainly) computer scientists at a conference by showing the wallet inspector scene from The Simpsons. There are, however, some computer scientist communities who give all computer scientists a bad name. Witness, for example, the infamous kick-starter project to give a food substitute called Soylent to poor people (which for non-sci-fi fans took its name from the dystopian film called Soylent Green...

Gender & Sexuality / Social Identity / Social Movements / Social Change

Parenthood as Collective Identity

  Iowa is engaged in an historical race, possibly sending their first female to the U.S. Senate.  Republican candidate, Joni Ernst, while also an Army National Guard soldier, describes herself as a mother first.  Albeit a mother who also carries a gun, castrates hogs and rides a motorcycle…just like most mothers I know.  A recent NPR piece questions whether motherhood is a qualifying attribute for national office.  The female focus group interviewed for the broadcast didn’t buy it.  They all seemed to...

Sociology of Culture

Crisp Culture: a national obsession.

  In the UK, this week marks the end of British Summer Time. The clocks go back an hour, its dark by teatime, and the sky turns a uniquely depressingly shade of gunboat grey until March. Yes, The Long Dark Winter Of The Soul starts here. For millions of Britons, keeping Seasonal Affective Disorder at bay will mean spending many hours in that great British sanctuary: THE PUB. There will be beer, there will be football, there will be whingeing...

Gender & Sexuality / Political & Economic Sociology / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Organizations & Work / Teaching & Learning Guide

Are We All Expert Impostors?

In a previous post (which can be found here), I mentioned the ‘impostor phenomenon’ and how I and many people I know who work in academia have experienced it in some form or another during their career. The ‘imposter syndrome’ (identified by Clance & Imes, 1978, pp. 1-2), the feeling that leads the self-declared impostors to believe that they are not intelligent and that anyone who thinks otherwise has simply been fooled, is usually accompanied by a fear that one...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

A Makeover for Cosmopolitan?

  Every day I drive a half hour from my home to my office at the university and a half an hour from the university back home.  Like many of my peers, I pass time during my commutes listening to National Public Radio.  I know it is a bit of a cliché, the doctoral student in the sociology department listening to NPR every morning, but I really do feel as if my 60 minutes of NPR each day keep me...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Only “Real” Women Need Apply: Defining Womanhood and Trans Inclusion at Women’s Colleges

If you read my last post about how women’s colleges are still relevant, you know that I am a large advocate for women’s colleges. There is a plethora of evidence that women’s college students experience (and gain) significant benefits compared to their coeducational peers. That does not mean, however, that sex segregation in education is always the answer. In fact, for some single-sex colleges, the gender-focused environment is in fact too exclusionary. Women’s colleges, by definition, are for women. But...

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture

Exhibit A: the Whites of the Eyes

Under what conditions might it be ethical to refuse to meet or return someone’s gaze? Is it ever acceptable for a social scientist or journalist to write ‘with their eyes shut’? The notion that visual receptiveness can be a spur to urgent ethical response is captured in that familiar category of humanitarian action, ‘bearing witness’ (so much so, in fact, that we often forget about the work that must be done in order for witnesses to be created). At the...

Opinion

Rugby Clubs and Riot Clubs: Privilege in UK Universities

When thinking about new blog post topics,  inspiration can come from any number of topics: something on social media, a new film or book being released, or, most often, something in the news that catches our eye and asks for a Sociological analysis. My topic today is a combination of two, that fit together almost too coincidentally to be funny: The London School of Economics’ student union’s decision to disband its Men’s Rugby club  for production of an offensive leaflet, and...

Opinion

The Graduate Student Tribe

  Mothers seem to be good at finding tribes.  They blog, form Facebook pages, meet for regular play dates, etc…If the plight of early woman were anything like this nostalgic blog post, I would surely miss a communal motherhood as I would miss an appendage.  I suspect however, that even with shared laughter the washing, cooking, and caretaking required of early mothers left them just as exhausted as we feel today.  According to Wikipedia (insert snickering), archeologists think that tribal...

Opinion

Flight-path dependency: How an uneven transport market is killing off green options.

I released a deep sigh last month, when I read that Deutsche Bahn is cancelling night trains on its Brussels-Copenhagen, Paris-Berlin, and Hamburg-Munich lines by the end of this year. I was further saddened to read that the Paris to Barcelona night train – which I took myself a few years ago on a fondly-remembered holiday across Europe – is already a thing of the past, as of last December.

Opinion

The Conference Conundrum: Yes, You Should Sumbit

  Recently, I was asked to prepare a presentation for first year graduate students on presenting at professional conferences.   I immediately recalled how terrified I was at my first round table presentation during the 2009 Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting and thought useful a simple summary of the various annual meetings and conferences might be for students in the early years of graduate school. Presenting papers at professional conferences has been a useful tool during my graduate school career.  In...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Who Needs the Boys?: On How Women’s Colleges Still Matter

As I received the invitation to join the Sociology Lens team as a News Editor, I spent a great deal of time reading archived articles, debating what could I possibly contribute to the discipline. As I came across Heidi Rademacher’s piece “Why We Definitely Need Feminism,” I realized that my experiences, research interests and questions I ask time and time again are relevant to a larger body of timely literature and understanding about women, gender, sexuality, feminism, education, human rights,...

Opinion

The Sociology of Web 3.0

This year the World Wide Web is 25 years old. Web 1.0 was made possible by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the http protocol which enabled us to retrieve of a copy of a document by accessing its address on a network. Web 2.0 was made by us; the content providers. To realise the semantic web or Web 3.0 technologists envision everything (documents, data, inanimate objects, even us) having an address on a network and artificial intelligence having the ability...

Opinion

In the Company of Spectacle Makers

Something rather curious is going to happen next week. On Michaelmas – the 29th of September – the next Lord Mayor of London will be elected by the Liverymen of the City of London’s trade associations – those gilded ‘Worshipful Companies’ of, among other craftsmen, the Goldsmiths, Spectacle-Makers and even Management Consultants. (The Lord Mayor presides over the City of London – the Square Mile on the north bank of the Thames that historically has been home to London’s financial...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

"Women are bitches", and other obvious tales from the Sociological front line

  Words excite me. I can’t help it, words are all I have really: they are my bread and butter and what keeps the wolves from the door, and what gets me up in the morning. And a lot of the time that means that I have a propensity to use long words when short words would definitely do. (See, I did it there with propensity. ‘Tendency’ would have worked, ‘habit’ would have done, too. It’s a sickness really.) Every...

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Mothering on the Margins: legislating first environments and the demand for maternal accountability

    “You put me in charge of Medicaid…”, the vice president of Arizona’s Republican Party and former state senator, Russell Pearce quipped on his weekly radio broadcast The Russell Pearce Show “the first thing I’d do is get Norplant, birth-control implants or tubal ligations”.  Medicaid is a program designed to provide health-related services for people who cannot afford healthcare in the private sector.  As Amanda Kennedy of Sociology Lens points out vividly here, “being valued as a parent is...