Author: admin

Political & Economic Sociology

The UK Election: How to lose friends (and still influence people)

Roy Jenkins famously described Tony Blair’s task in getting Labour into power in 1997 as “like a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”. This has now become something of a truism of electioneering. According to this view, winning power is about damage-limitation, about not messing up, and it implies a strategy of ‘triangulation’ – co-opting voters from other parties whilst keeping your own voters onside. It implies a certain lack of ambition, trying to carry as many...

Special Issue / Teaching & Learning Guide

It’s a wrap: Concluding Graduate Student Advice Month

And so here we are. Four weeks, 14 posts later. It never ceases to amaze me what we here at Sociology Lens have done here: we have created a space for graduate students to offer advice to other students. No where else is there a space specific for students to seek out advice and community, especially Sociology discipline-specific, from other students. I am ecstatic that this is now a resource that students will be able to come to for years. Throughout...

Opinion

Nepal Earthquake: How to Help and Lessons from Other Disasters

Most people with access to a news sources probably have heard, Nepal recently experienced a devastating earthquake. Over 5,000 people have died, over 10,000 injured, and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. As a Nepalese expatriate in the United States, unable to go home at the time of the disaster, I wanted to write this post about how we can help from afar. Since there are so many organizations and websites soliciting aid – and   some are doing great work...

Sociology Compass Issues / Sociology of Media & Communication / Special Issue / Teaching & Learning Guide

10 Writing Tips for Student Sociologists

Good writing is crucial to sociology. For sociology to thrive as a discipline we sociologists have to be able to communicate our research effectively to a range of audiences. There are many great writing guides out there (Write for Research is especially good: https://medium.com/@write4research). This list of tips reflects my experience of writing a sociology PhD. It’s by no means an exhaustive or authoritative list and some readers may disagree with some of its items: nevertheless it reflects three years...

Special Issue

Surviving the Job Search: It’s not about you

I am one of the job search survivors – if “survival” means “got a job”.  I did actually get a job.  I got a good job at a university and city where I can build a life.  I am one of the lucky few.  In preparation for this post, I have been racking my brain trying to come up with some things I did well that could be helpful to those on the market this fall.  But the fact is,...

Sociology of Culture / Special Issue

How to Not Lose Your Sense of Self in a Graduate Program

(Source:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colonial_Students_in_Great_Britain-_Students_at_the_City_of_London_College,_London,_England,_UK,_1946_D29304.jpg) So, you’re interested in pursuing a graduate program? Great! Before you start applying you have to; research which schools have the best department to fit your specialties, you apply to as many schools as you can to ensure at least one acceptance, and then you wait, and wait, and wait. The days turn into weeks, which turn into months, and then, you finally get an acceptance! You jump for joy; you cannot hold in your excitement. You want everyone...

Sociology of Media & Communication

Five reasons why grad students should start a blog

It seems rather presumptuous of me to give advice on blogging. I am hardly a power-blogging Pulitzer-prize winning writer and journalist. No-one describes me as a ‘commentator’, my posts don’t go viral, my number of twitter followers is not quite up there with Stephen Fry, by a factor of about er… forty five thousand. But that’s not why I do this, and that’s not why I’ve been blogging for Sociology Lens for well over a year now.  There’s a lot to...

Opinion

Coming to Terms With Being a Working Class Academic

I know I have a great deal of privilege. I am a white, thirty-something, well-educated, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied man from Britain. Life is relatively easy for me, and I am well aware of it. But I am also a working class PhD candidate, and academia is one of the few places in which I have ever felt like a minority. People like to think that anyone can make it in the academic world; that it is a meritocracy in which...

Opinion / Sociology of Media & Communication / Teaching & Learning Guide

Technologies of Interviewing: Revamping Qualitative Methods Lessons

  A couple of weeks ago, in my Social Issues in Qualitative Methodology course, I was assigned to give a presentation on the “technologies of interviewing.” At first, I was told by older cohort members that I was lucky because I had the easiest topic: “Just do the history of the recorder.” As I googled the topic, thinking that it would then be some cool history and development I found that my predecessors had just done a timeline of photos...

Opinion

How I Survived My First Year of Graduate School (and you can too!)

Around this time last year, I had finally received that life-altering email that had prompted numerous hits of the refresh button by the minute: an acceptance into a doctoral program. At first it was all cheers of joys and phone calls to distant family members and facebook statuses with one-off triple-digit number of likes. As April turned into May turned into June; however, and August was clearly in the horizon, a lot of the thrill started to be replaced by...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Organizations & Work / Special Issue

Focused Fatigue: Parenting Equally in Graduate School

I am a traditional parent and I began my parenting journey while in graduate school.  I am traditional in that boring two-parent household, two incomes, one dog, two children and a whole mess of bills, kind of way.  What makes us interesting however is how we partner in our parenting and household maintenance.  I know, I know – what’s new or progressive about being partners, isn’t that more of the same old style?  Not quite.  I’m serious when I say...

Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture / Special Issue

Difference and Support: To be a (Queer) Scholar of Color

(Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AStudenti_ULBS.jpg)   For many (Queer) scholars of color (Queer is in parentheses because not all scholars of color identify somewhere on the Queer spectrum), including myself, attending graduate school is an enormous milestone. In my family, I am the first to attend college, let alone a graduate program. It was weird growing up, and to know that no one in your family could help you with your homework. When I was in 8th grade, I helped my cousin with...

Gender & Sexuality / Opinion / Sociology of Culture

The Perils of Dating a PhD Student (or: an Honest Academic’s Dating Profile… )

Graduate Student Advice Month Last year at a conference I was talking to one of my mentors about how it felt to be in the final year of a PhD. She asked me if I was in a relationship with anyone, and I said I wasn’t. Her reply summed it up: “That’s probably for the best.”

Opinion / Sociology of Media & Communication

Inside the Black Box: How Publishing Works

When I’m not busy working on my classwork, thesis or on Sociology Lens posts, I serve as the inaugural Managing Editor for the new American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities’ journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, published by Sage. In this capacity, I am responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the journal including author inquiries and managing our submission portal. Being in this position gives me an insider position to the black box of publishing a manuscript. First, I...

Opinion

Five tips on applying for a PhD

Graduate Student Advice Month When you’re partway through something, it rarely occurs to you to stop and remember how you got there in the first place. I’m around a year-and-a-half into my PhD programme now, and as part of Sociology Lens’ graduate advice month, I thought I’d write up some tips on how to apply for a PhD. Doing so has made me recall exactly how I got here in the first place, and it all started, like so very...

Sociology of Organizations & Work / Special Issue / Teaching & Learning Guide

Five Things I Wish I had Known Before Starting My PhD

 Graduate Student Advice Month   Nobody really knows what is like to do a PhD until they do one. I am half way through mine and I still only half know what it is like to do one very specific PhD: my own. Everyone’s experience is unique to their own research topic, their own field site and their own personality, but many of the challenges, pressures and anxieties we encounter are more similar than we realise. We all seem to...