Category: Opinion

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Welfare / Sociology of Children / Sociology of the Family

Won’t somebody think of the children? Social democratic and neoliberal responses to ‘troubled families’ since 1945

When then Prime Minister David Cameron launched the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) in 2011 he claimed that ‘we’ve known for years that a relatively small number of families are the source of a large proportion of the problems in society’. He then outlined how his government would, in a radical new policy, ‘turn around’ the lives of the 120,000 so-called ‘troubles families’ by the end of the Parliamentary term. It did not work. In its official evaluation, the TFP was...

Class & Stratification / Opinion / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of the Family

Children’s Lunchboxes and Social Class

As children’s lunchboxes travel between home to school and back again, so might concerns about good and bad parenting, and healthy and unhealthy diets. The way in which parents discuss lunchboxes in research studies can reveal a lot about parenting, social class and ways of feeding children outside the home. Government and school health initiatives that attempt to regulate lunch boxes are underpinned by particular norms of healthy eating and one of their unintended consequences is that children and their...

Opinion / Peace, War & Social Conflict / Race & Ethnicity Studies

“Exotic” Travel, Missionary Work, and Race

In November 2018, media outlets exploded with the story of John Allen Chau, a missionary from Washington State, who was killed following his attempts to contact an isolated tribe in the Andaman Sea.  Despite legal protection by the Indian government and persistent warnings from local fishermen, Chau approached the island via kayak, bible in hand.  Shortly after reaching the shore, Chau was killed by bow and arrow. Chau’s story quickly sparked public debate, particularly regarding missionary work and its boundaries [1]. ...

Opinion / Social Welfare / Sociology of Health & Illness / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Honesty is the best policy in healthcare, but how to make it a reality?

In healthcare, as in all walks of life, things go wrong. However, the consequences of an activity going wrong in healthcare can be a matter of life or death. How a healthcare professional and their employer deals with an error is critical to maintain public trust and ensure that a mistake is not repeated. The tragic events of Mid-Staffordshire Foundation Trust and the Hyponatremia related deaths in Northern Ireland have bought into sharp relief the importance of professionals being open...

Opinion / Sociology of Health & Illness

Australian cancer physicians on the use of high cost cancer medicines at the end of life

The use of high cost cancer medicines to treat patients at the end of life (EOL) has become a contentious issue in recent years—due primarily to growing concerns about the safety, efficacy and cost effectiveness of these drugs in this clinical context. Evidence suggests that the use of high cost cancer medicines at the EOL is not cost effective; doesn’t improve overall survival when compared to palliative care; has a significant risk of serious side effects; and may reduce a...

Opinion / Peace, War & Social Conflict / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Identity / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Religion

Radicalization: Interview with Kevin McDonald

In his recent book, Radicalization (Polity, 2018) Kevin McDonald unpicks the term radicalization, showing that this term is little understood, and is problematic in that it does not articulate the very different experiences of those involved. New violent actors, whether they travelled to Syria or killed at home, range from former drug dealers and gang members, to students and professionals, schoolgirls, and mothers with young children. The book sets out to explore radicalization not as something done to people, but...

Gender & Sexuality / Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology

Gender and Contributions in Political Donations

Since the last presidential election, we have seen a rise in public coverage of female political involvement.  The Women’s March took center stage as women sought representation in public discourse and policy.  The #metoo movement, although initially founded offline roughly ten years ago by Tarana Burke, gained traction in 2018 as numerous women shared their experiences with sexual violence and prominent male figures became subjects of public scrutiny. Despite women’s critical involvement in such social movements, social science research has...

Opinion / Social Welfare / Sociology of Children / Sociology of the Family

Children’s Experiences of Childcare in Australia

Our article, “Autonomy, Fairness and Active Relationships: Children’s Experiences of Well-being in Childcare” (Cooke et al., 2018), recently published in Children & Society, provides insight into how children view their care, in a context where policy makers and academics agree that children’s subjective well-being in childcare is important, but research on this topic is limited. While some studies have examined children’s experiences of specific childcare settings (e.g. Outside School Hours Care [OSHC], Early Childhood Education and Care [ECEC]), many families...

Opinion / Rural Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Urban Sociology

Social innovation in crisis-shaken villages

Villages are rarely seen as centers for innovation. However, empirical research shows evidence of innovative activities taking place even in crisis-shaken rural regions. Anika Noack and Tobias Federwisch consider three initiatives, which aim to overcome local problems with socially innovative ideas. In doing so, the authors reveal external impulses by intermediates as crucial for social innovation. The rural municipality of ‘Kremmen’ (an anonymised name for the municipality involved in the study) was once a flourishing tourist destination in the Eifel...

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Theory / Sociology of Organizations & Work

The Power in Writing a Good Note

Why study bureaucracy? Institutions and practices that we have tended to take for granted have recently been subjected to a new awareness and interest. For instance, Timothy Snyder, in his recent book On Tyranny (2017) argued for the importance of government institutions and their capacity to preserve the rule of law when faced with the rise and coming to power of authoritarian populist parties. Others, including key political scientists such as Francis Fukyama, Bo Rothstein, Paul DuGay add to this and point...

Opinion / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Children

Child’s play? Children and young people’s resistances to domestic violence and abuse

Children’s play is often viewed through adult eyes. We worry if children don’t get to play enough, and are often concerned that they are getting opportunities for the ‘right kind’ of play – they need to play ‘properly’ to grow up into ‘proper’ adults.  In developmental research, play is often described as a kind of stepping stone or building block toward something else. So when a child is throwing a ball to another child, professionals might see this as an...

News / Opinion / Peace, War & Social Conflict / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

An Interview with the American Society of Criminology’s 2018 Student Paper Award Winners

The American Society of Criminology (ASC)’s annual Gene Carte Student Paper Competition acknowledges full-time students’ exceptional contributions to the field of criminology, awarding winners with prize money and an opportunity to present their work at the society’s annual conference. Applications for the 2019 contest are now open. Having earned her master’s degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Kristina Thompson Garrity is now a doctoral student in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri –...

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology / Rural Sociology / Sociology of Globalization

Assembling wool and grounding globalization

In our recently published paper in Sociologia Ruralis, ‘Unravelling the global wool assemblage: researching place and production networks in the global countryside’ [1] we demonstrated the utility of assemblage thinking for revealing how globalization works through specific grounded relations and connections between places; remaking those places in the process. Despite being the subject of critique from various theoretical angles for decades, globalization is still frequently deployed as a top-down metaconcept to describe many of the processes and tendencies seen in the...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Opinion / Peace, War & Social Conflict / Political & Economic Sociology / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Social Identity / Social Theory

Making Sense of Brexit: Interview with Victor J. Seidler

Victor Jeleniewski Seidler is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology, at Goldsmiths University of London. His research interests include social theory and philosophy; Marxism and critical theory; moral theory; masculinity and sexual politics, and he has written on social theory, ethics and gender, particularly in relation to men and masculinities. In recent years his writing and research have focused on the cultural memory of particular events, including 9/11 and 7/7, and the ways they might challenge traditional social and...

Class & Stratification / Opinion / Population & Demography / Social Welfare / Sociology of Health & Illness

“Essentially it’s just a lot of bedrooms”: care homes and the conundrums of designing for care

My mum will be 90 next month, she lives in a care home, on the top floor which is a secured space dedicated for people living with dementia. The layout of each of the three floors of the home is the same, the design is economical with individual bedrooms off a corridor, a shared dining space, a communal living room at one end of the corridor and a ‘film’ lounge.  Bedrooms reveal a repeat pattern of en-suite shower and toilet,...

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology / Science & Technology / Social Welfare / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Risking safety and rights: online sex work, crimes and ‘blended safety repertoires’

Like all areas of life, the sex industry has been massively affected by the dominance of the internet and digital technologies which now is the main mechanism for advertising, marketing and organizing how sex is sold. In our project, Beyond the Gaze, there has been some intriguing findings which tell sociologists a lot more about the practices of online sex workers. Notably we found, as reported in the British Journal of Sociology, that the internet makes sex work safer. Primarily...