Category: Opinion

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...

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 / 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...

Opinion

From Farm to Market: The Complications in the Quinoa Economy

Within the last decade, the grain quinoa has emerged as an alleged “super food” in western dietary practices. Health food stores and upscale grocery chains have isles dedicated to varieties of quinoa, packaged under many different brand labels, touting it to be a nutritional goldmine. A simple Google search of the word “quinoa” returns pages of results with buzzwords like “healthiest”, “organic” and “wholesome.” Vegan and health-enthusiast subcultures swear by this expensive food product, and the Food and Agricultural Organization...

Opinion

Teen Mom OG Premiers Tonight!

They’re back!  All four of the original cast members of Teen Mom are returning to MTV.  Their return is being heavily promoted by US Magazine, TV Guide, and People Magazine.  For fans (and researchers!) it’s a super big deal.  It’s a big deal primarily because Farrah chose to return.  You know Farrah right – the adult entertainment star who works for Adult Video News (AVN)?   Rumor has it that the producers had to do a lot of convincing to get...

Opinion

The Madness is in Our Nature

Recently I returned to Quito after a short trip to the UK, where I attended the aptly named CAOS (the Centre for the Anthropology of Sustainability) conference at UCL. I also got some much needed guidance from my supervisors (Dr Evan Killick and Professor James Fairhead), and spent some wonderful time with friends and family, who I have dearly missed while I have been away on my fieldwork. While I was there, a close friend told me he had been...

Opinion

Wikipedia Zero: Socializing Knowledge, but Threatening Net Neutrality?

  Image by Omaranabulsi https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nairobi_-_Wikipedia_Zero_-_258A0439.jpg I visited Nepal earlier this year. It was my first visit since three years earlier and I was completely taken aback by just how many people appeared to own a smartphone: even in remote areas of the country that are some of the least developed regions of the world. Upon some research, my suspicions that mobile devices are the fastest spreading technology in developing countries were confirmed. I did wonder the extent to which cell phones can...

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology

Do heterodox economists make heterodox markets?

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...

Opinion / Sociology of Children

Unqualified Teachers: Why Our Young People Deserve Better

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...

Opinion / Sociology of the Family

“It’s the family, stupid”

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...

Opinion

Could this year’s general election finally shake up UK politics?

  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,...

Opinion

There is No Alternative

*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)....