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.
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...
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...
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...
What is the relationship between global theory and feminist scholarship and activism? Even when global theories do not appear to relate to contemporary feminist dialogues, links can be drawn between global theory and women’s rights agendas. One example can be seen in the relationship between world-polity theory and gender mainstreaming. World-polity theorists sought to emphasize the importance of cultural frames, even suggesting world cultural principles and institutions shape the actions of nations and individuals (Boli and Thomas 1997). World...
Next time you read research about young people ask why is it focussing specifically on their age. It is still taken for granted that the process of maturing from a child to adolescent to adult unfolds as a series of naturally occurring stages, that there is a right age at which children should develop certain competencies and acquire certain freedoms and responsibilities (Scott, 1999). Contemporary sociological research, however, has “highlighted the blurring of boundaries between youth and adulthood and the...
Photograph taken by Joanne Koehler. This is a guest post by Jamie Longazel and Joanne Koehler. Jamie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of Dayton. Joanne is a recent graduate of the University of Dayton, receiving degrees in Sociology and Criminal Justice Studies. There is an interesting and potentially important fracking case going on New Mexico right now. The Mora County Commissioners passed the Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance,...
I just came back from a week in Greece. I’m not here to brag, but it was pretty damn great. One of the best things about it was that I hardly used my phone. I couldn’t. Out on the scrubland hills on the island of Levkas, my friend’s mother’s villa does get some limited internet access, but it’s expensive and patchy, so I just didn’t bother using it at all. No email, no facebook, no twitter, no whatsapp, no news,...
In 2008, I read a book by Adina Nack, Damaged Goods? Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases. At the time I was blown away by a text that focused on the study of chronic, non-fatal sexually transmitted infections (STIs) at a time when the majority of research on gender and STIs focused on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States and abroad. Nack’s study examined the ways in which women diagnosed the issue of non-fatal, chronic, sexually transmitted infections...
There’s an interesting post at over on The Philosopher’s Eye, questioning whether Facebook’s recent ‘emotional contagion’ experiments really were so unethical. So, what do you think? Was manipulating the newsfeeds of a few hundred thousand Facebook users unethical, or just part and parcel of the standard user agreement? The Facebook Scandal that Wasn’t – By Udo Schuklenk
How well did you sleep last night? Or the night before? Feeling rested and ready? Nope, me either. While I find it no trouble at all to feed myself adequately, I’m in a constant struggle to provide myself with enough of that most basic resource, sleep. It sometimes feels like while my body and mind most certainly value sleep a lot, technology and modern social practices seem to have very little regard for it at all, and my body and...
The following article By June Sekera gives an extensive account of how the concept of the “public good” has been undermined and redefined as a market failure. The introductory paragraph is below and the remainder of the article can be found at http://rwer.wordpress.com/2014/07/09/re-thinking-the-definition-of-public-goods/ Introduction A year ago last May, the Real World Economics Review blog published my post, “Why Aren’t We Talking About Public Goods?” In that article I argued that we need to revive and reframe the concept of...
“Without money, without income, there is no social existence, no existence at all in fact, material or physical. […] The paradox of capitalist societies is that the economy is the main source of exclusion but that this exclusion not only excludes people from the economy, it excludes or threatens ultimately to exclude them from society itself” Godelier, 1998:2[i] In today’s society, money is the non-plus-ultra. There is no way around it. You use it every day to buy a morning-coffee,...
Recently, I have thought about new forms of pornography and prostitution. The internet landscape in particular is changing rapidly. The old commercial porn industry is really in trouble; not only has it trouble finding a location for its filming after the ban from LA, sales have been going downhill – up to 80% have been lost since 2007. A big part of the reason for this decline is the boom of webcam sites, like Livejasmine and Omeglegirls. Private performers log...
I recently had my carbon footprint calculated over the phone with a member of an environmental NGO called the Surefoot Effect. It was an interesting experience. The conversation was going well. I was asked questions about how I heat my flat (answer: I’ve never turned the heating on), how I commute to work (I cycle), how much meat I eat (I’m vegetarian) and my carbon footprint came in at roughly half the UK average, until I was asked about the...
Piketty is everywhere. Both the French professor himself – always impeccably dressed in smart suits and equipped with the cutest French accent imaginable – and his latest book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ are all over the media, intellectual book-clubs and university common-rooms. He is #1 on Amazon (or on several Amazons in the US, the UK and France) and the hard cover version is sold out both in French and English. Piketty spoke on Reuters TV, CNN Money,...
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