Category: Opinion

Opinion / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of the Family

Young children at street protests

When we see reports from protests, some of us feel uneasy about seeing children taking part. The reasons for this anxiety may vary. But it is interesting to ask ourselves what exactly triggers our reactions. Of course, photos and videos capture a fragment of reality in a specific composition, while the experiences of the participants are more integrated and general. The pictures of children protesting [1] raise in many people the fear that they may have fallen victim to manipulation....

Gender & Sexuality / Opinion

LGBTQIA+ youth in out-of-home care: The rain and the rainbow

Let’s get things straight. Nowadays, in almost all regions of the world, society discriminates against individuals who don’t fit into the imposed sexuality norms. Individuals who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual/Aromantic/Agender and other sexualities and identities (LGBTQIA+) are subject to systemic violations of their human rights. This is not news; it is a historical reality. LGBTQIA+ individuals are living under pervasive violence that comes in many forms: discrimination, harassment, criminalization, stigma, denial of services, invisibility… However,...

Opinion / Urban Sociology

Has the Pandemic Changed the Cities Forever? Everyday Urbanisms and Covid-19 from an Indian Context

With regards to Covid-19, India is the second most affected country in the world. The urban dimension of Covid-19 in Indian cities reflected the urbanisms, geographies, culture and patterns of life that varied across different intensities and forms. The pandemic has brought to the fore the issue of urban vulnerability, how cities are affected by pandemics and how there is a need to develop pandemic resilience and reimagine cities in the post-pandemic world. The Pandemics of Urban Cities The World Economic...

Opinion / Sociology of Health & Illness

The Psychiatrization of Society: Why we should care

Some years ago, I started my residency as a psychiatrist in a hospital close to Berlin. I was prepared for my job also to encompass meeting people who were not very pleased about meeting me. As one of the downsides of my career choice, I expected to inevitably become a part of the disciplinary institution that Foucault and others had famously described (Foucault 1965; Goffman 1961; Szasz 1974), being obliged to play a main role in cases of compulsory treatment...

Geography and Sociology / Opinion / Social Movements / Social Change

If You Plant It, They Will Come: Anti-GM Protest in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom

On 13 October 2003 Friends of the Earth led a group of 1000 people on a march through London to Downing Street to present a petition opposing the continued development of genetically modified crops in the UK (Brown, 2003). A week later in Wellington, Greenpeace erected a billboard on the grounds of Parliament asking why the Prime Minister was not listening to the peoples’ concerns over genetic engineering (New Zealand Press Association, 2003). Both these events came in the latter...

Opinion / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Globalization / Sociology of Media & Communication

Local Contexts, Global Movements: How Place Shapes Online Social Movements

These days, it is almost impossible to imagine what our daily lives would look like without social media. Platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram have all come to shape our society in fundamental ways – not least in the ways in which we communicate. On the most fundamental level, social media usage has introduced new words to our language that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago (for example, Merriam Webster now lists a Twitter-specific definition for...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Opinion / Social Identity / Social Movements / Social Change

Emotional Labor, Social Movements, and Being a Bad Feminist

Since Arlie Hochschild’s groundbreaking book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), the concept of “emotional labor” has become increasingly popularized. Writing about jobs in the service industry, Hochschild defines emotional labor as the work that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (20). In other words, many (if not most) jobs require us to manage and negotiate our own feelings and the...

Geography and Sociology / Opinion

The fluid nature of rural ethnic identity: encounters between non-Roma and Roma people in a Central-Eastern European context

In the early 2010s, France repatriated a large number of Roma back to Romania, following a series of highly controversial reforms by Nicholas Sarkozy’s government (BBC, 2010). Campaigners for human rights, free movement, and workers’ rights hotly contested those harsh actions of forced repatriation, which were widely discussed in international media. A Romanian article called ‘Back to the life of Gypsy in Romania’ (Micu, 2010) suggested that most of the transnational worker Roma went back to their homelands in the...

Opinion / Social Welfare

Transitions from care to adulthood: exploring historical narratives

Outcomes for care leavers The evidence has been well publicised: young people who have spent their formative years in public care are less likely than their peers to be in gainful employment, and more likely to become homeless, to become involved in crime or prostitution or to become long-term dependent on the state.  A closer inspection of the data tends to reveal a much more nuanced picture: a small group of care leavers are ‘movers on’ who achieve educational, employment...

Class & Stratification / Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology

Is America Coming Apart?

Income and wealth inequalities in the United States are ever widening, and it is having a knock-on effect on segregation. Consider your own life. When you think about the people with whom you interact most, both socially and professionally, it is likely that your neighbors, classmates, and coworkers come to mind. This makes sense, as we come to spend a great deal of our time in our own schools, our own neighborhoods, and our own workplaces. Now consider the socioeconomic...

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Religion

Why declining church attendance sharpens cultural backlash

Religion occupies an odd place in British public and social life. On the one hand, there is an established church in England, while the Church of Scotland is recognised as the national church in Scotland, guaranteed under the Act of Union of Scotland and England of 1707. But compared with other countries Britain is at a relatively late stage of secularisation. A decreasing proportion of the public attend a place of worship regularly, even taking into account the relatively greater...

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

To Do What You Love, Or Not? Employment and the Dominant Ideology of Work Passion

“Do what you love” is something we often hear in response to questions about what career path to choose. Whether from guidance counselors, college professors, or parents, the message is always the same: the best job is the one you are passionate about. A job, in other words, should be more than a job – it should be a part of who you are. While often well-intentioned, this idea is built on several problematic assumptions. First, it presupposes that everyone...

Opinion

Making it easier for authors to publish their research in a Wiley sociology or social welfare journal

It is easy to understand why some authors dislike submitting manuscripts. If you have ever published your research in an academic journal, you may have submitted your paper to three or four journals before you finally found it a home. Searching for the right journal, reformatting your manuscript, and completing each submission process can take a lot of time and effort. Not to mention how long it might take for journal editors to find expert peer reviewers in the field....

Opinion / Political & Economic Sociology

The economic and distributional impacts of affordable housing

A new report on limited-profit housing associations in Austria quantifies the economic impacts of affordable housing in terms of household budgets, economic output, and state expenditure. This article summarises the key findings from this report and draws conclusions on the links between housing and economic inequality. Profit-limitation and affordability – almost 2k Euros savings to households Limited-Profit Housing Associations (LPHA) in Austria occupy a distinctive Third Sector role in Austria’s housing market, being neither profit-driven nor state-dependent. LPHA provide homes...

Opinion / Sociology of Children / Sociology of Health & Illness

Researchers should do more to bring their findings to society: the case of ADHD-medication

In 2020, I co-authored a paper with one of my PhD students, entitled A prescription trend analysis of methylphenidate: relation to study reports on efficacy. In this study by Maruschka Sluiter and colleagues, the prescription-rate of ADHD pills in the Netherlands was analyzed in relation to newly published evidence regarding the lack of their efficacy. We showed that several negative study reports from 2007 onwards did not lead to significant reduction in the rate of methylphenidate (MPH) prescriptions. The data...

Class & Stratification / Opinion / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Does cultural consumption increase future earnings?

In contemporary Britain (as in almost every other nation), there is a clear link between cultural tastes and social position. People who are highly educated, have higher incomes, and work in prestigious occupations are generally more avid cultural consumers than people in less advantaged positions. As you might expect, they are more likely to enjoy high-brow activities like classical music concerts and art galleries. However, they also participate more often in a diverse range of activities; from going to the...