Category: Article types

 ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ © 2013 Sumi Perera RE In my post a fortnight ago, I picked up on a topic that Johannes Lenhard had engaged with on Sociology Lens earlier this year – the apparent immateriality of new monetary forms. From paper money, now unbacked by gold and promising the bearer nothing more than an ‘identical replacement of itself,’ up to the monetary ether that circulates in the rarefied market for foreign exchange derivatives, back down to London’s increasingly cashless public...

My friend hates instant messaging. I know this because he sends me instant messages about it. His main problem is that messaging, whether through SMS, facebook or whatsapp, is distracting, causes misunderstandings, and is a poor substitute for a quick old-fashioned phone call.  Whether my particularly cantankerous and contradictory friend is right or not, the way we communicate is certainly changing very rapidly indeed, in interesting and challenging ways. In the last fifteen years alone we have shifted from phone...

Writing for Sociology Lens earlier this year, Johannes Lenhard introduced ‘the homeless as the last materialists’ – past masters in the dying arts of cash, marginal to the ‘dematerialised’ and ‘virtual’ monetary circuits that are fast becoming conventional. For it is not only in the migraine-inducing markets for foreign-exchange derivatives (worth US$70 trillion at last count) that money appears dematerialised and virtual; you cannot any longer use cash to pay your bus fare in London. But for homeless people in...

When thinking about new blog post topics,  inspiration can come from any number of topics: something on social media, a new film or book being released, or, most often, something in the news that catches our eye and asks for a Sociological analysis. My topic today is a combination of two, that fit together almost too coincidentally to be funny: The London School of Economics’ student union’s decision to disband its Men’s Rugby club  for production of an offensive leaflet, and...

  Mothers seem to be good at finding tribes.  They blog, form Facebook pages, meet for regular play dates, etc…If the plight of early woman were anything like this nostalgic blog post, I would surely miss a communal motherhood as I would miss an appendage.  I suspect however, that even with shared laughter the washing, cooking, and caretaking required of early mothers left them just as exhausted as we feel today.  According to Wikipedia (insert snickering), archeologists think that tribal...

  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...

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...

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,...

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...