Latest articles from sociology lens

Books and arts / Class & Stratification / History of Sociology / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Buying Time: Stefano Sgambati’s Sociology of Money, Debt & Finance

Writing for the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog yesterday, David Graeber warned that we may be heading towards yet another crisis of the kind we saw in 2007–08. In his Comment, Graeber takes to task George Osborne’s 2015 Mansion House speech (or rather the logic underpinning it), in which Osborne made a commitment to run a budget surplus in ‘normal times’, much to the consternation of dozens of academic economists. It seems that the utterly misleading and moralizing analogies so...

Class & Stratification / Sociology of Media & Communication

Confessions of an Airport-lover. The ‘Non-place’ in a global village.

Like millions of others – possibly including yourself – I passed through several airports this summer (Remember summer?). But – perhaps unlike you – I obsess about airports, maybe because air travel forms a key part of my studies, or because I’m just something of an aero-geek. I mean, I was in the air cadets for two years as a teenager. But if you think about it, airports are strange, unique kinds of places.

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies

LGBTQ* People and Public Space

Photo Source: https://pixabay.com/en/people-crowded-steps-walking-692005/ For LGBTQ people, public space is fraught with potential dangers, harassment, and discrimination. Over the past few months I have been researching how LGBTQ people learn to navigate space and its political implications. Public space is the stage in which the sociopolitical plays out. How people present themselves and how people respond to such presentations is inherently a political struggle. Noting that gender is part of our performance is important to analyzing gender as a political act, as...

Books and arts / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Prize Winning Fictions

On Tuesday, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings was awarded the Man Booker Prize for 2015 at the City of London’s Guildhall (an institution about which I wrote for Sociology Lens last year). James’ book is an imagined retelling of the attempt made on Bob Marley’s life in 1976, and the first novel by a Jamaican writer to win the Prize, which now comes with a £50,000 cheque, having been introduced with a purse of £5,000 in 1969....

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Social Identity / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Selected Politics Concerning Natural Hair

The term “natural hair” is used in the African American community to differentiate between hair that has been left in its natural state and hair which has been permed (which is to permanently straighten the hair follicle with chemicals). African American hair in its natural state appears tightly coiled or kinky and is often socially stigmatized. Social stigmas are any idea that individuals associate with negative connotations. Many individuals would agree that hair is a prevailing symbol of one’s self...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Media & Communication

The Perpetually Angry Activist: Emotions and Social Change in News Media

Source: https://pixabay.com/en/anger-angry-bad-isolated-dangerous-18615/   News coverage of protests and the activists which engage in them forms into patterns; media tends to highlight the extreme, irrational, angry, and violent segments of collective action (Corrigall-Brown and Wilkes 2012; Winter and Klaehn 2005). We can turn to the recent example of the Black Lives Matter movement shown shouting down presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Why does the nature of news media depictions of activists’ emotional expressions matter? Evoking the wrong emotion in the public can alienate...

Class & Stratification / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Identity / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Making sense of the ‘social’ in social media (and social enterprise, social marketing, social analytics…)

Doubtless I am not alone among the contributors to Sociology Lens in having been exposed, during my first year as an undergraduate, to an array of foundational thinkers in sociology (and anthropology) who present human history as a movement away from ‘traditional’, ‘face–to–face’ or ‘kinship–based’ societies, towards those in which interaction and identity is less relational, and more individualized. Such theorizing is not only limited to the classical sociologists who wrote in the 1900s, like Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim;...

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture

The Symbolics of Sexuality

One of sociology’s main critiques revolves around neoliberalism, and its implications on everyday life in a capitalistic society. Yet, individuals do not comprehend what these implications are for those who identify as LGBTQ. As of recently, there are a plethora of articles illustrating some of the consequences that occur in this new neoliberal society. For example, John P. Elia and Gust A. Yep stated in their article, “Sexualities and Genders in an Age of Neoterrorism:” Read more about neoliberalism and...

Opinion

In Defense of Millennials: A Sociological Explanation

Photo Credit: Unsplash (Public Domain) There have been innumerable pieces dedicated towards labeling the millennial generation with negative qualities. The generation is usually targeted with the following complaints: Narcissistic Entitled Apathetic Immature I think these arguments have been poorly constructed. They’re often more symptomatic of a fear of what is new. I will explore these four critiques and offer what about them actually makes millennials an interesting, unique and a positive generation. One that is capable of making changes to the...

Political & Economic Sociology

The same old ‘New Politics’? Or has Corbyn just done something historic?

Yesterday I had to pinch myself when I saw Jeremy Corbyn on the front benches of the House of Commons, facing David Cameron as the leader of the British Labour party. Corbyn is the man who has spent all of his adult lifetime on the fringes of mainstream politics, an unapologetic socialist campaigner who has fought many of the battles of the left: against South African apartheid and Thatcherite deindustrialisation in the 1980s, against the introduction of university tuition fees...

Race & Ethnicity Studies

Microaggressions Within Academia

Being a WOC (Woman of Color) or MOC (Man of Color) in a graduate program is a unique experience. The opportunities made available to you become a great resource for networking, strengthening a skillset, and producing valuable research that provides a unique contribution to your field. Some departments offer grants to their graduate students while some pay for tuition waivers, however some students are left to fend for their own sources of funding. During this period of learning to become...

Sociology of Culture

‘You can’t see me!’ How our consumption habits are becoming invisible

I look at you across the train carriage. I can see the clothes you wear, I can guess the car you drive, possibly take a stab at the house you live in. In my arrogance, I think I’ve got you down. Then you get your phone out and start pushing buttons and swiping around. I can now only see your facial expressions for any clue whatsoever as to what you’re looking at, who you might be messaging, what you might...

Gender & Sexuality / Social Movements / Social Change

The Missing Base: Barriers to Coalition-Building Around the Murder of Trans Women

  (Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Prop_8_protest,_Washington_D.C.,_November_15,_2008.jpg) Today is the last day of the American Sociology Association’s annual meeting. In honor of this year’s theme Sexualities in the Social World, I wanted to bring attention to the troubling trend of murders of transgender women. First, I introduce what little data exists about the experiences of trans women. Then I consider three existing groups of social movement activists that could act as allies to the transgender community and the presence of barriers which might inhibit...

Opinion

Doing social research in China: a beginners’ guide.

Last month I had the privilege of going to Xiamen University in south-eastern China for a ten-day research trip, along with ten other social science PhD students from my department at Southampton University. The purpose of the trip was to give us an opportunity to do a research project with ten Chinese PhD counterparts, and to give us a feel for what some of those buzzwords of contemporary academia – ‘global’, ‘networking’, ‘collaboration’, ‘inter-disciplinarity’ – might actually mean in practice....

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

The Other (Religious) Dimensions of Sexuality

(Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Religious_items#/media/File:Fastentuch.jpg)   One of the main ideologies of religion, which Ninian Smart has pointed out, is that of the ethical, and legal dimension. Smart states, “the law which a tradition or subtradition incorporates into its fabric can be called the ethical dimension of religion” (Smart 18; 1998). History has proved how social customs, usually stemming from religious ideologies, tend to become laws, and govern social norms. When thinking about American society, society claims there is a separation between the Church,...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

The detriments of "Sex Ed" in its current state

Do you remember your sex education during your youth? Did you even have sex education? My school district (a local, public school district composing of four small townships) contracted out our sex education through Catholic Charities, which would come into health classes and teach “sex ed.” (Note: I am very conscientious of using quotations around my experience of “sex ed” because it wasn’t real sexual education, but rather, (heteronormative) abstinence only education.) We started having exposure to sex ed as...