by Ros Edwards and Val Gillies As the academy becomes further marketised and institutionalised, it grows harder to envisage operating academically outside of traditional organisational forms. Yet the resulting pressures, hierarchies and exclusions are leading many to look for alternatives. Can… Read More ›
Committing Sociology 
This will be a seminar series in 2013/2014 – watch this space!
Eating disorders awareness week
This week (24 February – 2 March 2014) is dedicated to raising public awareness about eating disorders. Read more at the website of B-EAT – a charity working to beat eating disorders, www.b-eat.co.uk.
Bill Carroll: Grassroots organizations as alternatives in the global economy
William Carroll is a Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada). In this video from the 2012 Global Studies conference, he talks about his research on global politics, and looking at grassroots organizations as alternatives in… Read More ›
Blind Eye Forward
How does a critical sociologist approach a troubled world? Bill Carroll, professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada), has sent us this awesome music video. The original composition, entitled “Blind Eye Forward”, is a… Read More ›
Why I am quitting the British Sociological Association
Now that my PhD is almost complete, I’ve received a polite request from UCU that I rejoin as a staff member. I was pleased to find that subscription rates are on a sliding scale, with the highest band paying twice… Read More ›
Sociology and poetry
Sitting near a lake See more than our reflections So this is sociology K.J., sociology student There is an uneasy relationship between traditional sociology and the arts, in particular openly irrational registers of writing, such as poetry. I’m not sure… Read More ›
A Follow-Up Interview with Dr. Patricia Leavy about Arts-Based Research and Public Sociology
Lauren Sardi: To recap from our last interview you explained that there is now am arts-based paradigm in addition to qualitative and quantitative paradigms. ABR is when researchers in any discipline adapt the tenets of the creative arts in their… Read More ›
Journeys Through Sociology
UC Berkeley have produced a great series of video interviews with former presidents and current board members of the International Sociological Association. These engaging interviews mix professional interests and personal reflections in a way that we rarely encounter within the… Read More ›
Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology
Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology by Mark Carrigan and Milena Kremakova This website’s raison d’etre was initially nebulous, tentative and ambitious all at the same time: we wanted to create a new online… Read More ›
Getting your research noticed by journalists
Interested in getting your research noticed by journalists? The LSE Impact Blog recently published an article by a politics PhD student which reflected on this process. Engaging with the media is something which PhD students are rarely encouraged to do but… Read More ›
An Interview with Sociologist Patricia Leavy about Arts-Based Research, Fiction and Public Scholarship
Lauren Sardi: You are a proponent of arts-based research. What is arts-based research (ABR)? Patricia Leavy: Arts-based research is when researchers in any discipline adapt the tenets of the creative arts in their social research. The arts can be used… Read More ›
Research as Fiction: “The Return of Rufus Stone” by Kip Jones
A four-year research project at Bournemouth University, “Gay and Pleasant Land?—a study about positioning, ageing and gay life in rural South West England and Wales”, took place as part of the Research Councils UK-funded New Dynamics of Ageing Programme on… Read More ›
Re-thinking research repertoires: foregrounding sound
On the final afternoon of an intense, three day sociology conference for the NYLON research network (PhD students and faculty from New York, Berlin and London), the two authors ran a workshop on sound and listening. This was something of… Read More ›
An invitation to punk sociology
I seem to recall dreaming up the notion of punk sociology at some point during my PhD, I think it was around 10 years ago. When I think back I imagine, rather melodramatically, that it came to me whilst I… Read More ›
Please keep up, Sociology
How can we have a real ‘global dialogue’ in a sociological discipline that is becoming increasingly censorious and elitist? In each major publication or event we wheel out the same theorists to regurgitate the same ideas. Textbooks and monographs are… Read More ›
BSA Activism in Sociology Forum Inaugural Meeting
Saturday 9 November 2013, 10:30am-4pm BSA Meeting Room, London Invitation and Call for Papers The BSA Activism in Sociology (ASF) has been established to increase the contribution of sociology and sociologists to challenging injustice and inequality by connecting those already working… Read More ›
Building an Africana Sociology
As a sociologist-in-training and a grad student it is my job to eat, breath, and live sociology, the study of human interaction and social institutions. I spend most of my week either reading sociological pieces, listening to lectures and talks,… Read More ›
What the other social sciences can learn from economics
An interesting post by Diane Coyle on the LSE Impact Blog offers a useful counterweight to those who engage in economist-bashing as a matter of reflex. Though I’m sure I’ve probably lapsed into this on occasion, it’s something which increasingly… Read More ›
#BritSoc13 Interview with John Holmwood
Annual Conference 2013 Interview with John Holmwood from British Sociological Association on Vimeo.
Reclaiming ‘impact’ and committing sociology
Earlier today I stumbled across this interesting post by David Mellor on the (now defunct) Sociology & the Cuts blog: There is a great deal of talk about publics that very often fails to materialize into anything more substantial than… Read More ›
Sociology’s ‘Moments’: Democracy, Expertise and the Market by John Holmwood
The videos from this year’s British Sociological Association conference have been released. You can find the full set here – the video above is from John Holmwood’s plenary. As we paraphrased its conclusion while live tweeting at the time: The… Read More ›
What is Sociology for?
But, sometimes, asking what something is ‘for’ can, if understood as an expository tactic, a starting-point rather than a ruling, be a means of helping us to clear away the discursive debris that accumulates round any widely used category. The… Read More ›
John Urry and Chris Rojek: “British Sociology since 1945”
Recorded at the British Sociological Association annual conference 2011, sponsored by SAGE. In this interview with Professor John Urry, Professor Chris Rojek discusses the state of Sociology in Britain today and the main developments in Sociology during the 60 years… Read More ›
Does Sociology still have a demand problem?
Mark Carrigan asks, after an essay by Wolfgang Streeck, why there is so little sociology in public discourse? Streeck argues that there might be a demand problem, since although there are numerous sociologists plying their trade, we still seldom see sociology… Read More ›
CfP: The Sociological Craft Project
In this new feature the Sociological Imagination invites short (2500 word max) contributions reflecting on any aspect of sociological craft. We use the term ‘craft’ in the broad sense conveyed by Richard Sennett: Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a… Read More ›
Alienated and alienating writing (by alienated and alienating social scientists)
The problem for social scientists is that our jargon, like that of the natural scientists, is heavily biased towards nouns and noun phrases. Our big words are nearly always nouns, such as “re-ethnification”, “mediatisation”, “deindividuation” and all the other “isations”… Read More ›