Category Research Profiles

Entries 14 Total

SI SPORT WEEK #5-1: Rock Climbing and Gendered Identity (Victoria Robinson)

Jun 17, ’11 8:00 AM

Today we present a selection of sociological resources on rock climbing and introduce the work of Victoria Robinson on climbing identities.

Do Not Climb! (Model: M. Mihaylova. Photo: Idle Ethnographer TM)

Do Not Climb! (Model: M. Mihaylova. Photo: Idle Ethnographer TM)

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SI SPORT WEEK #4-1: Researcher’s profile: Deborah Butler discusses Careers in the Racing Industry

Jun 16, ’11 8:00 AM
Deborah Butler: University of Warwick researcher studying careers and training in the horse racing industry

Deborah Butler: University of Warwick researcher studying careers and training in the horse racing industry

Most people may have heard about Arkle, Red Rum, even Desert Orchid. How many people will have given a thought about the individuals who made sure these equine athletes made it the racetrack, fit and ready to race? It is these individuals, known collectively as ‘stable lads’ and yes, quite a high percentage of them are women, that I am interested in. Thus my research is investigating the working identities of stable staff who work, for very little reward, in the horseracing industry. Like in many male-dominated occupations and sporting arenas the racing field itself is male dominated , gendered masculine and is struggling to move away from the feudalistic employment relations that once governed the workforce. Women were once excluded from the workforce as entry was controlled by employers, the racehorse trainers through indentured apprenticeship. A knowledge of horses was unnecessary – trainers wanted young boys who were very small and light in weight, no more than 5stone at 14, and no taller, if possible than 5’7”. Indentured apprentices if good enough were given the opportunity to race ride, as apprentices (trainee jockeys) although being indentured did not automatically guarantee the right to race ride. As the supply of small, light boys began to dwindle employers had to look elsewhere for their workforce which was when women, in the late 1960’s, early 1970’s started to be seen working as ‘stable lads’ although they were not legally permitted to race ride. Indentured apprenticeship was abolished in 1976 during a period when wide reaching legislation in the form of the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) amongst other things was introduced. Racing’s ruling body, The Jockey Club had to accept the fact that women could now legally be jockeys.

The racing industry now employs migrant labour to help fill its labour force. Young entrants, racing’s potential workforce, if between the ages of 16-22 must be signed onto a government funded training scheme known as a modern apprenticeship but, and this is an important but, it has nothing to do with being an apprentice jockey! Rather it refers to a type of training that was once synonymous with producing skilled craftsmen and in some occupations, craftswomen. Interestingly 60% of the intake at the British Racing School (BRS) are women. The BRS is one of the two specialist training providers for the racing industry where modern apprentices over a nine week period complete the first part of their training before being found employment in a racing yard. What is perhaps more salient is that a very small proportion of these young women will become apprentice jockeys and an even smaller proportion will become professional jockeys when compared to their male counterparts.

Deborah Butler is PhD candidate at the University of Warwick. Her research is on employment and training in the horse racing industry.

Read more about Deborah’s research here.

Read an article about Deborah and her work on Voices for Horses .

Hear Deborah speak about her research at the Sociology of Sport Seminar (20 June, Warwick University).

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SI SPORT WEEK #1-1: Sport and Social Identities (edited by Andrew Parker and John Harris)

Jun 13, ’11 8:00 AM

Welcome to the first post from this week! We begin by introducing an important collection on the sociology of sport.

Sport and Social Identities

(edited by John Harris and Andrew Parker)

Sport and Social Identities, by A. Parker and J.Harris

Sport and Social Identities, by A. Parker and J.Harris (image: Amazon)

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Royalty, weddings, gender, and class: What is so middle-class about Kate Middleton?

Apr 27, ’11 12:20 PM

Don’t miss the Live Chat by Warwick PhD student Sam Lyle at the Warwick University Knowledge Centre (today, Wednesday 27th April, at 2 pm), regardless of whether you are interested, amused, baffled, or repulsed, by the imminent royal wedding.

The live chat will begin at 2pm (GMT), a link will be posted at the event page: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/alumni/knowledge/projects/live/ from 1.55pm (GMT).

The topics of the live chat will centre around the royal wedding when considered alongside gender and social class, and aim to answer questions such as:

  • What has been the media and social response to Kate and William’s engagement?
  • Are we, as a nation, anxious about middle-class identities?

If you are not able to attend the live chat, a summary will be posted on the Knowledge Centre after the event.

Sam’s PhD work focuses on social class and gender, and in this live chat she will be helping us answer the question: ‘What’s so middle-class about Kate?’.

In November 2010, Sam appeared on local radio speaking about the engagement between Prince William and Kate Middleton (listen to the programme here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00c3gqf#synopsis).

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Emotional management during research: A personal reflection

Mar 15, ’11 8:00 AM

Dickson-Smith et al (2009: 61) suggest that ‘undertaking qualitative research is an embodied experience and that researchers may be emotionally affected by the work that they do’. They also state that this ‘emotional work’ (Hochschild 1983) is rarely theoretically or empirically investigated (Dickson-Smith et al 2009). Throughout this article I take a distinctly un-academic approach (and voice) to provide a personal account of my experiences of doing emotional work while conducting my PhD fieldwork. To add context, my PhD research focuses on disabled peoples’ experiences of sexuality and relationships. The research begins from the idea that disabled peoples’ sexualities are constructed in ways which may be disempowering, that their bodies and lives are largely degendered and desexualised, and that their sexual politics and cultures are inhibited within an ablest/disablist society. Thus, through collecting disabled peoples’ sexual stories (in a variety of ways), the research seeks to explore experiences and understandings of sexuality, both in terms of these constructions, and the ways in which disabled people manage and negotiate them.

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Casting My Net wide*: Ethnography and today’s ‘Knowing Capitalism’

Mar 11, ’11 8:00 AM

Traditional anthropology and ethnography are all about daring researchers originating from civilised Western European countries venturing into unknown territories to spend half their lives living with fascinating, backward tribes. They defy the comfy practice of armchair theorising and instead theorise on scruffy notepads, sat on prickly palm-leaf mattresses, while risking being eaten alive by tsetse flies and Felidaes.  If not consumed by carnivores, native diseases, or evil spirits, they tend to judge the native tribes by their own post-Enlightenment standards (despite their best intentions), and occasionally go native (because of their best intentions).  They then come back to their native universities to hold professor chairs in departments of Social science and Humanities, and proceed to publish acclaimed œuvres on the mores of one tribe for the rest of their lives.

The image of the ethnographer/anthropologist which I so mercilessly caricatured above has now been outdated and superseded by more reflective and less self-glorifying views on the researcher’s role.  But the reputation gained during anthropology’s infant years still haunts any social research which does not rely on skilful number-crunching, instead insisting on asking uncomfortable and vague questions, such as ‘why’ and ‘how’.

As the Idle Ethnographer, my quest is to subvert this lingering notion.  I cast my nets wide.  Among many other authors, I take inspiration from the socially awkward, but perceptive character in Kate Fox’s book Watching the English. Wherever I find myself (even, in fact, especially at home), I watch, mingle, taste, take photos, ask questions, say uncouth things to test people’s reactions, never take anything for a final answer, and generally try to tease out a richer, if disconcerting, verstehen of what Goffman calls ‘the tissue and fabric of [...] life’ (Asylums, 1961).   I sincerely welcome questions and criticisms, because they are essential for that same understanding (or possibly also because I have been embarrassed so much that I have grown insensitive to embarrassment).

There is one important ‘HOWEVER’.   In the contemporary British sociological tradition, qualitative sociology seems to enjoy a relatively higher status compared to other countries – as Savage and Burrows (in The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology, 2007) point out, this happened as a ‘reaction to Parsonian functionalism from the 1950s‘.  However, they also note that there is a bias towards the comparatively ‘lightweight’ (or even flawed) method of in-depth interviews, rather than fully-fledged ethnography: ‘A comparatively unusual feature of British sociology is its embrace of the ‘in depth interview’ as its preferred research method. Halsey (2004) shows that 80
per cent of qualitative articles published in the British sociology journals in 2000 used interviews, a proportion which has steadily increased from about 50 per cent in the early 1960s. No other national tradition of sociology gives the in-depth interview such pre-eminence.’ (ibid.)

At least one reason for the current proliferation of qualitative methods in UK sociology is somewhat dubious: namely, the dislike of mathematics-based methods harboured by some researchers and students in the social sciences.  At least in part, the negative attitude towards ethnography is caused exactly by the widely-held assumption that those of us who rely on qualitative methods do so, due to being handicapped in our numerical skills (see, e.g., ‘A Crisis of Number: Some Evidence from British Sociology’; or Payne,Williams & Chamberlain (2003) Methodological pluralism).  Even though I am only a PhD student, each time I present  my research, I receive at least one question regarding my choice of methodology, and have to refute all over again explicit or implicit allegations of incapacity: that, presumably, I must favour ethnography because I dislike statistics, and not because it presents a richer conglomerate of methods which are immensely more appropriate, both in view of my specific research question, and in view of the resources available to me as a sole researcher.  I have grown so accustomed to this accusation, that I automatically find myself pointing out the opposite: that I enjoy, and can do, mathematics and basic statistics, but that for the purpose of my PhD project, I happen to be interested in other types of questions about the behaviour and social arrangements of human beings.  Even a five-year old knows that you need to choose the right method according to what it is that you want to achieve.  For my research questions, statistical analysis is far less helpful than other methods – even though my results are not verifiable.  This is not always a convincing cop out, but comparing my research to the sociological equivalent to chaos theory dealing with a multivariable system sometimes yields understanding laughter and occasionally helps*.

Joke aside, a rigorous qualitative+quantitative sociology is necessary more than ever.  With the ever-growing scientific specialisation that has been going on in the social sciences, and especially in view of the increasingly marginal social role of professional sociology (discussed at length in the excellent article by Savage and Burrows cited above, drawing on what Thrift (2005), calls a ‘knowing capitalism’, in a book called ‘Knowing Capitalism’).  A better mutual understanding – and trust – of each other’s work by researchers on both sides of the lingering methodological divide is indispensible.  Perhaps we need a constant reminder to awake us from the slumber of blind methodological allegiances that lead us to forget that the best research in any field – be it history, economics, sociology, journalism, natural sciences, or mathematics – makes use of all available methods and bits of information, and strives to create the most comprehensive, rich, and reflective story possible, in order to help us know more.   And that good researchers are never idly resting on their methodological laurels, or assuming that yesterday’s superiority guarantees them tomorrow’s power.

*(Chaos theory deals the behaviour of dynamical systems which are so sensitive to initial conditions that even the smallest variation in them gives widely divergent results (see e.g. Gleick, J.(1987) Chaos: Making a New Science (see excerpts) or this blog for a brief introduction).  Only that in ethnography there are a huge number of unknown variables, whereas mathematics has so far only found ways of dealing with small numbers of dimensions – which makes social research a hugely more complicated exercise.

* this is also a citation from Savage and Burrows, (2007)

http://soc.sagepub.com/content/41/5/885.abstract

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Why am I doing a PhD? By Sarah Smart

Feb 24, ’11 8:00 AM

As I sit in my quiet but chaotic study, staring out of the window and wondering whether I can justify stopping for another cup of tea, I find myself wondering why I have spent the last three years doing social research for my PhD. It is a question that I often see (or imagine I see) on people’s faces when they ask what I do, especially since a friend blustered in response to my explanation: “And are my hard-earned taxes funding you?”

My PhD is looking at secondary school pupils’ constructions of social justice. I have learnt not to tell the general inquirer this, as it is open to a number of misinterpretations, including the assumption that I am studying youth offending and that I am a radical communist. In fact, what I want to understand is how young people apply principles of fairness and justice to the social order that they see around them. I want to understand the different ways in which young people deploy concepts of fairness and justice to talk about their school and their society. I am attempting to do this by conducting a series of group interviews with small groups of 11 and 14 year olds in a range of different schools. I began with 110 participants, although there has been some attrition, so only about 80 have taken part in all three interviews. So far the groups have discussed what they think makes a fair or unfair school, examples of fairness and unfairness they see on the television and around them, whether they think a fair world is possible or desirable and what they think needs to happen to make the world fairer.

I often explain to my interviewees that my interest in my topic stems from my time working in education policy research, where I observed that many policy makers seemed to have no idea why I was so concerned about educational inequalities. While this is true, I think the interest in my topic can be traced much further back in my past. I might go back to the short period I spent living overseas as a child, my involvement in the Jubilee 2000 “Drop the Debt” campaign as a teenager, time living in and working in a deprived area of South Wales, or my experiences living in a diverse area of South London. As I learnt more and more sociology I began to make sense of these experiences using theories of habitus, structure, culture, agency and ethics. I became convinced that I live in a deeply unequal nation in a massively unequal world. I also began to understand that my actions contribute to maintaining and recreating that world order. I wrote in my initial research proposal that studying constructions of social justice is important because “constructions of social justice may be used to justify the reproduction of inequality, but they may also be used to challenge and transform unjust social structures”. So I began my research with the aspiration that it would prompt people to consider and debate constructions of social justice and thus take a step towards a fairer society and a fairer world.

Of course, I didn’t know when I set out to do the research that 2010 would be such an interesting time to be studying young people’s ideas about social justice. “Fairness” is trumpeted as the key principle behind decisions about cuts, and is also becoming a rallying call for protesting students. Within my secondary school participants, one group that two years ago told me they were unlikely to do anything to stop unfairness have joined the “Save our School” campaign, which they justify using the language of fairness and justice. Another group spoke passionately about the impact student fees might have on them, denouncing the proposals as unfair. I am still convinced when I go back to the foundation of the research that it is worthwhile and important.

And sometimes when I am in school with young people, I remember this and am encouraged. I look forward to days when a conversation with a teacher prompts them to say “I’ve never thought about it like that before,” or when a student says “I enjoyed talking about that, we never discuss that kind of thing in school.” But more often I find it is a struggle to convince myself that the research is worth doing. On days when casual acquaintances suggest that political affiliation is all in the genes, or when tell me there’s no point in researching fairness because Britain is a land of opportunity, I despair. On these days I worry that understanding young people’s ideas about social justice will make no difference to the world at all, let alone contribute to making it fairer. I guess ultimately it will be desperation that drives me to finish, rather than naive idealism. As for the impact of the research – we will all have to wait and see.

Sarah is a  PhD researcher in Sociology at the University of Reading.

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From Journalist to Sociologist: Some Reflections

Feb 1, ’11 8:00 AM

I never, ever wanted to be a journalist. But when an editor of a niche entertainment magazine about to go monthly came knocking at my door about a year and a half after receiving my bachelor’s degree, I was in no financial position to refuse. My newfound writing job put me on the periphery of the cultural industries in the United States, writing primarily about the then burgeoning sector of book publishing which was translating Japanese comics (called ‘manga’) for English-language release. It was, all things considered, a good fit with my undergraduate study in English literature and East Asian area studies, and in the past five years since I have begun freelancing, one lucky break has led to other opportunities, and I have written over a thousands magazine features, news articles, reviews, and more.

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Indigenizing Approaches to Research

Oct 28, ’10 8:00 AM

What does it mean to see the world through Indigenous eyes, to come to understand the ontological worldview that Indigenous peoples assert as an essential component of their existences? These questions have more than just theoretical relevance; for Settler peoples, understanding Indigenous ways of knowing is necessary for understanding the nature and causes of Indigenous-Settler conflicts.  Eminent Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. asserted from the 1960s through to his passing in 2005 that colonial conflicts are rooted in deep philosophical and ideological disjunctures between colonizing Settler peoples and Indigenous resisters (see for example: (Deloria, 2006, 2003, 1997, 1988). Maori scholar Makere Stewart Harawira (2005) has linked divergent ontological and epistemological production of knowledge to the creation of very real social and political conflicts between Indigenous and Settler peoples.

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I Am Redneck, Hear Me Roar

Oct 19, ’10 8:00 AM

Y’all call me Bubba.  Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money, and nothing particular to interest me in Southeast Missouri, I thought I would move away, get an education, get a job, and join former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s “knowledge workers” feasting at the table of the global economy.  I was just like everyone else – reaching out to grasp my own little share of the rusty old American Dream of personal prosperity and the consumer goods that came along with it… but, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum… I mean, at Will Rogers Auditorium… that changed everything for me.

In the winter of 2000, I bought tickets to the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” and got to hear Jeff Foxworthy tell redneck jokes up close and in person.  I also got to hear Larry the Cable Guy explain that Al Gore lost the election because a handful of rednecks from a Dade County, Florida trailer park didn’t know how to operate a voting machine.  I suppose if those same machines were designed to look like those video poker “eight liners” or a cigarette machine that our political landscape would have been a whole lot different in the first decade of the 21st century.  Essentially, George W. Bush won the election because a handful of rednecks could find “Jones” on a jukebox but couldn’t find “Gore” on a punch card.  If ballots had only looked more like those Bingo cards, the disaster of George W. Bush’s presidency could have been averted – that is, assuming that us rednecks had the good sense to vote with our wallets and not cast ballots based on the emotional manipulations of a Karl Rove or a Lee Atwater.

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