The Causal Power of Social Structures Dave Elder-Vass, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, £50.00, 240pp. Explaining the Normative Stephen Turner, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2010, £18.99, 240pp. Normativity is a concept with a contentious history. While most would accept its centrality to… Read More ›
Reviews 
Academic integrity for the new year
Happy New Year 2013 to all of our readers! Thanks for stopping by to read and comment. We hope to continue being fun and useful to you in this new year! We thought we should start the year by mentioning… Read More ›
Review of Beyond Duty by Shannon Mehan
Shannon Meehan is a high school wrestling star and local hero in a home town struggling to retain its blue collar pride in the face of unceasing deindustrialisation. Meehan felt pushed towards leadership and heroism from an early age and… Read More ›
The Consumer Experience of Higher Education, The Rise of Capsule Education
The Consumer Experience of Higher Education, The Rise of Capsule Education by Deirdre McArdle-Clinton, Continuum 978-1-4411-7919-7 (pbk), £27.99 I read this book as a treat after two week’s marking. At this point I should stop because the state of higher… Read More ›
Prayers for Bobby
If you had asked me a few days ago, I would have assumed it was obvious that a film about gay teen suicide could not also be morally inspiring. Yet this is precisely what Prayers for Bobby achieves. It tells the… Read More ›
It’s tough being a man these days…
We first meet Detective Tommy Craven greeting his daughter at Boston station. He’s clearly a loving but overprotective father, a man subtly ill at ease with the modern world. His daughter chides him for ‘always’ being early, and on the… Read More ›
Review of Precious
A word of warning: this is not an uplifting film. It is however one of the rare films worthy of the epithet “unmissable”. Set in 1987, it tells the story of Claireece Precious Jones (usually known simply as Precious): a 16… Read More ›
Who is Barack Obama?
I’m someone who is far from sympathetic to postmodernism, seeing it as, at best, mildly interesting observations couched in a silly insular language and, at worst, reactionary attitudes presenting themselves as radical intellectual chic. Yet I find it difficult to… Read More ›
SI Top 10 #9 – Review of ‘The Aftermath of Feminism’ by Angela McRobbie
Is feminism as a movement no longer indispensable? Is it redundant or too aggressive for contemporary society? In The Aftermath of Feminism Angela McRobbie argues that the contemporary social and cultural landscape (especially in the global North) could be called… Read More ›
Review of ‘Dear Granny Smith’ by Roy Mayall
Granny Smith’ is the name given by postmen to the isolated old ladies along their routes for whom the mail service is a lifeline. Dear Granny Smith takes the form of a letter to such women, attempting to explain what has… Read More ›
Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative?
Capitalist Realism, Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher, Ropley: Zero Books 2010, £7.99, ISBN 978-184694-317-1, pp.81. Mark Fisher is a leading light at Zero Books, publishers of a growing stable of short, topical essay-books such as Richard Seymour’s The… Read More ›
Review of Chavs and The Precariat
Among those who understand social classes as things it is acknowledged that they have changed. As Guy Standing explains this change, ‘globalisation has resulted in a fragmentation of national class structures’ (p.7). Whereas Owen Jones sees change imposed by a… Read More ›
Review of ‘Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism’ by Sarah Sobieraj
In her introduction to Soundbitten: The Perils of Media-Centered Political Activism (NYU Press, 2011), sociologist and Tufts University professor writes, ‘I thought this would be a book about how activist groups use presidential elections as moments of political opening, but… Read More ›
Review of ‘Exploring the networked worlds of popular music’ by Peter Webb
The aim of this book is quite ambitious. Namely, developing a theoretical framework for the study of music-related subcultures that departs both from the position of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which conceived subcultures as class-based and symbolically… Read More ›
SI SPORT WEEK #1-1: Sport and Social Identities (edited by Andrew Parker and John Harris)
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… Read More ›
Making Sense of Everyday Life by Susie Scott
At a critical moment in time when the British Sociological Association has marshalled an impressive cast of luminaries to orchestrate the ‘sociology and the cuts’ blog and the Con-Dem coalition continues its relentless assault against public service provision, Susie Scott… Read More ›
The Future of the British City? A review of Ground Control by Anna Minton
Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City The reconstruction of Manchester’s city centre after the IRA’s 1996 bomb stood as the background to my teenage years and, as is often the case with such things, I never… Read More ›
Review of ‘Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora’ by Ben Carrington
Race, Sport and Politics is an intense sociological engagement with the intersection of- as the title suggests- race, sport and politics in twentieth century Britain and USA. Ben Carrington is a well-established and well-respected author in the areas of sociological… Read More ›
Evolutionary psychology: are we still haunted by the spectre of eugenics?
You can invariably trust the Idle Ethnographer to come up with a refreshing pre-Christmas read. So, it is the beginning of the XXI century? So, we’ve had the Holocaust in Europe, the Apartheid in South Africa, and racial segregation in… Read More ›
Review of `Exploring Disability’ by Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer
Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer (2010) Exploring Disability – Second Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kayleigh A. Garthwaite is a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Geography at Durham University. Just over a decade after the first edition of ‘Exploring Disability’… Read More ›
Review of ‘Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods’ by Shawn Wilson
Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2008. 144 pp. $18.95 CAD paper. Paperback ISBN: 9781552662816 Emma Battell Lowman University of Warwick In Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson sets out to describe and explain an Indigenous approach to… Read More ›
Review of ‘Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism’ by Nick Couldry
In an era in which the neoliberal tenets and conditionalities, after threatening to become the ‘lore’ of the so-called good governance, are also seeking to pervade popular imagination, voice as an articulation of critical insight has become all the more… Read More ›
Review of ‘Globalization and Football’ by Richard Giulianotti & Roland Robertson
Globalisation and Football is an engaging, accessible and comprehensive sociological study of the political economy of the world’s most popular sport. The authors Richard Giulianotti & Roland Robertson fuse disciplines to trace the historical evolution of football, its interplay with… Read More ›