This year I took over convening the Goldsmiths MA in Social Research. This degree has provided the place where we think about the craft of research. Initially, it was a degree set up by David Silverman and focused on qualitative… Read More ›
Reviews 
Book Review: ‘Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Ground of British Islamic Activism’
Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Ground of British Islamic Activism by Sadek Hamid (2016) reviewed by Tamim Sadikali What attracts young Muslims to this type of ephemeral but ferocious activism? One does not have to subscribe to determinist social… Read More ›
A Feminist Guide to Opera or Why I Read the Subtitles
by Lisa Gaufman How is that for a Hollywood movie scenario: a young woman starts dating a poor student, but then dumps him for a rich old man, whom she tries to relieve of his treasures before getting… Read More ›
Brassed Off (Oldham Coliseum until 1 October)
BRASSED OFF 7 SEP – 1 0CT 2016 “I don’t know anyone who admits to voting Tory but t’buggers keep getting in”. Brassed Off film fans will very much enjoy the Oldham Coliseum Theatre production of the hugely successful… Read More ›
Book Review: Diversity, Equality and Achievement in Education (Knowles & Lander, 2011)
reviewed by Sadia Habib Diversity, Equality and Achievement in Education by Gianna Knowles and Vini Lander (Sage, 2011) Intentional and unintentional racism is very much still a part of today’s society experienced by people of colour in everyday situations… Read More ›
Book Review: Muslims, Schooling & The Question of Self-Segregation
reviewed by Sadia Habib Muslims, Schooling & The Question of Self-Segregation by Dr Shamim Miah (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) Muslims and education are frequently ‘hot topics’ in media and political discourses. Academics have highlighted how pessimistic media and political rhetoric about… Read More ›
Book Review: Foucault’s ‘Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling’
by Rosie Smith Book Review: ‘Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling’ by Michel Foucault (2014). Michel Foucault’s 1981 Louvain lecture series ‘Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling’ is a wonderfully insightful book. It provides a detailed examination of the role of truth-telling throughout antiquity and its development into… Read More ›
Book Review: Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of Humanitarian INGOs
Reviewed by Bradley Williams Between Samaritans and States: The Political Ethics of Humanitarian INGOs by Jennifer C. Rubenstein How should scholars, activists, and states understand not only the activities of humanitarian INGOs, but also ethically? Humanitarian INGOs (international non-governmental organizations)… Read More ›
Book Review: Organizations, Strategy and Society: The Orgology of Disorganized Worlds
by Bradley Williams In Organizations, Strategy, and Society, Rodolphe Durand draws attention to the ways in which organizations affect and provide meaning to peoples’ public and private lives. Organizations are not merely temporary groups of individuals or groups of aggregate… Read More ›
Hibben Prejudice: Can Prejudice be Defended?
by Oliver Bonnington In 1911, John Grier Hibben, who was for twenty years President of Princeton University, wrote A Defense of Prejudice and other Essays; a ‘forgotten’ philosophical text, rarely cited, though recently reprinted. The republishing of a book can… Read More ›
Book Review: Group Conflict and Political Mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf: Rethinking the Rentier State
Conflict and Political Mobilization in Bahrain and the Arab Gulf: Rethinking the Rentier State – Justin Gengler (Indiana University Press, 2015) review by Bradley Williams The 2011 Bahraini Uprising seemed to confirm that Bahrain does not conform to the orthodox… Read More ›
Book Review: Land of Strangers by Ash Amin
Land of Strangers – Ash Amin (Polity Books, 2012) Ash Amin’s book focuses on how we live as strangers in modern society: the stranger who resides in hybrid modern Western societies “with their heterogeneous populations and cultures, they exist as… Read More ›
Book Reviews: ‘Sleepwalking to segregation’? and ‘Lived Diversities’
Recently I have been catching up on publications about diversity, ethnicity and multiculturalism. The following books, written or edited by academics from a range of backgrounds including the Social Sciences, Geography, Population Studies have provided a broad and engaging insight… Read More ›
Homi K Bhabha’s Nation and Narration
“What kind of a cultural space is the nation with its transgressive boundaries and its ‘interruptive’ interiority?” (p5) Bhabha’s edited book contains chapters by prominent thinkers on the “ideological ambivalence” of nation, and the performative nature of language employed when… Read More ›
Book Review: Youth, Multiculturalism and Community Cohesion
Youth, Multiculturalism and Community Cohesion by Paul Thomas (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) (Palgrave Politics of Identity & Citizenship Series) Thomas’ book is an engaging and well-written account of the dilemmas of contemporary society in dealing with youth identity and multiculturalism, particularly… Read More ›
Book Review: The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism
The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism Edited by Duncan Ivison, University of Sydney, Australia Review by Sadia Habib The Ashgate Research Companion to Multiculturalism provides a thoroughly detailed and very contemporary analysis of the problematic and nuanced nature of… Read More ›
Book Review: Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration – Educating white working-class boys
review by Sadia Habib Identity, Neoliberalism and Aspiration – Educating white working-class boys by Garth Stahl Adopting a culturalist approach and a Bourdieusian lens, the book focuses on research conducted in London to learn about white working-class students’ experiences, identities… Read More ›
Preview of Book: Muslims, Schooling and the Question of Self-Segregation
Muslims, Schooling and the Question of Self-Segregation by Shamim Miah ‘Integration’ or the supposed lack of it by British Muslims has been a ubiquitous feature in political, media and policy discourses over the past decades, often with little or no evidence… Read More ›
Book Review: Social Morphogenesis, Volume 1
by Tom Brock Social Morphogenesis is the first volume in a series of books, edited by Margaret Archer, that seeks to develop an explanatory framework that can account for how the rate of social change has ‘speeded up’ in the… Read More ›
Book Review: The Nature of Intractable Conflict by Christopher Mitchell
by Bradley W Williams In the third edition of Contemporary Conflict Resolution, Oliver Ramsbotham, Tom Woodhouse, and Hugh Miall (2011) note that the “new field of conflict resolution in the 1950s defined itself in relation to the challenge of understanding… Read More ›
Kingsman – The Secret Service: A Critical Review
by Hafsah Aneela Bashir “So I watched the film Kingsman – The Secret Service, based on the acclaimed comic book, directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass, X-Men First Class) which tells the story of a super-secret spy organisation in London. Described… Read More ›
Book Review: Learning care lessons – Literacy, love, care and solidarity
by Gwen Redmond Learning care lessons – Literacy, love, care and solidarity by Maggie Feeley (The Tufnell Press) Maggie Feeley’s book Learning care lessons – Literacy, love, care and solidarity is the result of a period of longitudinal ethnographic research with… Read More ›
Book Review: The Storytelling Animal – How Stories Make us Human.
Story and Society: The Storytelling Animal by Emma Parfitt “All this happened a long time ago–so many years ago that if you counted them on your fingers among all the old men in the village you would have to… Read More ›
Book Review: Disposed to Learn – Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus
Reviewed by Garth Stahl Disposed to Learn: Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus by Megan Watkins and Greg Noble is a thought-provoking, cohesive, and deeply engrossing monograph of research which will be of interest to scholars studying ethnicity and education… Read More ›
Book Review: Ann Oakley’s Father and Daughter – Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science
By Gwen Redmond Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science by Ann Oakley (Policy Press, 2014) I am not sure how an academic like Oakley would respond to my referring to her book as ‘unputdownable’, but there you have… Read More ›
Book Review: Liminality and the Modern, Living Through the In-Between by BjØrn Thomassen
Book Review by Bradley Williams With Liminality and the Modern, BjØrn Thomassen has provided an invaluable resource for researchers of all types of ritualistic processes in different social settings. As Thomassen notes, the concept of liminality is under-utilized in anthropology… Read More ›
Exploring Gender: Man Meets Woman by Yang Liu
A beautifully presented book with bold and binary pictograms illustrating gender issues of contemporary times is the perfect stimulus to use for discussion with undergraduates interested in issues of sociology, sociolinguistics, and particularly gender roles and relationships. Some of the… Read More ›
Book Review: Experiments in Knowing – Gender and Method in the Social Sciences by Ann Oakley
by Gwen Redmond An interest in the methodological debate between qualitative and quantitative research methods, as well as an inclination to read methodological approaches with a feminist perspective, drew me to reading Ann Oakley’s Experiments in Knowing. Published in 2000,… Read More ›
Book Review: Doing Critical Research – A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth
Doing Critical Research: A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth (2014) By John Smyth, Barry Down, Peter McInerney, and Robert Hattam This book discusses in great detail the internationally recognised collaborative and critical nature of the educational research conducted… Read More ›
Book Review: Methodologies for Researching Cultural Diversity by Smyth and Santoro
Methodologies for Researching Cultural Diversity in Education: International Perspectives (2014) By Geri Smyth and Ninetta Santoro Smyth’s and Santoro’s exciting new edited collection is aimed at educationalists researching diverse cultural contexts from a critical perspective. The selected papers, with underlying… Read More ›