Social Science Bites

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 2 Social Science Bites
LISTEN TO WHO INFLUENCED WHO!

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science Bites Retrospective, Part 2

March 15, 2017 2437

influence schematic

LISTEN TO WHO INFLUENCED WHO — PART TWO!

The Communist Manifesto. Novelist Don DeLillo’s account of a big moment in baseball. Works by Wittgenstein and Foucault. And a famous –and shocking – behavioral experiment. These are a few of the supremely inspiring works which have influenced some of the leading social scientists at work today.

During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the 50th Bites podcast to air, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages. The second appears here, with answers – presented alphabetically – from Bites’ guests ranging from Sarah Franklin to Angela MacRobbie.

Their answers are similarly diverse. Sociologist Franklin, for example, who studies reproductive technology, namechecked two greats – Marilyn Strethern and Donna Haraway — who directly laid the foundation for Franklin’s own work. “I would hope,” she reflected, “that I could continue toward those ways of thinking about those issues now and in the future.”

David Goldblatt meanwhile, who studies the sociology of football, picked influencers whose contributions are apparent in his work but less academically straightforward. He chose The Communist Manifesto (“the idea that history was structured and organized has never left me”) and the first 60 pages of American novelist Don DeLillo’s Underworld, which describes ‘the Shot Heard Round the World,” a famous home run from baseball’s 1951 World Series. Goldblatt terms it the “greatest piece of sports writing ever.”

Other guests in this 15-minute podcast recall important studies that set the scene for their own work, or important figures that left them wanting to emulate their scholarship. And not everyone cited academics in their own fields. Witness Peter Lunt citing Ludwig Wittgenstein and MacRobbie Michel Foucault, while Jennifer Hochschild named an historian, Edmund Sears Morgan. She called his American Slavery, American Freedom “a wonderful book, everyone should read it – including the footnotes.” The book’s thesis, that “you had to invent slavery in order to be able to invent liberalism,” sticks with her to this day.

Other Bites interviewees in this podcast include Jonathan Haidt, Sarah Harper, Rom Harre, Bruce Hood, Daniel Kahneman, Sonia Livingstone, Anna Machin and Trevor Marchand. To download this podcast, right click HERE and ‘save.’ To hear the first montage, click HERE.

***

Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE Publishing. You can follow Bites on Twitter @socialscibites and David Edmonds @DavidEdmonds100.


Welcome to the blog for the Social Science Bites podcast: a series of interviews with leading social scientists. Each episode explores an aspect of our social world. You can access all audio and the transcripts from each interview here. Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @socialscibites.

View all posts by Social Science Bites

Related Articles

Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System
Social Science Bites
October 1, 2024

Nick Camp on Trust in the Criminal Justice System

Read Now
Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures
Impact
September 23, 2024

Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures

Read Now
Paper to Advance Debate on Dual-Process Theories Genuinely Advanced Debate
Impact
September 18, 2024

Paper to Advance Debate on Dual-Process Theories Genuinely Advanced Debate

Read Now
Webinar: Fundamentals of Research Impact
Event
September 4, 2024

Webinar: Fundamentals of Research Impact

Read Now
Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence

Daron Acemoglu on Artificial Intelligence

Economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses the history of technological revolutions in the last millennium and what they may tell us about artificial intelligence today.

Read Now
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect. That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research

Read Now
Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later

Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later

An article in the journal Psychological Science, “The New Statistics: Why and How” by La Trobe University’s Geoff Cumming, has proved remarkably popular in the years since and is the third-most cited paper published in a Sage journal in 2013.

Read Now
0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments