Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Michael Burawoy on Sociology and the Workplace
Michael Burawoy is a practitioner of what we might call ‘extreme ethnography.’ In this Social Science Bites podcast, Burawoy tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about his various experiences on factory floors, and some of the specific lessons he learned and the broader points — often unexpected — that emerged from the synthesis of his experiences.
Stephen Reicher on Crowd Psychology
“In a sense, you could summarize the literature: ‘Groups are bad for you, groups take moral individuals and they turn them into immoral idiots.’ I have been trying to contest that notion,” social psychologist Stephen Reicher says in this Social Science Bites podcast, “[and] also to explain how that notion comes about.”
Janet Carsten on the Kinship of Anthropology
One of the leading exponents of what might be called the second coming of kinship studies, Janet Carsten, a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, has (literally) brought new blood into the field, exploring kinship’s nexus with politics, work and gender.
Ted Cantle on Segregation
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Ted Cantle (of the post-2001 riot report that bears his name) explains how the concept of ‘parallel lives’ continues to exert a malign influence wherever communities find themselves segregated — even when they may live cheek-and-jowl.
William Davies on the Happiness Industry
‘I think that happiness is better than a lot of what the ‘happiness industry’ represents it as,’ Goldsmiths sociologist Will Davies tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast.
Sheldon Solomon on Fear of Death
Social psychologist Sheldon Solomon routinely thinks about the unthinkable, studying how humans behave differently when the unthinkable forces its way into their thoughts. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he explains how the fear of death actually propels humankind forward.
Steven Lukes on Durkheim
In this Social Science Bites podcast, social theorist Steven Lukes tells interviewer Nigel Warburton how Émile Durkheim’s exploration of issues like labor, suicide and religion proved intriguing to a young academic and enduring for an established one.
John Brewer on C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills was one of the most important sociologists of the 20th century. He believed that sociology could change people’s lives, and that sociologists, far from being neutral, should help bring about such change, and his ideas would fuel ‘60s counter-culture. In this Social Science Bites podcast, John Brewer reveals the full man behind the icon.
