Social Science Space

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Harvard’s Jennifer Hochschild explains to interviewer David Edmonds some of the pertinent data points from her years of using quantitative and qualitative analysis to map the racial, ethnic and class cleavages in America’s demography.

Anna Machin’s research combine the study of neurochemistry, dating sites and waist-to-hip ratios to gives us the best understanding of the evolution of love and romance. In this Social science Bites podcast she details her research interests and findings.

Sociologist has studied the dance club scene — think of the lamented Fabric nightclub as a cultural touchstone — for years as a ‘participant observer.’ In this Social Science Bites podcast she talks about the scene’s obvious drug use and the mechanics of doing ethnography at a rave.

In his conversation with interviewer David Edmonds, Michael Billig — the author of landmark book ‘Banal Nationalism,’ dives deeply into one particular example of nationalism, the British royal family, and what the British themselves think about the royal family and the place of the royals in British ideology

It’s often remarked that technology has made the world a smaller place. While this has been especially true for those with the wherewithal to buy the latest gadget and to travel at will, but it’s also true for economic migrants. Those technological ties are one of the key research interests of Mirca Madianou who discusses her work on transnational families and social media in the latest Social Science Bites podcast.

“As a behavioral scientist,” Iris Bohnet tells David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast looking at implicit bias, “I strongly believe that we now do have the insights and the tools to help us promote behavior change, not by changing mindsets but changing organizations.”

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.

“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.”

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.