All Blogs / Academics / Sociology / Popular

NHS Commissioning: Why You Should Care

One of the reasons the government have had an easy ride over its plans for the systematic looting of the NHS by Tory-friendly private health companies is the sheer complexity of their restructuring. Unlike, say, the Department for Work...Show More Summary

Law & Order Quotes Actual Rape Survivors, Calls Itself “Fiction”

This is a new one. Some of you may know that there is a wave of colleges and universities filing complaints with the Office for Civil Rights, claiming that their institutions are failing to protect women from sexual assault. This (first)...Show More Summary

mothers in male dominated, overworked fields

From my colleague, Youngjoo Cha, a new paper in Gender and Society on the the tendency of mothers to not stay in overworked male dominated fields: This study investigates whether the increasingly common trend of working long hours (“overwork”) perpetuates gender segregation in occupations. While overwork is an expected norm in many male-dominated occupations, women, [...]

How Friendship Can Help End Rape

Cross-posted at PolicyMic. Let me ask you a question: Do you have a good friend of the opposite sex? Odds are you do. In fact, the odds are overwhelming. When I first began teaching, 25 or so years ago, I asked my students how many of them had a good friend of the opposite sex. Show More Summary

March 2013 TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science

It’s been decided! The winner of the March 2013 TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science goes to: “Anthropology Inc.,” Graeme Wood, The Atlantic. Wood explains that corporations are seeking the help of social scientists to understand the qualitative dynamics of consumer behavior. To illustrate, Wood delves into one strategy consulting company’s struggle to understand [...]

The Dirty World of Sanitation Work

Our society has a bad habit of making the most important jobs–and the workers that keeps us healthy, happy, and comfortable–the least visible. As a recent article in The Atlantic points out, while citing work from NYU anthropologist Robin Nagle, this invisibility hides some dire issues faced by one essential group of service workers: the [...]

Smash Facebook!

In my experience, anarchists are either the funsome tricksters of revolutionary politics; or the most terribly po-faced, super serious folk going. There is no happy medium. So I can't quite decide if Anarchists: We need to talk about Facebook is serious polemic bemoaning the lack of revolutionary responsibility, or a wind up. Show More Summary

Violence and the Need to Be Imaginatively Aware

By Peter Kaufman “It’s always one damn thing after another.” This was a favorite phrase of my advisor in graduate school. He was referring both to the relatively minor irritations of grad school—getting papers rejected, having data troubles, worrying about...

darwin’s conjecture, universal or general darwinism

Geoff Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen are doing an online reading group on their book Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution (University of Chicago Press).  Here is the site for the reading club and their proposed schedule for the discussion.  During this week, Apr 20-26, they are discussing the preface and chapter [...]

can you be deported while you are asleep?

Apparently, yes. An article in Talking Points memo reports on a rare, but disturbing, aspect of our immigration laws. Hospitals may pay for undocumented immigrants to be moved to medical facilities in their original nation. They occasionally do this when people start in the emergency room, they stabilize, and then insurance does not pay for [...]

That Racist Ice Cream Truck Song

Here’s a random creepy fact: one of the tunes that float out of ice cream trucks all summer is a racist song called “Nigger Love a Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!,” first recorded 1916 or before.  Have a listen. During slavery, the African population’s supposed taste for watermelon was used to suggest that they were stupid. Show More Summary

The Rise of Food Banks

Stoke's Homes for a Quid

It's not every day Stoke-on-Trent makes national headlines. Even rarer it does so for the right reasons, but the new homes for £1 scheme has certainly caught the media's eye. As the BBC puts it: More than 600 people are interested in buying rundown homes in Stoke-on-Trent for £1 each, the city council has said. Show More Summary

Punk in Burma: Cultural Appropriation & Resistance

Here at SocImages, we typically use the phrase “cultural appropriation” to describe rather frivolous borrowing of cultural practices and objects for the purposes of fun and fashion.  We’ve posted on examples ranging from the appropriation...Show More Summary

Fieldwork Fouls

A recent study has exposed rampant sexual harassment in one of the most unlikely of places: anthropological fieldwork. In his article for Science Magazine, John Bohannon describes the work of Kathryn Clancy, a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After being shocked by the horror stories of her colleagues’ fieldwork, Clancy collaborated with Katie [...]

more tweets, more votes: social media as a quantitative indicator of political behavior

Unit of analysis: US House elections in 2010 and 2012. X-Axis: (# of tweets mentioning the GOP candidate)/(# of tweets mentioning either major party candidate). Y-axis: GOP margin of victory. I have a new working paper with Joe DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey and Johan Bollen asking if social media data actually forecasts offline behavior. The abstract: [...]

Wanted – Bad Research

April 22, 2013 Posted by Jay Livingston I’m not a research director. But if I were, I hope I wouldn’t write questions that are obviously designed to bias the results. And if I did ask such questions, I wouldn’t boast about it in the newspaper, especially if my stacking of the deck got barely a majority to give the answer I wanted. Show More Summary

The State and Anti-Racism

One of the first things imbibed at far left school is that the state is essentially and irreducibly racist at an institutional level. But is that really the case? Well, officially, yes, it was. According to the 1999 Macpherson Report...Show More Summary

Do Sisters Have to Do It for Themselves?

Finding more lessons from TV (in this case, shows like 30 Rock and Girls), we’re seeing how women are investing more in careers and/or casual encounters than commitments to deep romantic relationships. At face value, this looks like a great example of women’s empowerment as our society comes to terms with the fact that—well—the Eurythmics [...]

The Power of Acquaintances

By Wayne Mellinger Instructor, Antioch University Casual connections might be some of the most consequential relations in our lives, helping us to land jobs, deal with our personal issues, and providing us with a sense of identity and belonging. And...