The Sociological Imagination

One Dimensional Woman is aphoristic and polemic from the start. As the author asks as the beginning of the book: “where have all the interesting women gone?”. In this slim volume the philosopher Nina Power attempts to answer this question. Through doing so she offers a compelling account of the place of women within contemporary society and a c ...

Given the brewing conflicts within British higher education it seems like an opportune moment for a thorough sociological analysis of academia. Such an analysis would supplement the expansive literature on the subjugation of higher education to market forces through a careful consideration of the consequences this process holds for the state of ...

A fascinating and graphically illustrated story on the blog of Verso publishers about the creative energy which emerged when Colin Ward, editor of Freedom Newspaper in the 1960s (a place where lots of friends of the SI editor used to work &am ...

So with London in flames for the third night in a row and, for the first time, disturbances spreading outside of the capital, the British population are asking the natural question - what the fuck is going on? The most frequent, as well as understandable, response to this question has been moral condemnation. Yet calling these riots ‘law ...

Over the last few years, it’s become something of a cliché to argue that the modern web (a.k.a. web 2.0) is transforming the way we interact. This happens to be one of those clichés which is, to a large extent, true. It would nigh on impossible to deny that things like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are having the sort of radical impact whic ...

Since the death of Kim Jong-il, the world's media has been voyeuristically fixated on the scenes of public mourning gripping North Korea. As a sociologist, I've found some of this footage fascinating. So too the way in which these scenes of extreme public mourning are frequently being framed, at least by the UK media. But is this kind of ...

I'm someone who is far from sympathetic to postmodernism, seeing it as, at best, mildly interesting observations couched in a silly insular language and, at worst, reactionary attitudes presenting themselves as radical intellectual chic. Yet I find it difficult to watch a video like the one below and not feel compelled to go running back to Bau ...

In this podcast Mark Carrigan talks to Emma Rees about her new book Can't, which explores the strange and confused representation of the female genitalia in contemporary culture. Can't

In this podcast Mark Carrigan talks to Katherine Davies, a researcher in the Morgan Centre at Manchester University, about her work on sibling relationships and personal identity. Despite the obviously somewhat common experience of sibling relati ...

In this podcast from the SI Sociology of Sport seminar, Deborah Butler talks about her research on the Horse Racing industry Deborah Butler on Horse Racing

In this talk from SI's Sociology of Sport seminar, Dr Sam Farooq discusses religious masculinities in sport Religious masculinities in youth sport

In this talk from the SI's Sociology of Sport seminar, Professor Wyn Grant, who we also interviewed on this topic some time ago, talks about the political economy of football. If you find this interesting you should definitely check out Wyn's sit ...

A couple of months ago Sociological Imagination held its first seminar on the Sociology of Sport. Given quite how few people ever want to travel to the University of Warwick (it's a bit of a hassle and the campus is in the middle of nowhere), we ...

The commercialisation of football is a widely remarked upon phenomena and yet the causes driving this process remain too little understood. In this podcast Professor Wyn Grant tackles the political economy of football. In doing so he explores a variety of topics including: the impact of globalization upon football, the divergence between hi ...

Andrew Feinstein was elected an ANC member of parliament in South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994. He resigned in 2001 in protest at the ANC government’s refusal to allow an unfettered investigation into a £5bn arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption. Feinstein lives in London, where he chairs the Aids cha ...

In this podcast Mark Carrigan talks to Hilary Pilkington, who has conducted two research projects on drug use in Russia, about researching drugs cultures. The interview encompasses the findings of the research in Russia, as well as wider theoretical and methodological issues which drugs cultures pose for social researchers. Interview wit ...

In this podcast Catherine Coveney uses the case study of Modafinil (a revolutionary 'wakefulness' drug reportedly subject to increasingly widespread use amongst students, academics, professionals and shiftworkers) to explore the status and practice of cognitive enhancement within contemporary society. Cognitive Enhancement and Modafinil

In this podcast Simon Williams talks about his new book the Politics of Sleep. While sleep is often taken to be a entirely private and natural part of human life, in recent years it has been the subject of a rich vein of interdisciplinary research. As well as exploring the political dimensions to contemporary discourses and practices of sle ...

As part of her research into channel swimmers, Dr Karen Throsby recently swam the English channel herself and was kind enough to talk to the Sociological Imagination about it as the first in a new series of podcasts. As Karen put it on her research Blog, "“I will just say that it was an extraordinary, brutal, intoxicating, frustrating, ...

Team sports are often seen a traditionally homophobia arena within society. In a second interview with Dr Eric Anderson, he argues that this widespread assumption is increasingly inaccurate. Through analysing the relationship between sport and wider society he offers an account of how wider cultural and social changes in relation to homophobia ...

Gender segregation in sports is usually seen as entirely natural and a fact of life. Yet in this challenging interview Dr Eric Anderson explores the social and economic roots of gender segregation in sport before questioning whether we have any real grounds for treating gender segregation differently to racial segregation. In doing so he of ...