Month: September 2011
In this podcast I talk 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 relationships, it’s an area that’s largely been ignored within social science, which has tended to focus on vertical kinship relations (parent –> […]
A scandal is brewing at the LSE. Tom Martin was a 39 year old student who signed up to do an MA in Gender, Media and Culture at the LSE. Six weeks later he quit. He has recently initiated legal action against the university for £50,000, claiming anti-male discrimination and false advertising. You can read his […]
I’ve had long standing issues with Serco ever since I was a teenager (long and not particularly interesting story!) and, as I’ve got older, I’ve found the extent of their activity and its general opaqueness rather troubling. However until I happened to check the Wikipedia page I didn’t realise quite how much stuff they do: […]
Saturday 15th October, 2011, Birmingham Midland Institute £10 waged, £5 unwaged The recent civil disturbances across a number of English cities have provoked much commentary and debate. However, there has been little sustained analysis of the events, their causes and likely consequences. This symposium is one in a series of unrelated endeavours to bring public […]
Hi, my name is Mark Carrigan and I’m a final year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Warwick. My research is an attempt to answer a question that’s fascinated me since I was at school: what makes people who they are? How do different sorts of structural, cultural and personal factors intersect in […]
So this is a draft version of a presentation I’m giving at the International Association of Critical Realism conference in Norway on Tuesday. For various reasons, I’m really nervous about it – going on here because one person has already agreed to listen to it. But if anyone else would be so kind any feedback […]
In the corner of the exhibition a three-hour film, Mouth of the Tyne, shows footage of Smith in the mid 1980s, explaining the ideas on devolution he lobbied for in the 1960s: Britain divided up into eleven locally administered areas, each of which would control the ‘commanding heights’ of its local economy. These would elect […]
