Department of Sociology

By Paul Hodkinson A year ago, I was beginning four months of what, at the time, was called ‘additional paternity leave’. I am hard pressed to remember a more distinctive, enjoyable or fulfilling period in my recent daily life and, as the spring weather has set in this year, have found myself wishing I could […]

By Jo Hope (née Belcher) Although use of the Internet in the UK has become widespread (Dutton and Blank, 2013), our attitude toward online interactions and information seeking remains complex. There are utopian and dystopian approaches towards our use of ‘new’ media that have remained remarkably resistant to criticisms. These themes run through research and wider, […]

By Andrew King The context I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about the housing crisis in the UK in recent weeks. It’s been dubbed a ‘human disaster’ and as the General Election 2015 fast approaches there are suggestions that housing is moving up the political agenda; witness, for example, the Conservatives’ much debated extension […]

By Karen Bullock For the police service, as for other public sector organisations, a primary question since 2010 has been how to maintain levels of service as deep funding cuts start to bite. The public sector union Unison has recently drawn attention to how police services across England and Wales are quietly retaining volunteers to […]

By Jon Garland April 2014 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the London nailbombings: three separate attacks that occurred over two weeks in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho in the spring of 1999. In total, three people were killed and over 120 were injured in blasts that targeted the capital’s black, Asian and gay communities. In […]

By Christine Hine An important strand of sociological work in the 1990s focused on “invisible work”: the labour that was needed, in the background, to make things run smoothly. Susan Leigh Star (1999) was particularly influential in showing us that everywhere there was an infrastructure apparently standardizing, facilitating and automating, there would be people working […]