Department of Sociology

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 […]

crowd sourcing criminal justice and swearing as democracy By Mike McGuire Having recently been called to Jury service for the first time, the significance of the jury and its function as a feature of civil society is something which I had a fair amount of time to reflect upon. A very fair amount. I hadn’t […]

By Graham Scambler One point of frustration for sociologists reading or listening to journalists opining on our changing world is their fixation on events. Sociologists, I have long argued, should delve beneath the surface in search of the mechanisms – ‘social structures’ – that help cause or shape events. If we can’t quite match the […]

 By Jon Garland Jon Garland, Reader in Criminology, reports on the findings from the Leicester Hate Crime Project, the largest ever study of hate crime victimisation Recently I was co-organiser of a highly-successful conference, held on 5 September, that launched the findings from the Leicester Hate Crime Project, a two-year study of hate crime victimisation […]

By Peter George Johnson Fun American Philosophy I have always struggled to understand or enjoy ‘serious’ philosophy. As such, I was long-ago pleased to hear American philosophers, though ‘serious’, have a reputation for being accessible and hands-on. Thus, when I chanced upon Daniel Dennett’s (he’s American!) 2013 book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, […]

By Charles Masquelier As a firm believer in both the desirability of and possibility for radical social change, I am often confronted with heavy doses of scepticism and doubt on the part of those willing to discuss the matter with me. Questions like ‘So what’s the alternative?’ or comments such as ‘That sounds like a […]