Department of Sociology

By Jon Garland and Paul Hodkinson Claire describes being approached and questioned about her goth appearance by a group of young people and, after the interrogation turned more aggressive, finding herself on the receiving end of a thrown bottle. Eleanor explains that she became afraid to go into town on her own because of a series […]

By Robert Meadows The BBC NEWS website recently carried a story on couples’ sleep.  Research, we were told, had found that happy couples sleep nearer to each other than unhappy couples.  As the article put it: “Partners who sleep less than an inch apart were more likely to be happy with their relationship than those […]

By Carrie Dunn Female fandom has been one of the most neglected aspects of football scholarship. My  forthcoming book, ‘Female Football Fandom: Community, Identity and Sexism’ (Palgrave Pivot) represents an attempt to begin to redress this imbalance. Few other studies focus on the experiential as narrated by the participants themselves, but it seems evident from […]

By Alex Seal Love it or hate it, the popular saying “YOLO” (an acronym for You Only Live Once) has gained increased prominence in current discourse. This week alone has seen it used in hundreds of thousands of twitter posts, often used to justify a person’s actions because, as the motto states, ‘you only live […]

By Daniel McCarthy In recent years we have witnessed many challenges to the core ideologies and functions of the police in England and Wales. One such agenda, which this blog posting analyses, is the emphasis of the police on trying to support children and young people on the fringes of offending. These strategies are referred […]

By Andrew King As someone whose research explores young people’s transitions to and understandings of adulthood, I was pleased to be approached recently to review a book for an American Sociology journal. The book’s called ‘Coming up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty’ written by Jennifer Silva, who’s a post-doc fellow at Harvard. […]