Department of Sociology

By Emily Setty At a time when we are more aware than ever of the problem of sexual violence, abuse and harassment (‘sexual harm’) among young people—and in society more generally—it may seem obvious that we need to be educating them about consent. After all, the idea is that sexual harm is, by definition, non-consensual—hence, […]

By Ranjana Das As I write, Twitter (whose biography is grasped brilliantly here), is now owned by Elon Musk. Twitter  is immersed in mass firing, massive uncertainties around what dramatic shifts in policy and ensuing public discourse on Twitter might look like, and indeed, valid doubts on the future of Twitter itself, as dangerous new […]

By Tyler Dadge On the 22nd of June 2022, I presented at the University of Surrey Doctoral College Conference, discussing my PhD research on the police’s use of facial recognition, and its relationship with citizens’ human and data protection rights. I was delighted to be awarded the prize for the best afternoon parallel session oral […]

By Rachel Brooks I have been studying higher education students with caring responsibilities for over a decade now. Over this period of time, although the academic research has grown considerably, change in the policies and practices that affect this group of students has been notably slow. Indeed, extant research has documented the substantial obstacles often […]

By Ranjana Das and Paul Hodkinson We write this blog post at the end of an impact partnership to enhance the wellbeing of new parents. The project was funded by an ESRC impact acceleration award and followed various pieces of individual and joint research on the mental health of new parents and the role of […]

By Philip Jackson and Ranjana Das What expectations do citizens have of new technologies for media personalisation? How do audiences and users of future technologies feel about the use of their personal data? Our exciting new project brings together academics from engineering and sociology to explore, in partnership with the BBC, how citizen voices can […]