Awards
Fay Dennis has been awarded the Sociology of Health & Illness New Writer’s Prize for her article Drug fatalities and treatment fatalism: Complicating the ageing cohort theory.
Faten Khazaei (Postdoctoral Researcher) has been awarded the Brigitte-Schnegg-Prize for 2021 for her thesis entitled Manufacturing Difference: Double Standard in Swiss Institutional responses to Intimate Partner Violence.
Publications
Abby Day’s review of Robert Wuthnow’s latest book: ‘What Happens When We Practice Religion?: Textures of Religion in Everyday Life’ Princeton University Press appeared in Religion online. While welcoming Wuthnow’s attention to, and theoretical development of, ‘practice’ she identified significant gaps, mainly concerning the varied and often less visible forms of women’s ‘practice’.
Abby was also commissioned to write ‘Why people today believe more in ghosts than gods’ for RE Today. The purpose was to widen Religious Education teachers’ knowledge about the growing number of non-religious young people in their classes and the diversity of their non-religious beliefs. While many young people are not religious, and do not recognise the legitimacy of a god, they have deeply held moral commitments and often have experienced what they describe as the presence of deceased loved ones.
The Japanese translation of Les Back‘s book Migrant City has just been completed. It includes a new Preface entitled ‘Sociology from the Heart’.
Les also has a new piece in Discover Society entitled “Diversity Conservatism and Sociable Sociology” Volume 1, Issue 3.
Martin Savransky has published a paper titled “Counter-Apocalyptic Beginnings: Cosmoecology for the End of the World” in the journal Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology & Society.This publication is part of a forthcoming special issue on the topic of “Ends in Other Terms”, but is already available online.
An interview with Martin Savransky, conducted by Martin Tironi and titled “Decolonising the Imagination in Times of Crisis: Gestures for Speculative Thinking-Feeling”, has been published in the journal Diseña. The original version (in Spanish), and an English translation, can be accessed here.
A Shifting Incubation: From exhibiting Academic Migration to staging Interactions with Academic Refugees is the title of the new publication by Michael Guggenheim, Judith Kröll, and Bernd Kräftner; In: Making & Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel; Edited by Gary Lee Downey, Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, MIT Press, 2021.
Christos Varvantakis has published an essay, ‘Ethnographic film at the crossroads‘ at Allegra Lab.
Sara Farris‘ book In the name of women’s rights. The rise of femonationalism (Duke UP 2017) is now available in Spanish translation and is forthcoming in French in December 2021.
Kat Jungnickel has published a journal article in Science, Technology & Human Values called “Clothing inventions as acts of citizenship? The politics of material participation, wearable technologies and women patentees in late Victorian Britain”.
Forthcoming
Abby Day has agreed to a contract with Routledge to update and combine her best-selling books: How to Get Research Published in Journals and Winning Research Funding, with a submission date of January 2022 and publication later that year.
Les Back has just completed with John Solomos the Third Edition of their edited collection “Theories of Race and Racism” which will be due out later this year.
Vikki Bell‘s review of The Surrendered: Reflections by a Son of Shining Path by Michael J. Lazzara and Charles F. Walker, Trans. and Eds (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2021) is to be published in the journal Memory Studies.
Vic Seidler‘s new book will be published in November in hardback and paperback in the Routledge Research in Anticipation and Futures. It is called “Ethical Humans: Life, Love, Labour, Learning and Loss“; Routledge.
News
Brian Alleyne will present ‘Two Complementary Strategies for Using NVivo in Narrative Research’ at the NVivo Virtual Conference 2021 (22 – 23 September 2021). 2021 Virtual Conference (qsrinternational.com)
Brian will also give a talk entitled ‘Technological speculations and explorations in odd places, or, how to be a geek in the Global South’, at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of St Andrews in mid-November. Brian aims to challenge representations of technoculture centred on global North national silos and ethnocentric frameworks. The talk will offer a narrative history of computing in the Spanish and English Caribbean and will supplement this by a thematic reading of speculative fiction from that region.
Xu Lui (PhD Candidate) will be attending the BSA MedSoc 2021 conference (MedSoc Month). Xu has virtually presented his paper (by pre-recorded video) “Transforming the Public’s understanding of ‘the Origin of Pandemic’: A Case Study of China’s State Propaganda about Covid-19” and will attend the Q&A session on 24th September.
Nina Wakeford‘s book ‘Our Pink Depot’ was featured as part of an article about the new opening of the new Bakerloo line extension and how the London transport system has a higher prevalence of LGBT+ workers than any other sector.
Brenda Herbert (PhD Candidate) recently gave two oral presentations on her ethnographic study. One was ‘Making space for play in the time of Covid and austerity’ at the Royal Geographical Society Conference, London with the other; ‘All About ME!: A multimodal ethnography with children’ at the European Conference on Domestic Violence (ECDV).
On 9 September, Sara Farris gave a keynote lecture at the Gender Law Conference organised by the Swiss Institute for Feminist Legal Studies and Gender Law at Fribourg.
Sara also spoke at the conference ‘Your body is a battleground’ organised by the Frankfurter Kunstverein and Normative Orders Research Centre at Goethe University Frankfurt on 19 September.
Abby Day was an invited guest on Voice of Islam radio phone-in show on July 8, to discuss ‘pandemic fatigue’ and how various religious adherents respond to it, and again on August 10 to discuss (in the context of Ashura): ‘How should we commemorate a murder?’.
Abby also attended virtually the British Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion study group conference on 12-14 July 12 and delivered a paper ‘Breaking the binary boundary between Insiders/outsiders in the Sociology of Religion canon: a report and reflection’. She drew on her recently published graduate textbook, Sociology of Religion: Overview and Analyses of Contemporary Religion, Routledge 2020 and her recently submitted co-edited collection: Diversity, Inclusion and Decolonisation: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research and Scholarship, Bristol University Press. Forthcoming 2022.
Les Back spoke at ‘The Changing Face of Football: 20th Anniversary’ Symposium Nottingham Mechanics Institute 9 September 2021.
On 1 September, Vikki Bell gave an opening plenary at the International Conference ‘The Place of the Archive of State Violence’ organised as a conversation with Oriania Bernasconi. The conference was organised by the Anillos project ‘Tecnologias Politica de la Memoria’ (CONICYT funded) whose interdisciplinary team incorporates members from the University Alberto Hurtado, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights Santiago. University Austral de Chile and the University of Chile.
With Nicholas Bussmann, Michael Guggeneheim appeared as part of Kosmoskopien: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; 17 and 18 September.
Events
Martin Savransky’s multimedia collaboration with artist Sonia Levy, “For the Love of Corals: An Ecology of Perhaps”, is now being displayed as part of the “Festival Der Kooperationen”, Literaturhaus Berlin.
On 15 October Sara Farris will discuss Sherin B. S. book Gendering Minorities: Muslim Women and the Politics of Modernity (OrientBlack Swan). The book launch is organised by the Anveshi Research Centre for Women’s Studies in Hyderabad (India).
This will be followed by Sara Farris and Nicola Mai discussing Rachel Parreñas new book Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Migrant States, (Stanford UP) organised by the University of Lancaster, on 25 October.
Kat Jungnickel has organised a 5-panel stream at this year’s 4S – Society for the Social Studies of Science – Annual Meeting (held in Toronto and online) from 6–9th October. It’s called: #198 Un/Making a Difference: the possibilities of extra-ordinary acts of mundane resistance in unequal and uncertain worlds. There are 25 international speakers. Four members of the POP team are presenting: Kat is talking about “Citizens with Secrets: How Clothing Inventors make Extraordinary Claims to Ordinary Rights and Responsibilities”; Katja May is presenting “Un/Making a Difference: Interspecies Knowledge-Making through Clothing Inventions”; Ellen Fowles (with Kat) is presenting “Care, Cure and Contradiction: Investigating Disabled Clothing Inventions as Objects of Resistance”; and Silvia Bombardini is presenting “‘Something New In Skirts’: Fashionable Inventions For Female Shoplifters, 1880-1920”.
