School of Social and Political Science

Content

26 January - Cultural globalization on Spotify: A Bayesian multilevel modeling approach

Tod Van Gunten

Tod Van Gunten is a senior lecturer in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. He completed his Ph.D. in 2012 in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Tod is a comparative economic and political sociologist with interests in social networks, development, organizations, globalization, the sociology of knowledge and professions, and sociological theory. His empirical research centres on elite political networks and the economic sociology of financial institutions, particularly in Latin America.

2 February - Network spatial dispersion and social capital deficits among youth in high-unemployment areas of Switzerland

Gil Viry

Gil is an expert in using social survey methods, social network analysis and sequence analysis, his substantive research focuses on spatial mobility, social networks, family and intimate relationships. Gil has a keen interest in studying the spatiality of social networks and how spatial distance and mobility behaviours relate to individuals’ social and professional integration over the life course.

Gil has been leading research that aims to analyse how individuals’ spatial mobility skills and their social networks, including the couples’ network overlap and moderate the influence of residential mobility of couples. 

Gil is also involved in a large-scale project that surveyed an almost complete national cohort of young men and their personal networks in Switzerland, examining social capital, educational and work aspirations. 

9 March 2026 - Diverging Paths: The onset of gender-and-class-differentiated family labour in young adolescence

Runjie Sui

Runjie is a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Their research interests centre on inequalities, family labour division, and time use. This focus on inequalities is specifically oriented towards gender inequity as manifested within families. Gender inequalities are a persistent and unresolved social issue that permeates everyday life, yet often remains unacknowledged or normalised. The family represents one of the most common sites where gender is performed and reproduces the daily allocation of domestic work and caregiving tasks. Runjie explains that this recognition led to their initial research direction: examining gender inequality in the family domain through time use data. 

23 March - Understanding of inequalities in teenagers’ educational and occupational aspirations

Philippa Costello 

Philippa’s research aims to deepen understanding of inequalities in teenagers’ educational and occupational aspirations through a sociologically informed analysis of three British birth cohort studies. It seeks to develop a wider understanding of the social processes underpinning social reproduction and the transmission of inequality.

Philippa has spent the past ten years working across a range of professional services roles in higher education. Philippa has led and supported teams at the University of Nottingham, University of Warwick, the Open University, and Queen Mary University of London, working in areas such as student representation/voice/advocacy, student engagement, academic policy, and programme management. Philippa is motivated by a commitment to widening participation and improving the student experience for underrepresented groups.