School of Social and Political Science

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Schedule - Autumn 2025

Previous schedules

Spring 2025 - Event information

22 Jan | 16:00-17:30 | Nathan Coombs and Matthias Thiemann | Rule Evasion from Above

About the talk:

Shadow banking, notorious for its role in the 2008 financial crisis, remains a key component of the global financial system. It is a vast market worth $217 trillion, encompassing the activities of hedge funds, asset managers and dealers providing credit and issuing deposit substitutes outside of banking regulation and the safety net of state-backed insurance schemes. Traditionally, its origins are traced to private sector innovations, which the US Federal Reserve was forced to accommodate when they began bailing out ‘too big to fail’ markets in the early 1970s. This paper instead identifies the origins of the shadow banking system with an earlier postwar period (1948-1966) when US government agencies were actively facilitating the growth of unregulated deposit substitutes. We present the goals of our historical comparative project, as well as initial findings from archival research at the Library of Congress regarding controversies over repurchase agreements in the Federal Reserve in the early 1950s. We suggest the original concept of “rule evasion from above” and theorize the motivations and political dynamics at work when regulators intentionally undermine the very rules they are supposed to enforce.

About the speakers: 

Nathan Coombs is Senior Lecturer in Economic Sociology and co-director of the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Policy in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on central banking and financial regulation, particularly knowledge and agency in the field of financial stability governance. He is a founding editor of the journal Finance and Society published by Cambridge University Press.

Matthias Thiemann is Full Professor of European Public Policy in the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po, Paris. He published a book on the Growth of Shadow Banking with Cambridge University Press in 2018 and more recently, in 2024, a book on Taming the Cycles of Finance about post-financial crisis regulation, also with Cambridge University Press. He has published research on European shadow banking in American Journal of Sociology (2017).

 

29 Jan | 16:00-17:30 | Simin Fadaee | Global Marxism and the Decolonial Turn

About the talk:

Marxism became the most prominent school of thought in inspiring revolutionary ideas throughout the global South, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century when nations were in search of alternatives to advances of imperialist and colonial forces. It created radical political imaginaries which rejected capitalism while emphasising an indigenous ideological heritage, values and traditions. Nationalist sentiments went hand in hand with anti-capitalist and egalitarian objectives and provided an alternative to the Western model of modernization.

This talk criticises accusations of Eurocentrism against Marx(ism) and discusses the problems with the decolonial turn that disconnects decolonisation from Marxism. It advances two main arguments: First that a close examination of the history of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles reveals that Marxism and anti-colonial thought and practice are inseparable and therefore, the re-joining of Marxism and decolonisation debates is imperative. Second, it argues that it is Eurocentric to claim that Marxism is Eurocentric, because this entails dismissing the cornerstone of some of the most transformative movements and revolutionary projects of recent human history.

About the speaker:

Simin Fadaee is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Classes and Social Movements. She is the author or editor of several books, including Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics (2024) and Marxism, Religion and Emancipatory Politics (2022).

 

12 Feb | 16:00-17:30 | Chris Till | Beyond Meat & Memes

About the talk:

This paper will present findings from an ongoing multimodal critical discourse analysis of vegan social media activist and promotional posts on Instagram and TikTok; two of the most widely used and influential social media platforms today. It will suggest that prominent in this discourse is a construction of veganism as rational, caring, vibrant and (often) aligned with femininity and motherhood. The avoidance of animal products has moved closer to the centre of mainstream culture in recent years with social media often a key site for debates over its ethics and efficacy (Hughes, 2022; Marshall, 2021; Morgan, 2022; Oltermann, 2021; Rivera, 2022; Vernelli, 2022; Webber, 2021). This project explores how the affordances of these platforms are used to mobilise positive discourses of veganism by investigating how meaningful connections are made between text, image, and audio in discursive formations. The findings suggest consistencies or connections between posts of diverse genres (activist, lifestyle, celebrity, recipe) in their broad messaging, lexical construction, use of composition, colour, and constructions of subjectivity. The analysis helps to develop understanding of how veganism is portrayed and promoted and  to whom, and how cultural, ethical, and political debates and dichotomies are constructed in this context. More broadly it also helps to better understand the impact of image and video based social media on the formation of lifestyles and movements and how media influence functions in contemporary society.

About the speaker:

Chris Till (PhD) is a Reader in Sociology in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Leeds Beckett University where he is also Associate Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research. His research and writing covers health, technologies, and social media including analyses of the digitisation of health and exercise, self-tracking technologies, exercise communities and online mis- and disinformation. He is Editor-in-Chief of Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine. 

 

5 March | 16:00-17:30 | Beata Kowalczyk | Inspiring Collaborations

About the talk:

This presentation offers insight into the role of editors in the construction of career pathways for writers and, consequently, in the formation of contemporary Japanese literature. Previous research has emphasised the importance of encounters and meaningful connections in the construction of a career in the arts. For instance, networking has been considered a fundamental aspect of art production. Scholars have found that meaningful connections facilitate the acquisition of employment opportunities, constitute a vital component of career advancement, mitigate uncertainty, serve as a conduit for the development and sustenance of a vocational identity, provide a source of mutual support in artistic pursuits, and act as a conduit for change and innovation in the arts. Izabela Wagner developed the concept of career coupling to explain the mutual benefits of effective collaboration between young virtuosos and their musical mentors, whereby the success of the former reinforces the professional status of the latter. This paper advances our understanding of collaboration in the arts, with a particular focus on the world of novelists, by demonstrating that editors' decisions to collaborate with debut novelists cannot be reduced to the pursuit of career advancement or the reduction of uncertainty. Rather, it argues that what is at stake is the shaping of aesthetic literary value through collaborations with emerging and established authors, and thus the making of contemporary Japanese literature.

Drawing on qualitative interviews with the editors of Japan's leading literary magazines and Japanese novelists, this paper addresses questions such as: What is the role of editors in shaping the careers of contemporary Japanese novelists? How does their role change at different stages of writers' careers? What are the implications of editors' collaborations with writers for the construction of aesthetic value in contemporary Japanese literature? Ultimately, how do editors participate in the making of the contemporary world of Japanese literature through their collaboration with writers? 

About the speaker:

Beata M. Kowalczyk is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and an associated researcher at the Institutions et Dynamiques Historiques de l’Économie et de la Société (Paris 1 Panthéone Sorbonne). She has conducted multi-sited fieldwork with Japanese musicians in Warsaw, Paris, and Tokyo, much of which was based at Warsaw University, the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the University of Tokyo. Her research has focused on Japanese society and culture, precariousness, and racial and gender-related inequalities in the creative and classical music industries, transnationalism, and postcolonialism. She is the author of Transnational Musicians. Precariousness, Ethnicity and Gender in the Creative Industry (Routledge 2021). She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working on a sociological analysis of inspiration and creativity in contemporary Japanese literature.

 

12 March | 16:00-17:30 | Canglong Wang | Interweaving Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Cultivating Confucian Citizens through Classics Reading in China

About the talk:

In this talk, I explore the intricate relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism and how they influence the discourse and practice of citizenship, especially within Confucian education. I investigate the theoretical underpinnings of Confucian classical education and share insights from the teaching practices at a specific Confucian school, showing how these elements come together to shape students into Confucian cosmopolitan citizens with a strong sense of Chinese national identity. Through this discussion, I offer an insider perspective on how civic identity is nurtured within the Confucian tradition, contributing to the broader shift toward post-orientalist understandings of citizenship. Ultimately, I argue that Confucian education has the potential to enrich global conversations on citizenship by providing nuanced perspectives on the relationship between national identity and global awareness, all within the unique context of China’s political and cultural environment.

About the speaker:

Canglong Wang is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Brighton. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Edinburgh and has previously taught at the University of Hull and Birkbeck, University of London. His research extensively explores the cultural, social, and political implications of the revival of Confucian education in contemporary China. He has a persistent research interest in the topic of Confucianism and citizenship in China. His work has been featured in many leading journals and edited volumes. He is the author of “The Rise of Confucian Citizens in China: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Explorations” (Routledge, 2023) and “Cultivating the Confucian Individual: The Confucian Education Revival in China” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). As a guest editor, Dr. Wang has successfully completed three Special Issues of journals, including “Reconsidering Chinese Citizenship” for Citizenship Studies (2023), “Beyond the State’s Reach? Education and Citizen Making in China” for Social Transformations in Chinese Societies (2023), and “Reinventing Confucian Education in Contemporary China” for China Perspectives (2022). He can be contacted via email at c.wang@brighton.ac.uk or canglongwang6@gmail.com. 

 

19 March | 16:00-17:30 | Stella Chatzitheochari | Childhood Disability, Social Class and Pathways of Disadvantage 

About the talk:

Despite the growth of disability studies and the recognition of structural barriers faced by disabled people across the world, there is little systematic research on the pathways the perpetuate socioeconomic disadvantage among this group. At the same time, earlier research has paid little attention to the intersection of disability with other ascriptive characteristics. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative longitudinal evidence on disabled young people's educational trajectories, this paper will particularly focus on the intersection of social class and disability, which has been largely neglected in earlier literature. Our findings contribute to social stratification literature as well as disability studies, challenging monolithic views about disability as a homogeneous category. 

About the speaker:

Stella Chatzitheochari is a Reader in Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her research interests include time-use, childhood disability, social stratification, and longitudinal methods. Stella has recently completed research on the Leverhulme Research Project Grant Educational Pathways and Work Outcomes of Disabled Young People in England and the British Academy Small Grant Intersectional Effects of Disability and Social Class on Becoming NEET.

 

26 March | 16:00-17:30 | Mustafa Emirbayer | Self-Negation 

About the talk:

This talk presents a new approach to theorizing and empirically investigating a phenomenon variously described by sociologists as internalized oppression or symbolic violence. Located at the intersection of internal worlds and external reality, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal and social, this object of inquiry—which I term self-negation—is crucial to many forms of societal domination. The talk explores its inner workings, analytically disaggregating it into an array of psychosocial processes drawn from the psychoanalytic theory of the defenses. Much of the study's originality consists in showing how these processes operate across multiple systems of domination and drive many and varied outward manifestations of the phenomenon.

About the speaker:

Mustafa Emirbayer is the John Dewey Professor of Sociology and Social Thought at University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He has written extensively on sociological theory, the sociology of race and ethnicity, civil society and the public sphere, and, most recently, psychoanalysis and sociology.

 

24 April | 16:30-19:00 | Debra Thompson | From Black Lives Matter to the War on Woke: the (Homegrown) Politics of Backlash in Canada

This public lecture is part of the Canadian Studies 50th anniversary conference.

About the talk:

In the summer of 2020, hundreds of thousands of Canadians across the country marched under the rallying cry of Black Lives Matter in protest of endemic police violence and systemic anti-Black racism. Now, less than five years later, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, once the avatar of centre-left progressivism, is wildly unpopular, forced to concede his leadership of the Liberal Party. In addition, there are widespread attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in universities and corporate Canada alike, public consensus on the benefits of immigration has fractured, and Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has successfully mobilized simmering resentment to wage a war on wokeism.

This presentation examines the rise of this political backlash in Canada, reflecting on this time of political upheaval and flux. It considers the collapse of old political norms, the uncertainty surrounding emerging alternatives, the influence of American culture wars, and the pressing question of whether Canadian democracy can withstand the challenges ahead.

About the speaker:

Dr. Debra Thompson is the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. A member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, she is internationally recognized as a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race. Her teaching and research interests focus on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in democratic societies. Dr. Thompson has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern University, and Ohio University, and held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University in 2010-2011.

Autumn 2024 - Event information

25 Sept | 16:00-17:30 | Steven Threadgold |  Young people making a life in the new era of fintech

* co-organised with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships

About the talk:

Young people are experiencing their transition to adulthood in an era of rising inequality, unprecedented new risks and the ubiquitous saturation but ever-evolving role of digital technologies in their lives. Marketing themselves as suited to the consumption and financial practices of young people, fintech – for instance, BNPL, crypto, gambling and share trading apps - are a key example of the shift to credit itself as a consumer good and the financialisation of everyday life. Forms of debt and fintech have become a normalised feature of young people’s lives that they need to reflexively navigate. The intersection between the frontstage consumption of credit and the backstage data-fied processes of algorithmic evaluation and sorting of access to financial instruments is where inequalities will be shaped in the future, that is, who can access the means to financial and credit services that are central to creating a future. This is especially important for policy makers and youth sector workers as not all future fintech access will be equal. Traditional understandings of financial ‘literacy’ and ‘capability’ based on rational choice perspectives are therefore not adequate to explain the emotional and financial considerations in young people’s lives. Policy makers and the youth sector therefore need to consider the ‘everydayness’ of fintech beyond the moral panics that situate young people as being duped or irresponsible, especially as the cost-of-living crises and labour market precarity make many of the markers of adulthood of previous generations luxuries only the privileged can now access or afford. 

About the speaker:

Steven Threadgold is Associate Professor of Sociology the Director of the Newcastle Youth Studies Centre at University of Newcastle, Australia. His research focuses on youth and class, with particular interests in unequal and alternative work and career trajectories; underground and independent creative scenes; cultural formations of taste, and financial practices. Steve an Associate Editor of Journal of Youth Studies, and on the Editorial Boards of The Sociological Review, DIY, Alternative Culture & Society, and Journal of Applied Youth Studies. His latest book is Bourdieu and Affect: Towards a Theory of Affective Affinities (Bristol University Press). Youth, Class and Everyday Struggles (Routledge) won the 2020 Raewyn Connell Prize for best first book in Australian sociology. His latest edited collection with Jessica Gerrard is Class in Australia. 

 

2 Oct | 16:00-17:30 | Rebecca Hewer | Administering the ‘Rape Clause’: A Critical Examination of the Two-Child Limit’s Non-Consensual Conception Exception

About the talk:

In 2016, the UK’s Conservative government limited the number of children for whom a low-income family could claim a means-tested benefit (worth up to £3,250 per annum) to two. Shortly thereafter, they announced three ‘exceptions’ to this ‘two-child limit’: for multiple births, children living in kinship care, and children born as a result of ‘non-consensual conception’. The final exception, colloquially called the ‘rape clause’, was highly controversial. Critics of the policy were dismayed that women could be forced to disclose details of a potentially harrowing ordeal in order to claim subsistence benefits for their families. In apparent deference to these concerns, the Conservatives opted for a ‘third-party evidence model’. In sum, those eligible for a ‘rape clause’ exception are not required to disclose details of their non-consensual encounter to an employee of the Department of Work and Pensions, but must rather seek support from one of a select group of health and social care professionals. These ‘approved third parties’ include GPs, registered social workers, health visitors, and support workers employed by a small number of sexual violence charities.

As of April 2024, 450,000 households were affected by the two-child limit, and 3,100 households were in receipt of a rape clause exception.

In this presentation, I share early findings from BA/Leverhulme-funded research that explores how health and social care professionals in Scotland’s central belt would administer the ‘rape clause’ if asked. I highlight a range of obstacles likely to undermine claimant access to an ‘approved third party’. These include a lack of knowledge or understanding of the policy, rape myth acceptance, the under-resourcing of statutory and third-sector services, waiting lists, and triage. I discuss how disclosures of sexual violence for the purposes of rape clause certification can trigger invasive and unwanted safeguarding processes. I conclude by demonstrating that, in contrast to the state, approved third parties largely favour a victim-centred, trauma-informed understanding of sexual violence. This arguably frustrates the state’s ambitions with respect to the two-child limit, whilst destabilising the need for any kind of evidence collection.

About the Speaker:
Rebecca Hewer is a Chancellor’s Fellow (Lecturer) in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh and a non-practicing barrister in the jurisdiction of England and Wales. Her research, which is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, focuses on the socio-legal regulation of women’s bodies and the politics of knowledge production. She is the author of Sex-Work, Prostitution and Policy: A Feminist Discourse Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

 

9 Oct | 11:00-12:30 | Lena Henningsen | Of eyebrows, moustaches and revolutionary spirit: Reading Lu Xun through comics adaptation

** co-organised with Asian Studies

About the talk:

Lu Xun is seen as the founding father of modern Chinese literature; thanks to the propagandistic efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, he was posthumously framed as a revolutionary fighter wielding his pen for the sake of the nation, and the revolution. This (re-)framing rested on political speeches appropriating the famous intellectual, on depictions of the author on propaganda posters, as well as on adaptations of his person and his works into Chinese comics (lianhuanhua连环画). In my presentation, I will sketch this process and argue that comics, as a medium combining text and image, were particularly well suited to this end, quite literally framing Lu Xun and his works from different viewpoints. As adaptations, lianhuanhua represent distinct readings of famous literary works – and as a genre of “pulp fiction”, they reached massive audiences, thus impacting how large parts of the Chinese population would read Lu Xun. I will show how lianhuanhua had their part in the styling of Lu Xun into a devoted revolutionary. Yet, time and again, lianhuanhua moved beyond the narrow reading of the CCP’s Luxunology, thus demonstrating that as a genre it is particularly well-suited to move beyond the narrow frames of official ideology, and that the texts of Lu Xun themselves defy easy readings and appropriations through Party ideology. Core to this are the ambivalences inscribed into the texts of Lu Xun, as well as the depictions of his eyebrows and moustache.

About the speaker:

Lena Henningsen is PI of the ERC funded project “Comics Culture in the People’s Republic of China (ChinaComx)” at Heidelberg University. Before that she was a junior professor at the University of Freiburg conducting another ERC project on reading practices in China (ReadChina). With a background in Chinese Studies, literary and cultural studies, she is interested in the production, circulation and reception of texts both as literary artefacts and as concrete material objects. She has published widely on these topics, including unofficial manuscript fiction from the Cultural Revolution (Cultural Revolution Manuscripts) and copyright infringements on the 2000s bestseller market (Copyright Matters) and is now working on a monograph on the adaptation of Lu Xun into lianhuanhua (Chinese comics).

 

23 Oct | 11:00-12:30 | Andrew Hoskins | The Deadbot Society: AI and the end of the human past

About the talk:

The 2020s are marked by a convergence of huge computing power with the greatest memory dump in history. The digital participation of billions – producing, exposing and sharing data and information about personal and public selves and experiences – has forged an astonishing shadow archive of us. This has been waiting for something to render it accessible, meaningful, usable, on a planetary scale. That time has come, and that something is generative artificial intelligence.

Generative AI changes what memory is and what memory does, pushing it beyond the realm of individual, human influence and control, yet at the same time offering new modes of expression, conversation, creativity, and ways of overcoming forgetting. 

I argue here for a ‘third way’ of memory, an approach that recognises how the related growing autonomy and infinite potential of AI agents (bots and services) to be remade and repurposed and to remember, semi or fully independently of human consent and control, smashes the once more distinct individual, social, archival and generational boundaries of the past. The third way of memory also highlights the overlooked relationship between memory and privacy, to see large language models and the digital content and data which they are fed, as super archives of us.

This talk outlines two key developments of generative AI driven services: firstly, they untether the human past from the present, producing a past that was never actually remembered in the first place, and, secondly, AI ushers in a new conversational past through the dialogical construction of memory in the present.

Ultimately, developments in generative AI are making it more difficult to recognise the human influence on, and pathways from, the past, and that human agency over remembering and forgetting is increasingly challenged.

About the speaker:

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Professor of Global Security in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has been researching the relationship between media, war and memory for over 20 years.

He is founding Co Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Digital War, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory Studies, and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Memory Studies Book Series. 

He is author/editor of 10 books, including: Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst/OUP 2022, with Matthew Ford) and The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media (OUP 2024, co-edited with Qi Wang).

He holds an ERC/UKRI Advanced Grant ‘The New War Front: Digital Participation in War’ (2025-2030).

 

29 Oct | 15:00-17:00 | Book Launch: Gender in South Asia and Beyond

*** co-organised with The Centre for South Asian Studies, Gender.Ed and the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships

Join us for the launch of the essay collection, Gender in South Asia and Beyond, celebrating the scholarship of Professor Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita in Sociology, University of Edinburgh. For over 40 years, Patricia carried out pioneering research, individually and in partnership with her colleagues on a range of subjects including gender and development, especially childbearing, women’s reproductive rights, social demography in South Asia, gender and communal politics, education and the reproduction of inequality; race and ethnicity. 

Her books, including Frogs in a Well: Indian Women in Purdah (1979) and Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism, Politicized Religion and the State in South Asia (edited with Amrita Basu, 1998) inspired peers and future scholars alike. In this volume, we bring together a range of new research that is inspired by and intersects with Professor Jeffery’s work. The chapters offer new data, refreshing insights and original analysis on subjects of contemporary importance in the fields of gender, health, marginalization and development. 

This collection of essays is available from Zubaan Books. 

Organised by GENDER.ED in partnership with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, Centre for South Asian Studies, and Sociology. 

Guest Speakers 

We are thrilled to announce that the following guest speakers will join the book's editors on the discussion panel. 

Professor Anuj Kapilashrami, Professor in Global Health Policy and Equity and Director of the Centre for Global Health & Intersectional Equity Research, University of Essex. 

Professor Lynn Jamieson, Professor of Sociology of Families and Relationships, University of Edinburgh. 

About the Editors 

Dr Shruti Chaudhry is a Chancellor's Fellow in sociology and co-director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships (CRFR), University of Edinburgh. 

Professor Hugo Gorringe is the Head of Sociology, University of Edinburgh. 

Dr Radhika Govinda is the Director of GENDER.ED and Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Edinburgh. 

 

13 Nov | 16:00-17:30 | Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman | Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite

**** co-organised with Social Policy

About the talk: 

Think of the British elite and familiar caricatures spring to mind. But are today’s power brokers a conservative chumocracy, born to privilege and anointed at Eton and Oxford? Or is a new progressive elite emerging with different values and political instincts? In this talk, based on our new book Born to Rule, we comb through a trove of data in search of an answer, looking at the profiles, interests, and careers of over 125,000 members of the British elite from the late 1890s to today. At the heart of the study is the historical database of Who’s Who, but we also mined genealogical records, combed through probate data, and interviewed over 200 leading figures from a wide range of backgrounds and professions to uncover who runs Britain, how they think, and what they want. What we found is that there is less movement at the top than we think. Yes, there has been some progress on including women and Black and Asian Brits, but those born into the top 1% are almost just as likely to get into the elite today as they were 125 years ago. What has changed is how elites present themselves. Today’s elite pedal hard to convince us they are perfectly ordinary – in the way they tell their back story, express their cultural taste, or articulate their meritocratic legitimacy. And this is logical; we show that there is a strong symbolic market for ordinariness among the British public. Why should we care? Because the elites we have affect the politics we get. We show that the family you are born into, and the schools you attend, leave a profound mark on the exercise of power.

About the speakers:

Aaron Reeves is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at LSE where he works on the political economy of health and social stratification. His latest book – Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite – will be published by Harvard University Press in September 2024.

Sam Friedman is Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on class, culture and social mobility, and is the co-author of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged and Social Class in the 21st Century. He is also the author of Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a ‘Good’ Sense of Humour and Co-Editor of The British Journal of Sociology.

 

20 Nov | 16:00-17:30 | Book Panel: The Sound of Difference: Race, Class, and the Politics of 'Diversity' in Classical Music

***** co-organised with the BSA Sociology of the Arts Study Group

About the book panel:

This book panel will discuss Kristina Kolbe's new book, The Sound of Difference (Manchester University Press 2024). In this book, Kolbe critically examines how diversity work takes shape in classical music, a cultural sector deeply implicated in hierarchies of class, structures of whiteness, and legacies of imperialism. The author will be joined by panelists Christina Scharff (Kings College London) and Lisa Gaupp (Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies/IDK) to discuss the book and its implications.

About the panel:

Kristina Kolbe is an Assistant Professor in Sociology of Arts and Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE. With a PhD in Sociology from LSE, Kristina explores how inequalities of class, race, and gender are reworked in and through culture, with a special focus on the role of music, visual arts, and the media. She currently holds a VENI grant from the Dutch Research Council and an Early Career Fellowship from the Independent Social Research Foundation to examine the relationship between a politics of music production, grassroots approaches to creative work, and a politics of care.

Dr Christina Scharff is Professor of Culture & Subjectivity at the department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. She explores gender, media, and culture through theoretically informed empirical research. Christina is author and co-editor of several books, which discuss topics ranging from young women’s engagements with feminism, new femininities, and aesthetic labour to gender, race, and class inequalities in the classical music profession. Most recently, Christina co-edited (with Anna Bull and Laudan Nooshin) the book Voices for Change in the Classical Music Profession: New Ideas for Tackling Inequalities and Exclusions.

Lisa Gaupp is professor of Cultural Institutions Studies at the Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies (IKM). She researches and teaches on topics including cultural institutions/norms, musical practices, performing arts, arts organizations, migration, inequalities, global interrelationships, urban spaces, politics and policy, diversity, and decolonisation. Amongst others, she is the author of 'Die exotisierte Stadt – Kulturpolitik und Musikvermittlung im postmigrantischen Prozess' [The Exoticized City – Cultural Policies and Music Mediation in a Post-Migrant Process] and the co-editor of the volumes Diversity and Otherness. Transcultural Insights into Norms, Practices, Negotiations and Arts and Power. Policies in and by the Arts.

Spring 2024 - Event information

24 January | 11:00-12:30 | Libora Oates Indruchovà | Imagined Conversations: A Methodological Proposal for Slow Memory

About the talk:

Slow memory is a new emerging concept in memory studies and refers to “thinking through which ‘pasts’ have a meaningful impact on our present(s)” in order to shift research attention from events to slow-moving processes (Wüstenberg, forthcoming). The presentation will discuss a method of narrative research presentation developed as a part of a project on academic censorship, self-censorship and publishing in the Czech Republic during state socialism. The objective of the method was to allow the interviewees to represent themselves to the greatest possible extent, while at the same time preserving the multiple voices and contradictions present in the interviews due to the politically sensitive nature of the topic. The research and its method bring together multiple actors and levels at which censorship was deployed, striving for a nuanced account of repression, resistance, negotiation, and complicity. All those interviewed were academics in senior positions at the time of the interview and they were also active within official academic structures during state socialism. The method of treating the interview material in the written output combines the approaches of grounded theory and narratology in the production of dramatised “imagined conversations”. These are structured loosely as a quest narrative that tells the story of a research “quest” to understand the intricacies and dilemmas of individual academic lives under state socialism through the haze of memory, pain and vested interests. The conversations are “imagined” in the sense that they never happened in a real research situation, because the interviews were conducted one-to-one, but also because the bringing together of the individual biographical narratives created a sense of a shared community around an issue (in the sense of Benedict Anderson‘s concept of “imagined communities”).

About the speaker:

Libora Oates-Indruchová is Professor of Sociology of Gender at the University of Graz (A) and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced `studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.Her research interests include cultural representations of gender, gender and social change, censorship, everyday creativity and narrative research, with a focus on state-socialist and post state-socialist Czech Republic. Her publications include Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89: Snakes and Ladders (Bloomsbury 2020); “Blind Spots in Post-1989 Czech Historiography of State Socialism: Gender as a Category of Analysis” (East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 2022) and “Self-Censorship and Aesopian Language of Scholarly Texts of Late State Socialism” (The Slavonic and East European Review 96 [2018], 4: 614-641). From the project on censorship she published earlier “The Limits of Thought?: The Regulatory Framework of Social Sciences and Humanities in Czechoslovakia (1968-1989)” (Europe-Asia Studies, 2008). She also co-edited The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: an Expropriated Voice (with Hana Havelková; Routledge 2014, paperback 2015; expanded Czech edition 2015) that won the 2016 BASEES Women’s Forum Book Prize.

 

31 January | 16:00-17:30 | Emily Laxer | Populism, Rights, and Legality in Canada: Lessons From an Understudied Case

*co-organised with the Centre of Canadian Studies

About the talk:

From the U.S.’s Donald Trump, to France’s Marine Le Pen, to India’s Narendra Modi, the rise of right-wing populism is transforming politics-as-usual in several democratic systems.  Among the troubling elements of this populist surge is its association with campaigns to overhaul constitutions, with sweeping consequences for individual and collective rights.  In this talk, I derive lessons about the relationship between populism, rights, and legality from an understudied case: Canada.  While often portrayed as impervious to the populist surge occurring elsewhere, Canada has in fact seen a significant increase in right-wing populist claims-making, both at the federal and provincial levels.  Provincially, this is manifested in governments’ accelerated attempts to circumvent the Constitution as a means to push through legislation affecting minority rights, electoral policy, and other domains.  Based on close observation of the discursive strategies behind – as well as the implications of – these measures, I offer conclusions about the impact of emerging populisms on rights and legality in Canada and beyond.

About the speaker:

Emily Laxer is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University’s Glendon Campus in Toronto, Canada.  Her research draws on sociological approaches to politics, immigration, race, and gender to assess state policies attending immigrants’ citizenship, rights, and belonging in diverse settings.  International in scope, it has been published in both English and French in such peer-reviewed journals as Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Contemporary Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, and edited volumes. Dr. Laxer’s research also forms the basis of a sole-authored monograph, Unveiling the Nation: The Politics of Secularism in France and Québec (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), which received the John Porter Tradition of Excellence Book Award from the Canadian Sociological Association (2020).  Dr. Laxer currently holds a York Research Chair in Populism, Rights, and Legality.  

 

14 February | 16:00-17:30 | Meredith Hall | Properties of Color: How Corporations Came to Own the Visible Spectrum

About the talk:

Is it possible for a corporation to own a color? In this talk, I argue that the answer, however improbable, is yes. My research details how individual segments of the visible color spectrum—seemingly timeless and universal elements of nature and culture—came to be understood as objects that a corporation might own. This is at once an inquiry into color’s ontology—that is, how color is defined at different times and by different groups of people—as well as how property and aesthetics work in late capitalism. To demonstrate how the expansion of intellectual property rights is practically accomplished, I draw on the watershed case, Qualitex v. Jacobson, which established the eligibility of “color alone” as an intangible corporate asset. This is at once a study of color’s ontology—that is to say, how color is defined at different times and by different groups of people—as well as a study of how property and aesthetics work in late capitalism. The talk also presents a new conceptual framework for studying “propertization”—the social process by which unowned things are acquired initially as property, which I theorize as a form of resource accumulation transacted through moral justification rather than, for example, monetary exchange. 

About the speaker:

Meredith Hall is a Teaching Associate in the Sociology of Media and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where her research focuses on the political economy of intellectual property rights and its implications for inequality, social justice, and the public good. Beginning with the invention of synthetic dye production during the Second Industrial Revolution and concluding with the U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting color trademarks in 1995, her book project, Properties of Color: How Corporations Came to Own the Visible Spectrum, offers a genealogy of color’s assimilation into intellectual property law and policy over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before joining Cambridge, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California. In addition to a Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, she holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University.

 

6 March | 11:00-12:30 | Andrew McKinnon | Shailer Mathews’ Historical Sociology of God: Metaphors of the Divine and the Social Imaginary

**co-organised with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships

About the talk:

Part of a larger project examining the social conditions of possibility for conceiving the divine in monotheistic terms, this paper examines Shailer Mathews’ historical sociology of religion, which has been roundly ignored for the better part of a Century. In two important books, The Atonement and the Social Process (1930) and Growth of the Idea of God (1931) Mathews argues that images of the divine have drawn on political concepts, and are premised on political relations and institutions. Images of the gods are drawn from the experience of social superiors, be those tribal elders, feudal lords, or monarchs. Religious imagery has thus relied on political metaphors, making consideration of the emergence and growth of the state essential for understanding religious development and change. Considering the utility of his approach, I will argue that Mathews’ theoretical schema has much to recommend it, though it could be supplemented by a dialectic approach to the social logic of metaphor. This would facilitate the operation of religion within relations of power as well as power relations within the religious imagination.

About the speaker:

Andrew McKinnon is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. His primary areas of interest are in the sociology of religion, especially conflicts over sexuality within global Anglicanism, and social theory, taking particular interest in the role of metaphor in the construction of sociological theories. 

 

13 March | 16:00-17:30 | Shruti Chaudhry  | Navigating Cultural Intimacies: Long-lasting Friendships in the Scottish South Asian Diasporas

**co-organised with the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships

 

20 March | 16:00-17:30 | Bin Xu | The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society

***co-organised with Nationalism Studies 

About the talk:

Against the bleak backdrop of pressing issues in today’s world, civil societies remain vibrant, animated by people’s belief that they should and can solve such issues and build a better society. Their imagination of a good society, their understanding of their engagement, and the ways they choose to act constitute the cultural aspect of civil society. Central to this cultural aspect of civil society is the “culture of democracy,” including normative values, individual interpretations, and interaction norms pertaining to features of a democratic society, such as civility, independence, and solidarity. The culture of democracy varies in different contexts and faces challenges, but it shapes civic actions, alters political and social processes, and thus is the soul of modern civil societies. In his new book, The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (Polity, 2022), Bin Xu provides the first systematic survey of the cultural sociology of civil society and offers a committed global perspective. He shows that, as everyone is eager to have their voice heard, cultural sociology can serve as an “art of listening,” a thoroughly empirical approach that takes ideas, meanings, and opinions seriously, for people to contemplate significant theoretical and public issues.

About the speaker:

Bin Xu is an associate professor of sociology at Emory University and a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2023-2024. His research interests are the intersection between politics and culture, including civil society, collective memory, symbolic politics, and disaster. He is the author of The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (Polity 2022), Chairman Mao’s Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China (Cambridge 2021), and The Politics of Compassion: the Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford 2017). His peer-reviewed articles appear in leading sociological and China studies journals.

 

27 March | 16:00-17:30 | Michael Hechter | Status Reversal and Its Discontents

****co-organised with ASEN

About the talk:

The recent rise of reactionary politics in modern democracies across the globe has been attributed to a variety of causes, including deindustrialization, economic inequality, immigration, and the rising fortunes of ethnic, racial, religious, and gender and sexual minorities. These explanations for rising support for parties of the radical right and left posit a common underlying dynamic: namely, a reaction among relatively privileged individuals and groups to the fear – or the reality – of downward status reversal. This paper seeks to identify the causal impact of actual status loss on in-group bias, outgroup discrimination, and potential downstream political attitudes. Importantly, the experiments isolate the effect of status reversal from that of pre-existing beliefs about lower status outgroups that may confound the relationship. Results suggest that status reversal can affect a range of group-based attitudes but caution against attributing effects on outgroup discrimination and downstream political consequences to the loss of status alone. 

About the speaker:

Michael Hechter is a Foundation Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University and an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hechter has also taught at the Universities of Washington, Arizona, Oxford and Copenhagen.  He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation, and was a visiting professor at the Universities of Bergen and Llubljana. Hechter is the author of numerous books, including Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (1975; 1999); Principles of Group Solidarity (1987); Containing Nationalism (2000), Alien Rule (2013), Rational Choice Sociology (2019) and The Genesis of Rebellion, with Steven Pfaff (2020), He is editor/co-editor of The Microfoundations of Macrosociology (1983); Social Institutions: Their Emergence, Maintenance and Effects (1990); The Origin of Values (1993); Social Norms (2001, 2005); and Theories of Social Order, with Christine Horne (2003; 2008). His articles have appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Demography, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Rationality and Society, Sociological Theory, European Sociological Review, and many other journals. His writings have been translated into Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, Chinese, Arabic, French, Spanish, Romanian and Georgian.

Autumn 2023 - Event information

4 Oct | 16:00-17:30 | Michael Hechter | Status Reversal and Its Discontents (Cancelled)

18 Oct | 11:00-12:30 | Alice Dias Lopes | International mobility after the PhD: Exploring the characteristics and early labour market outcomes of UK doctoral graduates

25 Oct | 16:00-17:30 | Katucha Benta | Meta-physics of Queer community building

1 Nov | 16:00-17:30 | Siobhan McAndrew | National and International Opera Worlds

7 Nov | 16:00-17:30 | Oriana Bernasconi | Documenting atrocities: Human rights archives, atrocities artifacts and insurgent knowledge 

** co-organised with Researching Latin America

15 Nov | 16:00-17:30 | Phillipa Chong | Working through uncertainty

27 Nov | 11:00-12:30 | Les Back | What sociologists learn from music: Identity, music-making and the sociological imagination

*** co-organised with RACE.ED