Dr Richer's views are unexceptionable - but could only come from Oxford, whose hostility to qualitative social science, except in anthropology, is notorious. Big Tech values this - Eg the WIT group at KCL. Great work on Alzheimers by @alisonpick.bsky.social et al
www.theguardian.com/education/20...
Why do fascists hate sociology? Because it makes transparent everything fascists don't want you to know. A sociological imagination makes us harder to control. Long live the sociological imagination.
Polling on changes to settlement showing plurality support for the status quo
The BBC has a Labour MP saying, "I have seen the polling and the immigration policies are popular. Some people will never vote Labour unless we get a grip."
MPs like this are dumb tbh. There's no clamour for these policies except by ppl who'd never vote Labour anyway
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I'll see if I can think of something relevant I may have come across. Bear with me @sorensorensen.bsky.social
Same here. It's actually our default search engine at uni.
The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself
theconversation.com/the-greatest...
Great pleasure welcoming to our campus Laurie Elks, one of the original commissioners on the Criminal Cases Review Commission, to speak about the CCRC’s work on righting miscarriages of justice.
He is our first guest speaker on our core module Law Enforcement and Human Rights.
I remember reading about the 2024 Nobel Prize for Economics and thinking, "That's what sociologists and historians have been discussing for a long time."
Excellent article but stark reminder that for all the perceptions of universities as ivory towers for elites, they are actually vital hubs in towns n cities supporting local businesses and providing key services as well as education….
I'm very happy for you, Marina!
Terrific news! Congrats, Antti!!
What struck me the most is that most of the public debate about the criminal justice process in E&W is about efficiency/speed. There's very little about fairness, rights of the accused, etc.
What's even worse? I doubt these changes will actually tackle most of the backlog as some said.
We have interstate taxes in Brazil. It's a complete mess since it creates tax wars between states. There are plans to reform the system, though.
Democracy under threat via the "empirically observable breakdown in the interactional practices that constitute democratic accountability between media and state power."
Wayne Martin Mellinger on Steve Clayman's decades of #EMCA research 👇
doingmodernity.blogspot.com/2025/11/demo...
A doctored image of three paragraphs from a large university's press release, replacing platitudes with the words "we must cut jobs".
I had a look at a press release about job cuts from a nearby large university .
I was struck by how each paragraph started off positively but then lapsed into treacly platitudes.
So I thought I'd help them out with their argument structure.
Really terrible news from the University of Nottingham. The idea you can have a comprehensive university without language and music is absurd. Higher education serves society and you can't have a society with imagination and purpose if the people in charge decide creativity is worth nothing.
Compulsory team teaching on every module is perhaps the biggest ever threat to the quality of teaching in UK universities.
It causes chaos on the ground for timetabling, ruins course coherence and turns lecturers into permanent supply teachers. It is pedagogically incoherent… 1/
This is absolutely appalling.
"The UK will not contribute to a flagship fund for the world’s remaining tropical forests, in a bitter blow to the Brazilian hosts on the eve of the Cop30 climate summit."
Absolutely pathetic.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
The only reason why international talent still moves to the UK is the language.
if you're using LLMs to generate (aka "write") papers or reviews, you are undermining your own value as a researcher
#chi2026
This comes as no surprise for those who have gone through the process.
The health surcharge is scandalous, especially considering the current state of the NHS.
The first School of Social & Political Sciences Research Seminar of the new Academic Year is underway. Thanks to our colleague @fferrazdealmeida.bsky.social for speaking about his research on Police Vloggers
Just heard this one on a meeting to discuss a funding bid😅
Colleague: I'm always making sure my students design their research to answer 'why' something happens, not simply 'how'. Who cares about the process?
That's how you provoke an ethnomethodologist 😅
I wonder what his party leader thinks about what he said.
I'm not sure what the best way to approach this is. Undergrad dissertations are rarely original anyway. The goal of producing a dissertation, in my view, is mainly pedagogical: learning the tricks of the trade.
Many of my undergraduate students want to do primary research for their dissertations.
Talking to colleagues, some question the value of doing so if there's data available out there - other surveys, interview transcripts, etc. - implying that there's no point in redoing what's already been done.
Today the School of Social & Political Sciences hosted the inaugural session of its MA International Relations Public Lecture Series organised by Marianna Charountaki & moderated by @drnickcowen.bsky.social. Thanks to Alam Saleh, Christos Kourtelis, Nasasra Mansour & Lesley Masters for participating
