Public sociology? read our commentary…

Please read some of the posts on our ’student-focused’ blog: Sociology and Criminology at Keele University.  There is quite a lot of research related commentary stimulated by recent events or news items, some written by Sociologists, some written by our colleagues in Criminology…

Recent highlights include:

Tony Kearon on Serial Killers and Bees
An overview of Siobhan Holohan’s research on narrative constructions of Otherness, including media coverage of the Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward cases
Rebecca Leach on risk and the new Britain from Above series from the BBC and the definition of a basic standard of living
Mark Featherstone on the Freedom Ship and on the UK ‘Gifted and Talented’ programme
Emma Head on Motherhood and on Food waste
An overview of Jane Parish’s research including her work on lucky objects
Helen Wells on knife crime

British Islam after 7/7

By Siobhan Holohan

I recently attended the Encounters and Intersections conference at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, giving a paper with Liz Poole from Staffordshire University about the media construction of British Muslim’s after 7/7.

Tavistock Square, 7/7 (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm)

The conference was part of two major research council programmes Identities (ESRC) and Religion and Society (ESRC / AHRC) and the culmination of many disparate projects broadly relating to the above themes.

Referring to a number of media stories of terrorist events after 7/7, Liz and myself argued that instead of simply repeating the Orientalist discourse described by Edward Said, they had the effect of inventing a new narrative that took into account the current political and legal notion of inclusive British citizenship. This new discourse sets up a binary of self / other not only in terms of ‘good’ Muslim / ‘bad’ Muslim, but also of ‘foreign’ Muslim / British Muslim. While foreign Islam remains tied to the usual negative connotations – e.g. insurgence, terrorism, fundamentalism – British Muslim is employed to reorder citizens in terms of their relationship to the State. For example, in last year’s car bomb attacks in Glasgow and London, those involved were declared criminal rather than terrorist. We argued that this was an attempt to overwrite the oppositional ideology which they might serve. So while terrorism is a term used to describe political violence, the criminal act can be constructed as an act of individual deviance, thus nullifying the need to associate it with all Muslims. We argued that removing religion as a valid ideological marker (while still recognizing its status as an identity marker, thus preserving Britain’s obligation to multiculturalism), had the effect of rebalancing power in favour of the State.

The paper is tied to a forthcoming article co-written by myself, Liz Poole and Mark Featherstone which considers the above within the context of global terrorism, political discourse and anxiety.

2009 British Sociological Association conference:

The call for papers for the annual conference of the British Sociological Association can be found here: bsa2009_callforpapers_final

You can find full details of the conference on the BSA website: http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/Conference

Although presenters can present on any of the broad themes supported by the BSA (see call or website for details), there are plenary sessions on The Challenge of Global Social Inquiry.

What are we up to this summer? Part 1

Lydia Martens, Jane Parish and Rebecca Leach have been in discussions with Liz Parsons (Marketing, School of Economics and Management) and external corporate parties exploring a new stakeholder consortium with a view to developing new research projects with a regional agenda.

Emma Head, Lydia Martens and Rebecca Leach are developing a new research project bid relating to their shared interests in parenting and consumption.

Mark Featherstone, James Hardie-Bick and Andy Zieleniec are working together on a research bid related to their shared research interests in risk, space and utopias.

Lydia Martens has been engaging in ongoing work on parenting with a number of field work visits.

Jane Parish has been doing a spot of ‘urban ethnography’ in relation to the potential consortium mentioned above.

Rebecca Leach has been drafting two articles, outputs from the Baby Boomers project.

Lydia Martens attended two international conferences, the ACR conference on Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behavior  (Simmons College, Boston, USA; June 2008) and the Consumer Culture Theory conference (Suffolk University, Boston; June 2008)