Introducing Journal Corner

Discover Sociology, as you may or may not know, is a section of The British Sociological Association website dedicated to A-level sociology. It’s got a range of resources for teachers and students (notes, podcasts, videos…), the latest of which involves a “digested read” of recent research. This is located in something they’ve called “Journal Corner”.

To find it you have, somewhat counter-intuitively, to go to the Downloads section of the site. This wasn’t the first place I thought to look for it. Or the second, come to that. It was more a process of elimination.

Anyway, “Journal Corner” is a new feature that offers “curriculum friendly summaries of papers published in the BSA journal Sociology, accompanied by an informal interview with one of the authors“.

digested

The first research to be featured relates to contemporary youth subcultures in the shape of Garland, Chakraborti and Hardie’s “‘It Felt Like a Little War’: Reflections on Violence against Alternative Subcultures” (2015) that studied “the forms and impact of violence against people identifying as members of alternative subcultures” using a mix of interviews and focus groups with respondents “from a range of alternative subcultural backgrounds“. The summary runs to around a 1000 words and touches on three curriculum areas teachers and students will find particularly useful:

• culture and identity

• crime and deviance

• research methods.

It’s sandwiched between a short (200 word) introduction to “the nature of contemporary youth subcultures” and a longer (900 word) interview with Jon Garland about the research. I’m not sure if the former’s going to be a feature of every digested study, but this one complements the digested stuff very nicely. The latter, not so much. Not because it’s uninteresting – there’s a neat little section on how the research was carried out both teachers and students should find illuminating – but rather because I’m guessing very few students will actually bother to read it.

I could be wrong.

But we both know the chances of that are frankly laughable.

undigested

Although I’m not quite sure why the BSA thinks teachers and students who are explicitly choosing to read a digested version of a research study would then want to read the original study, an added bonus (?) is a free copy of the original research “for a period of time“. Unfortunately it’s not clear how this is going to work because although the Digested Read document contains a link to the original research it doesn’t work. So you can’t download it even if you wanted to.

Except, of course, we live in the 21^st century and this is The Internet so there’s always a way if you know how to find it. To save you the time and trouble of scrabbling around the web looking for it,  here’s one I made earlier.

Teething problems aside – and maybe with a few tweaks to fine tune what’s on offer – this could become a valuable addition to the A-level Sociology teacher’s lexicon.

And if you’re interested in looking into the concept of Hate Crime a little further, our recent film “Hate Crime in Everyday Life” features Neil Chakraborti talking about his research…