(Re)Discovering Sociology

If you don’t subscribe to the British Sociological Association’s “Discovering Sociology” newsletter you’re missing-out on the free “journal corner” offering of “curriculum friendly summaries of papers published in the BSA journal Sociology” (which presumably means cutting-out all the dull bits and just moving straight to exam-friendly stuff – I could be wrong).

Although when they say “papers” you only actually get one summary per issue, so if you’re hoping to build-up some sort of extensive easy-access library for your students, this might take some time: the previous issue, “The Unhomely of Homeschooling” appeared in October 2023, although to be fair, Issue 2 (“Feeling Time, Fashioning Age: Pre-teen Girls Negotiating Life Course and the Ageing Process Through Dress.”) was only 6 months prior to that and Issue 1 ‘It Felt Like a Little War’: Reflections on Violence against Alternative Subcultures” came out a little while before that. Or, to put it another way, I’m not exactly sure because I wasn’t paying attention.

What I’m saying, in a meandering, roundabout way, is that while these condensed versions are useful, don’t get your hopes up for more than one or two a year.

Having said that, this issue’s contribution is “Disability, Social Class and Stigma: An Intersectional Analysis of Disabled Young People’s School Experiences” and as with each of the other Issues you get a bonus interview with the authors (in this instance Dr Stella Chatzitheochari and Dr Angharad Butler-Rees). How useful you and your students find the latter is only something you – and indeed they – will know.

And if you need any more encouragement to download and read the issue, you might like to know the article “was recently awarded the SAGE prize for Innovation and Excellence”.

And it doesn’t come much bigger than that.

Possibly.

I don’t actually know.

Although now I’ve looked it up (“The prize is £250 worth of SAGE books or a free annual individual subscription to a journal of the winner’s choice”) I could, maybe, be guilty of slightly over-inflating the size of the prize…