Podcasts for AS and A-level Sociology
With the growth of video, podcasts seem to have fallen out of fashion in recent years which is a bit of a shame because they can be useful teaching / learning aids. From a production point-of-view they’re also cheap to create and easy to distribute so it’s perhaps surprising that more aren’t made. Be that […]
Crime, Deviance and Labelling
This is a short discussion piece about Labelling (and Labelling Theory) based on the following Guardian article: Smash the mafia elite: we should treat offshore wealth as terrorist finance Aside from the issues it raises about globalisation, social class and social inequality, this article is also useful as a contemporary example of labelling theory. How, […]
Globalisation: Homogeneity or Diversity Exercise
Applying concepts of McDonaldisation and Disneyfication to contemporary cultural products helps students get to grips with the concept of globalisation (particularly its cultural form, but also its economic form). These concepts also provide a relatively easy way for students to explore some of the effects of globalisation in terms of cultural homogenisation and diversity theories. The […]
New Media: 1. Features
This short series of blog posts looks at various dimensions of new media, beginning with a broad overview of some key distinquishing features: As Socha and Eber-Schmid (2012) argue “Part of the difficulty in defining New Media is that there is an elusive quality to the idea of new”. This “elusive quality” can, perhaps, be […]
New Media 3: Implications – digital optimism
The development of new media has led to a general debate about the implications of changing technologies and their impact on economic, political and cultural life, polarised around two opposing views – the first of which can be characterised as: digital optimism From this viewpoint the defining characteristic of new media is a form of […]
Ethnicity: Free Films
These four short films from the University of Manchester focus on two broad aspects of ethnicity – identity and inequality – that might serve as interesting introductions / discussion starters. • We need to find a new way to talk about ethnicity (4 minutes) looks at the history of multi-ethnic diversity in Britain in the […]
Social Inequality: Missing the Bus?
Grasping the full extent of social inequality on a global scale can be a daunting prospect, but Oxfam have made things slightly easier by using a double-decker bus analogy to help students get to grips with the full extent of global wealth disparities… “The world’s wealthiest people aren’t known for travelling by bus, but if […]