Suffragette: On 100 years of votes for women
On the week the Bond film Spectre was released, as I entered the cinema through a 007 themed red carpet for the only screening of Suffragette that day, I was struck by the juxtaposition with Britain’s most popular misogynist. I...
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Cracked
How does it feel to have a young person in your care experience psychosis for the first time? An impressionistic answer to this question played out over sixty minutes in a studio theatre in Easterhouse, Glasgow: distress, frustration, repetition, annoyance,...
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Manufacturing fictions: Gothic morality tales
I am not the first person to point out the Gothic nature of capitalism, nor is it a particularly recent observation. The full extent of just how gothic it is dawned on me during my time at Shades City Centre...
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Saving Helen? Social Responsibility and Domestic Violence in The Archers
Media strategies can help challenge domestic violence and a fictional story can often give audiences a unique perspective on the lived reality of abusive relationships. This is because it is considered to operate outside of the legal and ethical constraints...
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Social policy and austerity outcomes
It has been argued that sociologists should ‘catch up’ with behavioural scientists and get more involved in trials of social policy, engaging in a culture of ‘experimental government’. I would be the first to agree that we could develop a...
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“A Kinder Politics and a More Caring Society”
Jeremy Corbyn stood for election as the leader of the UK Labour party on the pledge of a new “kinder politics and a more caring society”. Taken at face value it seems difficult to see how anyone can argue, or...
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Declining health outcomes, rising health inequality and extreme economic inequality
Evidence is beginning to surface of the possible health effects of the rapid social polarisation that is taking place in the UK. This evidence is often hidden, or at the very least hard to find, but it will soon emerge...
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Becoming a scientific society: making the living laboratory work for public services in Wales
Government departments and their frontline staff are constantly experimenting with new policies and different methods of delivering public services to try to discover better ways of doing things. For example, it’s thought that some health boards in Wales are now...
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Scary clones and space-ready humans – the genome debate hots up
Hopes and fears around new developments in genome editing have sparked a fresh round of arguments about the ethics of eugenics. Until recently, a great deal of ethical thinking about genomics focused on what would happen if scientists ever worked...
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Alan Kurdi
The pitiful picture of a child who drowned during a failed sea crossing from Turkey to Greece seems to have done what reams of analysis and commentary could not: shifted the narrative. The image of Alan Kurdi’s small body, being...
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Public Health and Behaviour Change: from naïve sociology to naïve psychology
One of the age-old problems for ‘public health’ has always been how to get people to adopt more healthy behaviour change. How can citizens be persuaded to vaccinate themselves, eat healthier food or avoid obvious harms such as smoking? Of...
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On euphemism & sheer cloudy vagueness: the case of tax credits