Mark Featherstone According to Klaus Schwab we are in the process of entering the fourth industrial revolution and this will produce enormous challenges for people in even the most high tech societies. What do we mean by the fourth industrial revolution? Essentially, Schwab’s term refers to a new age of interconnectivity defined by the integration of biological, sociological, economic, political, and cultural systems under the sign of digital technology which transforms everything into code. In other words, since we can now understand life itself in terms of data (DNA code and so on), new le ..read more

We are excited to be launching two new modules for the first year students who will be joining us in September 2018. The new modules are Investigating Social Issues and The Anthropological Imagination. Investigating Social Issues will introduce students to a range of challenges facing societies. The content will reflect current events and social problems that are shaping political, media, and sociological concerns. Topics will include: elites and globalisation; environmental issues; media fragmentation in a post-truth age; the impact of smartphones for the self and personal relationships; th ..read more

Dr Siobhan Holohan, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, recently spoke at the Social Media and Society Conference held in Copenhagen between 18-21 July. The paper, titled ‘Negotiating citizenship: social media use among asylum seekers in the UK’, presented findings from a BA/Leverhulme funded project (with Dr Natalie Soleiman) that seeks to examine how asylum seekers make sense of media discourses about immigration against their precarious citizenship status. Preliminary analysis of the findings suggests that while people in the asylum system are aware of the stigmatising narratives surrounding im ..read more

By Mark Featherstone, Senior Lecturer in Sociology Although he was recognised as an enormously important figure in sociology, there was a sense in which the discipline had left Zygmunt Bauman behind in his later years. As it realised the importance of advanced quantitative methods, and vanished into what Alvin Gouldner had years earlier called ‘methodolatry’, Bauman became a kind of peripheral figure. Everybody knew of his great achievements (particularly his book Modernity and its Holocaust), but many saw him as a kind of spectre of a past marked by ideological conflict and old fashioned deb ..read more

Picture by Global Justice Over the last 40 years the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played a leading role in both the development of neoliberal economic knowledges and their global spread as social and economic policy. Through various kinds of conditional loan agreements that provide financial assistance to nation-states in return for their adoption of “market-friendly” policies, including privatisation, deregulation and integration into the global market, the IMF has tethered us all to a mode of accounting that makes us accountable to the market in absolute and existential ter ..read more

Dr Jane Parish, Senior Lecturer in Sociology has a new article published in Culture and Religion... The Frankfurt Skyline where fetish priests manipulate the commodity markets (photo by Thomas Wolf "Der Wolf im Wald") In a world where bitcoin represent the wild west of finance and the manipulating of prices of stocks destroys communities and pension schemes overnight, this article explores the relationship between cosmology and financial transactions via the sacred and deeply secret discourses of West African traditional priests in Europe. If you thought that supernatural spirits ha ..read more

By Mark Featherstone  I was recently asked to take part in a horizon scanning exercise with the idea that I would gaze into the future in the name of figuring out likely hot research topics for years to come. Although I know that all major organisations undertake these exercises and had recently taken part in discussions about a Labour Party horizon scan – what would we do in the case of capital flight brought about by Brexit and so on? – I found scanning the future more difficult than I had imagined. Apart from feeling uneasy about the neoliberalism of the term, the horizon scan (i ..read more

By Mark Featherstone Apart from spending the summer working on a number of projects concerned with the idea of utopia in eastern thought; the philosophy of the German thinker Peter Sloterdijk; and debt and indebtedness, a couple of pieces I have been thinking about and working on for a year or so appeared in print.  My article on the French writer Bernard Stiegler and ideas of higher education called Stiegler’s University was published in the journal, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. This article, which concerns Stiegler’s theory of higher education as a battlegroun ..read more

Mark Featherstone According to Klaus Schwab we are in the process of entering the fourth industrial revolution and this will produce enormous challenges for people in even the most high tech societies. What do we mean by the fourth industrial revolution? Essentially, Schwab’s term refers to a new age of interconnectivity defined by the integration of biological, sociological, economic, political, and cultural systems under the sign of digital technology which transforms everything into code. In other words, since we can now understand life itself in terms of data (DNA code and so on), new le ..read more

Megan Hilditch graduated from Keele in July with first class honours in Sociology. She was awarded the prize for 'best overall performance in Sociology' and in this post she reflects on her experience of studying at Keele.    After enjoying studying Sociology at A-level I decided to continue to study the subject at degree level. Sociology at Keele University appealed to me because of the variety of topics covered by modules and the breadth of research conducted by the sociology department, both of which have helped to make my time at Keele an enjoyable experience. This not only gav ..read more