Then and Now
A few months ago I ran a couple of blog posts that featured the work of Dr Julia Russell under the headings “Hard to Find Classics” and “More Hard to Find Classics”. These files came from an online column she wrote, for a video-distribution company called Uniview, that I saved with a degree of prescience […]
Are You What Your Mother Ate?
Randy Jirtle and Rob Waterland’s Agouti Mouse Study has been called one of the most important study’s of the 21st century, not only for its significance for our understanding of the relationship between our genetic Nature and environmental Nurture but, most importantly, for our understanding of the epigenetic mechanisms that change gene expression in both […]
22 | Health: Part 3
The third chapter in this series looks at the social construction of mental illness and disability in terms of how definitions and meanings have changed over time and between cultures. In terms of definitions the chapter examines three basic models of mental illness the Biomedical, Psychological and Sociological (a distinction you can explore further through […]
Food Spaces: The Relationship between Economic and Cultural Capital
The notion of different types of “capital” (economic, cultural, social, spatial…) has become increasingly significant for students of a-level sociology – particularly through the work of writers such as Bourdieu – and while the concepts themselves may be relatively easily understood the relationship between them is not always so clear. A deceptively-easy to illustrate the […]
21 | Health: Part 2
The second chapter in what literally nobody but me is calling The Health Series focuses on Patterns and explanations of ill health in society and is arranged in a slightly convoluted but-quite-logical-if-you-think-about-it kind of way. It’s basically constructed around three broad organising categories – class, gender and ethnicity – and each is considered in terms […]