New Media: WeChat and the Chinese New Year.

One of the nice things about running Dorset’s Most Popular Sociology Blog (*) is that from time-to-time we get to feature the work of Richard Driscoll’s students at the Shenzhen College of International Education in China. Previous posts have, for example, examined ideas as diverse as Cultural Capital, Parental Involvement in Education, Social Identity and Matriarchy […]

The Dark Side of Family Life: Domestic Abuse

The issue of domestic abuse has hit the headlines recently with the start of both the 2018 World Cup and not-uncoincidentally, a “Give Domestic Abuse the Red Card” campaign promoted by a range of police forces and widely-reported in both old and new media. The campaign highlights the relationship between domestic violence (defined in terms […]

Youth Subcultures: The Changing Face of Gangs

Unlike in the USA, where the study of “gangs” and “gang culture” – from “Street Corner Society” to “Gang Leader for A Day” – is firmly embedded in the sociological mainstream, the empirical study of UK gangs is fairly limited. This makes it all the more interesting that, over the past 10 years, Waltham Forest […]

Get Back The Heartbeat: A Film about Social Control

Around 10 years ago I was contacted by a French film student asking permission to use something I’d written about social control as the basis for a Sociology lecture to be featured in a short film they were producing and directing. I’d forgotten all about it until I was rooting around in a bookcase looking […]