Sociology Revision Booklets: 6. Culture and Identity
Somewhat surprisingly, at least to me, there seems to be a positive dearth of Culture and Identity related revision material, at least of the Word / Pdf variety (PowerPoint users seem much better served). Why that should be I don’t know but I have managed to find a few resources you and your students might […]
More Sociology Knowledge Organisers
Knowledge Organisers, you may or may not be surprised to learn, are the classroom requirement de nos jours and while some (looking at you Michaela Community School) may like to casually lay claim to the concept / format as being something radically new and different they’ve developed, it really isn’t. Here, for example, is one […]
Society Now Magazine
“Society Now” is a free full-colour magazine published four times a year by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and features a range of articles that “showcase the impact of the social science research” funded by the Council. Although the magazine includes material that’s not necessarily relevant to a-level sociology – the ERSC funds […]
Chinese Parents’ Involvement in Children’s Education
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that from time-to-time we’ve been able to feature research done by Richard Driscoll’s Sociology A-level students at the Shenzhen College of International Education in China and the latest study to come our way, by Ma Jia Ying, looks at the involvement of Chinese parents in decisions made […]
Culture and Identity: Caught Between Two Worlds?
Richard Driscoll teaches A-level Sociology at the Shenzhen College of International Education in China and you may recall an interesting piece of research – The Last Queendom of Women? – carried-out by one of his students, Hecate Li, that provided a contemporary example of an alternative to the “conventional nuclear family”. In this latest piece […]
3 | Socialisation and Identity
The third chapter in what’s rapidly becoming something of a legendary giveaway (in my mind at least) is one that applies the concept of socialisation to the development of a range of social and personal identities in contemporary societies (or as contemporary as things get, given this was first published in 2012). This chapter on […]
1 | The Formation of Culture
Around 5 years ago I published a book for the OCR Specification (don’t thank me, somebody had to) and although it’s still available if you want to buy it , it’s probably out-lived what little economic utility it once had. I decided, therefore, it’s probably time to make it freely available to anyone who wants […]
BBC “Analysis” Podcasts
Over the past 10 years BBC Radio 4’s Analysis series has created a range of podcasts “examining the ideas and forces which shape public policy in Britain and abroad, presented by distinguished writers, journalists and academics”. There are over 200 podcasts to trawl through, many of which won’t be of any interest or use to sociology […]
Gay Best Friends as Consumers and Commodities
If you’re looking for something slightly different to incorporate into your Culture and Identity / Media Sociology teaching this book chapter on “Effeminacy and Expertise, Excess and Equality: Gay Best Friends as Consumers and Commodities in Contemporary Television” by Susie Khamis and Anthony Lambert might well fit the bill. Of particular interest here might be […]
Exploring the Nurture in Our Nature?
The Nature-Nurture debate in both sociology and psychology at a-level has, historically, generally been framed in terms of an either / or approach to understanding the relationship between genes and social / environmental influences. In short, either our behaviour is fundamentally a product of our genetic inheritance (biological determinism) or it is a product of […]