Social Science Bites
140 episodes - English - Latest episode: 29 days ago - ★★★★★ - 89 ratingsBite-sized interviews with top social scientists
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Stephen Reicher on Crowd Psychology
February 26, 2016 11:00 - 27 minutes - 24.8 MBThere is a school of thought that groups often bring out the worst in humankind. Think only of the Charles Mackay book on “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the U.S. Founding fathers’ visceral fear of ‘mob rule,’ or the influential social science of Gustave Le Bon and others during the French Third Republic. And yet, as a university student future social psychologist Stephen Reicher often witnessed sublime behavior from collections of people. He saw that groups cou...
Janet Carsten on the Kinship of Anthropology
January 12, 2016 22:22 - 19 minutes - 17.4 MBThe study of kinship, long the bread and butter of the anthropologist, has lost a bit of its centrality in the discipline, in large part, suggests Janet Carsten, because it became dry and fusty and associated mostly with the nuclear family. But as one of the leading exponents of what might be called the second coming of kinship studies, Carsten, a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, has (literally) brought new blood into the field, exploring kinship’...
Ted Cantle on Segregation
November 16, 2015 23:50 - 16 minutes - 11.1 MBThe concept of “community cohesion” rose to prominence in the detritus of Bradford and Harehills, Burnley and Oldham, Northern English towns where 14 years ago rioting broke out between Asian and white communities. Called on by the Home Office to investigate the roots of the riots, sociologist Ted Cantle – until then the chief executive of Nottingham City Council for more than a decade and before that director of housing in Leicester City Council –led an investigation that produced Community...
William Davies on the Happiness Industry
September 28, 2015 10:00 - 18 minutes - 12.9 MBHappiness, says sociologist Will Davies, is “all the rage” right now. Not actually being happy, by the way, but offering to provide happiness, or to measure it, or to study it, to legislate it, or even to exploit it. If that sounds vaguely corporate, Davies is unlikely to disagree. The author of the new book, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing, is concerned that real happiness may be getting left on the side of the road choking on clouds of neuroma...
Sheldon Solomon on Fear of Death
July 30, 2015 22:00 - 20 minutes - 14.2 MBUnlike the character in the movie The Sixth Sense, we actually don’t see dead people. Westerners go to great lengths to excise thoughts about death (real death, that is, not movie death) or being in the presence of death. Sheldon Solomon, on the other hand, routinely thinks about the unthinkable, and how humans behave differently when the unthinkable forces its way into their thoughts. Solomon, a social psychologist at New York’s Skidmore College, along with two other experimental social ps...
Steven Lukes on Émile Durkheim
May 19, 2015 18:02 - 18 minutes - 12.7 MBIf anyone can lay claim to be the father of sociology, it’s Émile Durkheim. By the time of the French academic’s death in 1917, he’d produced an extraordinary body of work on an eclectic range of topics, and had become a major contributor to French intellectual life. Above all, his ambition was to establish sociology as a legitimate science. Steven Lukes, a political and social theorist at New York University, was transfixed by Durkheim from early in his academic career -- his first major b...
John Brewer on C. Wright Mills
March 24, 2015 21:16 - 15 minutes - 9.06 MBThe late sociologist C. Wright Mills is in the eyes of many best summed up by one incredibly influential book, The Sociological Imagination, in which he famously urges the academy to "translate private troubles into public issues." The native of Texas was a prime mover in the explosion of leftist thought that pre-occupied the West in the 1960s (he helped popularize the term "New Left," for example). His trilogy of academic books on American society -- The New Men of Power (1948), White Colla...
Peter Lunt on Erving Goffman
February 25, 2015 21:00 - 21 minutes - 12.4 MBErving Goffman has been called the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century (although he was born and did his early studies in Canada) thanks to his study and writing centered on the social interactions of everyday life. In books ranging from 1959's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life to the next decade's Interaction Ritual to 1981's Forms of Talk, the sociologist examined how the small things ultimately were writ large. A quarter century after his his death in 1982 o...
Trevor Marchand on Craft
January 21, 2015 09:00 - 21 minutes - 12.6 MBIt’s an unusual approach for an academic: a hands-on approach. Literally a hands-on approach. Trevor Marchand is an anthropologist interested in how information about crafts is transferred from expert to novice. This has led him to Nigeria, Yemen, Mali, and East London and has required him to use his hands to build, among other things, minarets and homes of mud bricks. Marchand, currently at SOAS, University of London, started his studies -- in architecture -- at Canada’s McGill University,...
Peter Ghosh on Max Weber and 'The Protestsant Ethic'
December 16, 2014 00:00 - 22 minutes - 13.1 MBMax Weber, the German-born sociologist and philosopher, is one of the canonical figures in the creation of social science. And like any canonical figure, his legacy lies in hands of his subsequent interpreters. Karl Emil Maximilian Weber’s current interpreter-in-chief, Oxford historian Max Ghosh, the Jean Duffield Fellow in Modern History at St. Anne’s College, insists that Weber remains his primacy -- definitely top of the hit parade, no two ways about it – whether or not his works have be...
Linda Woodhead on the New Sociology of Religion
November 05, 2014 09:00 - 15 minutes - 8.86 MBFor years, social scientists who studied religion tended to see it as the study of something fated to decline and therefore the key, and almost only, question in their hymnbook was, "Do you still go to church?" But as societies modernise, religion has not gone away. It has, however, changed, mutating into something more institutional than spiritual for some, more fundamental for others, and generally more complex for all. Enter Linda Woodhead, a sociologist of religion at Lancaster Universi...
Ivor Crewe on Psephology
October 03, 2014 07:45 - 17 minutes - 10.3 MBPsephology, a word both charming and antiquated, is the study of elections. Ivor Crewe, also charming but not so antiquated, is a studier of elections. The current president of Britain's Academy of Social sciences and the master of Oxford's University College, Crewe has long been a respected voice on politics in the UK, US and elsewhere, as evidenced by the acclaim his recent book with Anthony King, The Blunders of Our Governments, has received. Here, in conversation with our Nigel Warburto...
Sarah Harper on the Population Challenge for the 21st Century
August 04, 2014 16:24 - 20 minutes - 12.1 MBAround the world, populations are growing older. But is that because people are living longer? Or could it be that there are fewer younger people to dilute the demographic pool? And what about aging itself -- when exactly is 'old' these days? Sarah Harper, an Oxford University professor of gerontology and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, grapples with these sorts of questions every day, asking how these changes will affect relationships, labor, migration, and even the ...
David Goldblatt on the Sociology of Football
June 12, 2014 07:30 - 19 minutes - 11.3 MBWith the arrival of the quadrennial World Cup, the whole world turns to football fandom. And that alone, independent of what actually happens on the pitch, is exciting to David Goldblatt, the soccer sociologist. “The point is that absolutely no other human behavior can gather these kinds of crowds,” he tells David Edmonds of Social Science Bites. “And if you're a sociologist and you're interested in the origins and consequences of collective action, you really can't beat that.” In this podc...
Bruce Hood on the Supernatural
June 04, 2014 08:00 - 18 minutes - 10.6 MBRemember the amazing, spoon-bending Uri Geller? Bruce Hood does. And while Geller is, well, to be kind, controversial, Hood is a quite recognized and reputable developmental psychologist at Bristol University. But he does share one trait with the self-described mystic who fascinated him as a boy -- an interest in the supernatural and how individuals process the potentially paranormal. Rather than collect ectoplasm, Hood focuses on why human beings, starting as children, offer supernatural ex...
Saskia Sassen on Before Method
May 01, 2014 01:00 - 16 minutes - 9.42 MBHere's an idea: social scientists should reflect critically on the prevailing concepts and categories before launching into empirical work with an existing framework. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast, sociologist Saskia Sassen discusses that concept, called 'before method,' with Nigel Warburton. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this and other episodes is available from Social Science Space
Gregory Clark on Names
April 01, 2014 15:55 - 19 minutes - 11.4 MBSurnames predict social status with surprising accuracy. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Gregory Clark discusses this phenomenon with David Edmonds. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this and other episodes is available from Social Science Space
Craig Calhoun on Protest Movements
February 04, 2014 11:01 - 22 minutes - 13.2 MBSocial scientist Craig Calhoun, Director of the LSE, discusses protest movements including the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. The interviewer is Nigel Warburton. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger on What is Wrong with the Social Sciences Today
January 08, 2014 10:57 - 20 minutes - 12.1 MBIn this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Harvard social theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger claims that the social sciences need to reorient themselves away from retrospective rationalisation of what exists and focus instead on transformative opportunity. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Angus Deaton on Health and Inequality
December 03, 2013 10:50 - 18 minutes - 10.7 MBThere have been substantial gains in life expectancy in the last two hundred years or so, partly because of improved public health policy. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Angus Deaton, whose recent research has focussed on India, discusses the relationship between health and economic inequality, and the most effective ways to alleviate the effects of poverty. He also discusses how his research sits within the Social Sciences. Social Science Bites is made in association w...
Robin Dunbar on Dunbar Numbers
October 31, 2013 16:07 - 16 minutes - 9.39 MBIs there a maximum number of friendships that we can maintain? Does this number apply universally? Robin Dunbar believes there are discoverable patterns in the numbers of close and less close relationships human beings can cope with and that this is reflected in, for example, the structural units of armies. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast he discusses this phenomenon with Nigel Warburton. A verbatim transcript of this interview is available from www.socialsciencespace.com
Valerie Curtis on Sources of Disgust
September 27, 2013 11:36 - 17 minutes - 10 MBMaggots, vomit, faeces, sores oozing with pus, putrid meat - these evoke universal reactions of disgust. But why do we have this Yuk! reaction and how did it evolve? Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygeine and Tropical Medicine, explains the sources and importance of revulsion in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
David Stuckler on Austerity and Death
August 01, 2013 08:36 - 16 minutes - 9.45 MBYou might assume that deaths increase in a recession, but that doesn't necessarily happen. What is clear, however, is the relation between government austerity responses to recession and an increase in rates of death. David Stuckler explains in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Kate Pickett on the Case for Equality
June 30, 2013 22:38 - 18 minutes - 10.9 MBSocial epidemiologist Kate Pickett, co-author (with Richard Wilkinson) of The Spirit Level: why equality is better for everyone, argues that inequality has bad social effects. She discusses her ideas with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Angela McRobbie on the Illusion of Equality for Women
June 03, 2013 05:41 - 21 minutes - 12.5 MBHas equality for women been achieved? Feminism has apparently achieved many of its aims. Some of the obvious inequalities between men and women seem to have been removed in recent decades. But have they? Angela McRobbie from the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, discusses her research on this topic.
Lawrence Sherman on Criminology
May 01, 2013 08:35 - 25 minutes - 14.6 MBLawrence Sherman is a Professor of Criminology at Cambridge University and a keen advocate of experimental criminology. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast he outlines his approach and gives some examples of its successes. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Ann Oakley on Women's Experience of Childbirth
March 31, 2013 18:42 - 20 minutes - 11.7 MBIn this episode of the Social Science Bitespodcast sociologist Ann Oakley discusses her research into a range of questions about women's experience of childbirth based on detailed interviews with 55 women that she conducted in 1975. She has since, with a team of other researchers at the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, been able to trace some of these women and re-interview them. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Sarah Franklin on the Sociology of Reproductive Technologies
March 03, 2013 19:45 - 24 minutes - 22.9 MBNew technologies have opened up new possibilities in the area of reproduction. Sarah Franklin, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge discusses this from a sociological perspective in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Doreen Massey on Space
January 31, 2013 16:03 - 18 minutes - 10.7 MBGeographer Doreen Massey wants us to rethink our assumptions about space. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast she explains why. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Daniel Kahneman on Bias
January 03, 2013 11:04 - 18 minutes - 10.6 MBThinking is hard, and most of the time we rely on simple psychological mechanisms that can lead us astray. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast, the Nobel-prizewinning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, talks to Nigel Warburton about biases in our reasoning. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. Transcripts of all episodes are available from www.socialsciencebites.com
Toby Miller on Cultural Studies
December 03, 2012 15:12 - 21 minutes - 12.2 MBCultural Studies sometimes gets a bad press. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Toby Miller, author and editor of over 30 books on interdisciplinary topics within the Social Sciences, discusses Cultural Studies in relation to his work on the Hollywood film industry and addresses wider questions about objectivity and bias. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature
November 01, 2012 10:05 - 16 minutes - 9.71 MBIs the world getting less violent? It seems unlikely. But Steven Pinker has amassed empirical evidence to show that it is. In this interview with Nigel Warburton for the Social Science Bites podcast he explains some of the possible causes of this transformation. He also discusses some broader questions about the nature of the social sciences.
Jonathan Haidt on Moral Psychology
September 28, 2012 16:46 - 17 minutes - 10.2 MBWhat can psychology tell us about morality? Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, discusses the place of rationality in our moral judgements in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in assocation with SAGE.
Paul Seabright on the Relationship Between the Sexes
August 27, 2012 13:01 - 21 minutes - 12.5 MBThere is still a great deal of inequality between the sexes in the workplace. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Paul Seabright combines insights from economics and evolutionary theory to shed light on why this might be so. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Robert J. Shiller on Behavioural Economics
July 30, 2012 09:29 - 15 minutes - 9.24 MBEconomists have in the past often treated human beings as ideally rational. But they aren't. In this episode of the Social Science Bitespodcast Robert J. Shiller discusses how behavioural economics, drawing on psychology and even neuroscience, is transforming the nature of the subject and giving a better picture of markets and how they operate. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Sonia Livingstone on Children and the Internet
July 01, 2012 07:30 - 19 minutes - 11.2 MBHow are children using the Internet? How is it affecting them? Sonia Livingstone, who has overseen a major study of children's behaviour online discusses these issues with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Avner de-Shalit on the Spirit of Cities
May 31, 2012 10:11 - 12 minutes - 7.23 MBCan a city have a spirit? Avner de-Shalit believes that it can. In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast he explains in conversation with Nigel Warburton why he believes that the identity of cities matters in a global age. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.
Richard Sennett on Co-Operation
May 01, 2012 16:52 - 18 minutes - 10.5 MBWe all need to co-operate to some degree. According to the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett, author of a recent book on the topic, complex co-operation is a craft. Listen to him discussing co-operation with Nigel Warburton on this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this interview is available from www.socialsciencebites.com.
Rom Harre on What is Social Science?
May 01, 2012 16:23 - 18 minutes - 10.8 MBHow do the social sciences resemble and differ from history and the physical sciences? Can the social sciences be impersonal? Polymath Rom Harré discusses these questions with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this interview will be available shortly from www.socialsciencebites.com
Danny Dorling on Inequality
May 01, 2012 12:40 - 18 minutes - 10.6 MBWe live in an age of economic inequality. The rich are growing richer relative to the poor. Does this matter? In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast Danny Dorling, a human geographer, discusses this question with Nigel Warburton. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE. A transcript of this episode is available from www.socialsciencebites.com