Seminar: Practice hunting with British telephone call records

Dr Ben Anderson, Department of Sociology, University of Essex and ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group

Dr Alexei Vernitski, Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Essex

Dr David Hunter,  School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

2nd February 2012
At 16:00 in Room 6.345.

Social practices have some to the fore in recent studies as a way to emphasise the habitual, embedded, normative and often unconscious nature of consumption. Empirically social practices have tended to be studied using mainly qualitative methods with occasional forays into time-use and purchasing diaries or data.

In this paper we draw on a unique dataset linking a longitudinal household panel survey with household call records over three years to try to explore the social practices of communication for different kinds of people in different kinds of households.

Seminar: ‘Welcome Intrusion? the reception of TV advertising in the 1960s’

Dr Sean Nixon

15 December 2011

At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Colchester Campus) and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.

The paper addresses how the viewing public responded to the new, intrusive form of television advertising in the 1960s. I ask how did the arrival of television advertising colour viewers general feelings about advertising? And to what extent did viewers feel an investment in the slogans, dramas and humour of ‘telly ads’? Did they worry about the effects of television advertising on them? Exploring these questions is important because the viewers and readers of advertising have remained a nebulous and shadowy presence within critical accounts of post-war consumer society.

Seminar: Security and Surveillance Ten Years after 9/11

Dr Pete Fussey

1 December 2011

At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Colchester Campus) and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.

This paper examines the role of public-realm surveillance in countering terrorism in the UK over the past decade. Although 9/11 is widely viewed as having a seismic impact on judicial and (particularly transnational) policing approaches across the globe, in the UK a series of violent Jihadi extremist activities between 2005-2007 particularly animated a range of counter-terrorist (CT) responses. Drawing from ongoing research yielding data from a range of sources – principally including interviews with policing, security and surveillance practitioners – the paper outlines and analyses the diverse approaches that comprise surveillance-based counter-terrorism approaches in the UK.

Seminar: Eric Williams, capitalism and slave ownership

Prof Catherine Hall, Dr Nick Draper, Dr Keith McClelland (University College London)

ESRC Research Group, Legacies of British Slave-ownership

17 November 2011

At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Colchester Campus) and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.

The complex debates triggered by Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery remain central to the assessment of the role of slavery in the formation of Britain a century after Williams’ birth. This seminar draws on early findings of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership (LBS) project at UCL to highlight the extent to which the imprint of slavery continued to broaden in the nineteenth-century, beyond the period in which Williams himself had construed slavery as formative of metropolitan Britain.

Seminar: The role of end-users in the Transformation of Broadband provision in Sweden and the UK

Dr Esther Ruiz Ben

03 November 2011

At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Colchester Campus) and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.

This presentation shows the involvement of end-users in the particular configurations that the system of broadband provision takes in different countries. I concentrate on the cases of the UK and Sweden showing some preliminary results of the ‘Consumption Work and Societal Divisions of Labour‘ research programme funded by the European Research Council.

Seminar: Reflections on water – historical and contemporary

Professor Mark Harvey
20 October 2011
At 16:00 in Room 6.345 (Colchester Campus) and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.

Water appears such a straightforward good, available at the turn of a tap to all in this country (but not to 1 in 9 of the world’s population). This presentation reconstructs the complex historical trajectories and flows of water, mainly in Britain, plus some light-touch comparisons with France and contemporary Delhi. This reflection on water demonstrates that water is an economically, culturally and politically complex good, sometimes public, sometimes private. It has experienced ‘sustainability crises’, and seen the emergence of commercial water, so that once more people drink ‘pure spring water’, now in bottles drawn from different regions national and international.

CRESI research features in #essexsociology research bytes

Professor Mark Harvey: Research Byte (YouTube)

Professor Miriam Glucksmann: Research Byte (YouTube)

Essex Sociology’s new ‘Research Bytes‘ YouTube channel includes interviews with Professor Mark Harvey and Professor Miriam Glucksmann. Mark discusses his research on the tomato and on new approaches to sustainable biofuels and land-use whilst Miriam describes her recent research on work and especially the new paradigm of ‘consumption‘ work.

CRESI to lead new research on social network structures

A new research project led by Sociology’s Dr Ben Anderson in collaboration with Dr David Hunter (Department of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering) and Dr Alexei Vernitiski (Mathematical Sciences) is planning to use extensive call records datasets to explore the value of novel mathematical network analysis methods in deriving emergent clusters of ‘social similarity’.

Twitter helps to strengthen CRESI collaborative research with Taiwan

Professor Mark Harvey has been invited to be a Visiting Scholar at the National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan to facilitate collaborative research on sustainable consumption and bottled water, with Dr William Li, a graduate from the Department of Sociology.

The collaboration stemmed from a job posting to the Department’s Twitter and Facebook feeds for a research officer to support Professor Harvey’s ESRC funded project on bottled water.

Seminar: The challenges of regulating ‘big pharma’

Emily Jackson from Department of Law, London School of Economics

19th May 2011

At 16:00 in Room 6.345, Colchester Campus and afterwards in the Sociology Common Room.

Abstract: It is important to recognise that the way in which companies behave is shaped, at least in part, by the regulatory framework within which they operate. This presentation will focus on a number of criticisms that have been made of the pharmaceutical industry, and will examine the role of regulation as an enabler or facilitator of undesirable, as well as desirable practices.