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.

We will discuss results relating to the size and nature of personal contact groups (ego-networks) and the frequency with which different members are contacted . We will also discuss an experiment in attempting to identify ‘batch’ and ‘grapevine’ calling practices (call sequences) that were previously reported in a qualitative study of the same households and will discuss some of the different temporal patterns this reveals.

Finally, we will highlight some of the intricacies and difficulties of linking ‘traditional’ longitudinal panel survey data with fine grained ‘traces’ from administrative/commercial data.

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. Like other attempts to understand historical audiences and readers, the fact that viewers of TV commercials in the 1960s have left few traces in the archives of their relationship to the new form of persuasion clearly presents a significant obstacle to any attempt to understand how they viewed commercials at the time. However, as Jonathon Rose has argued in relation to working class readers through the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is possible to begin to piece together the intellectual and subjective responses of these historical actors.

This paper, in seeking to draw out evidence of viewers’ responses, focuses on two key sources. The first are surveys and qualitative studies undertaken by the advertising industry which recorded attitudes towards advertising, and TV advertising in particular. The second source is letters written by viewers about the advertising that they watched. The letters are a particularly precious historical resource. Through them we can see how television and TV advertising communicated a sense of immediacy and eventfulness in the lives of those who watched it. It was this which stimulated them to write the letters to advertisers about the commercials they had seen on television. Their written responses speak to a broader, but distinctive, historical experience of the new medium of TV. For this first generation of post-war TV watchers – or ‘TV lookers’ as one of the women I cite later described the still new habit of watching television – TV’s novelty and power to communicate directly and instantly was conjoined with an older culture of letter writing. Their epistles show how television became central to everyday life in the late 1960s and how viewers were prompted by its vivid presence in their lives. It was this property of television in general, and TV advertising in particular, that engaged viewers and helped to embed television’s commercial messages in the worlds of the mass audience.

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. In doing so, the analysis reveals a contested landscape, configured via fragmented governmental arrangements and comprising substantial (and sometimes insurmountable) tensions. In addition to the way such arrangements impact upon operational efficacy, they also hold significant theoretical import, not least with regard to the way coercive state mechanisms exert themselves. Analysis of this latter regard not only enables reflection on the direction and cohesiveness of coercion, but also on the embedding of risk-based approaches into the everyday and of a devolved ‘responsibilisation’ (Garland, 2001) of counter-terrorist policing. Also important here is the way that surveillance and its social ramifications are conceptualised by practitioners in contradictory ways. Here, awareness of the limitation of technological surveillance and, also, potential to ‘radicalise’ its subjects conflicts with technological deterministic beliefs apparent at various levels of governance. At the same time, such divergence raises counters some of the claims made by specific adherents of post-Foucauldian theory within in the surveillance studies canon (inter alia Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). Moreover, this divergence of practice also generates a number of questions regarding the oversight and accountability of counter-terrorist surveillance.

Despite the multiplicity of surveillance-based CT approaches and the tensions within them, some commonalities are visible. For example, since the July 2005 attacks in London conflicts have emerged between community-based ‘counter-radicalisation’ strategies and high-level enforcement strategies. Yet both rely on surveillance-oriented strategies (albeit in different ways) and, crucially, harbour assumptions that seek to externalise and ‘other’ the subjects of surveillance. Conceptually, many of these issues are filtered through and articulated by events surrounding ‘Project Champion’, a scheme devised to monitor two predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods in Birmingham (2007-2010), a series of events discussed in this paper.

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. Consistent with Williams’ vision, the project assesses slavery’s contribution to British capitalism as an integrated economic, political, social and cultural whole. The three speakers will introduce the project in the context of Williams’ work and then each trace the main conceptual and methodological outlines of one of the key research strands of the LBS project (the commercial and industrial impact of slave-ownership, the political role of the ‘West Indians’ in the system before and after parliamentary reform; and the cultural and historical work undertaken by slave-owners and their families post-Emancipation to invent new and influential histories of slavery and of race) to demonstrate the continuing force and relevance of Williams’ own pioneering analysis.

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.

The most important differences between the British and the Swedish systems of broadband provision regarding the involvement of end users is first, the Governance focus on broadband demand in the British case and on public supply of infrastructures and services monitored by municipalities in Sweden; second, the liberalisation and privatisation rhythms, very early in the case of the UK and leading to a rapid pluralisation of the broadband system of provision and late in the case of Sweden with a very long lasting predominant role of the former incumbent.

In the UK end users represented from the early expansion phases of the broadband provision the consumer demand to be mobilised in order to incentivise private investment in telecommunication infrastructures, in Sweden the public intervention policy considered broadband end users as citizens of the long term planned ‘information society’.

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. Most importantly, water for cooking, drinking and washing became connected to water for sewage at a critical historical conjuncture, and has never been the same since. You cannot understand one without the other, and, equally, you cannot purchase one without at the same time purchasing recycling of the other. Water is indeed a most peculiar commodity.

The presentation develops a radically historical political economy of water, looking at trajectories of consumption (including consumption work), production, distribution, and exchange and is part of CRESI’s contribution to the ESRC Sustainable Practices Research Group research programme.

Slides:

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.

The project will use data from the BT Home OnLine study (1997- 2000) which comprises longitudinal household survey data and a record of each of the c 1.7million calls made by the 400 surveyed households over three years.

Dr Anderson said: ”This is a great opportunity to really explore a unique dataset using concepts and analytic tools from a range of disciplines. We hope that this will lead to new insights and open up new avenues for innovative research projects for us and our postgraduate students.”

The idea of this feasibility study grew out of one of the University’s Global Challenges projects to look at re-designing the internet, bringing together key researchers with computer science and electronic engineering expertise and internationally-renowned experts from sociology, law and other disciplines.

Media Attention:

• Times Higher Education: Campus round-up 24/3/2011
• Gazette
• Essex County Standard
• Halstead Gazette – Online

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. Dr Ben Anderson who co-manages the feeds said “We post all sorts of ‘news’ to twitter and facebook including new projects, publications and job or studentship opportunities. In most cases we are simply looking to engineer serendipitous connections – just as happened here.”

The research project is part of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Sustainable Practices Research Group, led by the University of Manchester, in which Professor Harvey and Dr Anderson from the Department are partners. Professor Harvey is due to visit Taiwan in November this year.

19th May 2011

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