Our research students
EJ-Francis Caris-Hamer
EJ-Francis Caris-Hamer presented at the British Sociological Association as part of a book launch (Consent: Gender, Power and Subjectivity), promoting EJ's chapter: What’s in a Name (or Even Pronoun)? In addition, as a response to the Cass Review published in April 2024, EJ wrote an article for The Conversation titled: Not all young trans people want medical intervention – what is social transitioning and how should schools handle it?
Farid Adilov
Farid Adilov was selected as a finalist in the Three Minute Thesis Competition of the University of Essex, and he won the People’s Choice Award on 1 May 2024 for his presentation on “How does women’s presence in parliament affect women-friendly policies?”.
In December last year, Farid travelled to Azerbaijan with recent Essex PhD graduate Dr Yemisi Sloane to attend an international conference on Prevention of Domestic Violence: Opportunities and Perspectives. Farid spoke on the panel ‘A Multidisciplinary Approach and Capacity Building Training for Specialists’, sharing international experiences, particularly from the UK. Farid also spoke about how female lawmakers can advance policies to address domestic violence against women and girls.
In March, Farid co-organised and chaired a hybrid event entitled "The Role of Women in Sustainable Development: A Gender-responsive Approach to Climate Change" at the University of Westminster. During the event, presentations were made by Jeyran Rahmatullayeva, Chief of the Staff of the Azerbaijani State Committee for Family, Women and Children Affairs, Dr Elgun Safarov, Member of the UN CEDAW Committee and Dr Yemisi Sloane, Lecturer in Criminology, University of Westminster.
Farid’s analysis of how women's participation in parliament affects policies in favour of women was published online (in Azerbaijani) by Azertag News Agency.
Robin Brooker
Robin Brooker and Nick Allum published a blog post about academic plagiarism.
Allum, N & Brooker, R (2024) How common is academic plagiarism? LSE Impact Blog.
Passent Moussa
Passent Moussa, a recent Essex Sociology graduate, wrote a blog post on human rights and the war on Gaza on the Human Rights Centre website.
Student event
We had a full house for our important, student-led workshop, From Occupation to Liberation: Decolonising Palestine, held on 9 May co-supported by @essexsociology and @artexchange.
We are proud of the student organising team, led by our 3rd year UG student, Safiyyah Esat.
A new name for the Department
The Department officially changed its name to
Department of Sociology and Criminology
The renaming ceremony took place on 8 May 2024.
Our academic staff
Professor Anna Sergi
Anna was on research leave for the Spring Term which she spent in Australia, for fieldwork within her latest BA/Leverhulme Trust Small Grant “HOST- HOnoured DynaSties” on intergenerational transnational criminal families. The fieldwork was a success - see picture of her in Griffith, New South Wales, on Sergi Road! As she was travelling, she co-hosted an itinerant podcast for SBS Radio Italian, which will come out later in the summer.
She has already written part of the data analysis during her visiting professorship at the University of Bologna in Italy. She currently has four papers under review.
In Bologna she gave a professorial lecture on the same fieldwork topic and also a few seminars to master students in the Social and Political Sciences Department. In April she participated as speaker to the International Antimafia Festival, promoted by Wikimafia, in Milan. You can listen to her speak in Italian here. She also wrote an article for a national Italian newspaper which she is very proud of, still in Italian, on the normality of “mafia villages” that you can find here.
In view of next year’s Impact Leave in Spring Term, still connected to the BA Small Grant, she has launched a research blog, aimed at boosting impact. During the leave she will be able to focus on the writing and the sharing of content through the blog, among other things, but you can check it out already, as she has started writing! https://myaustraliandrangheta.blogspot.com/
A paper first published in 2023 now has a home in a physical volume of the European Society of Criminology, you can read it here open access: Cocaine and the port: Utopias of security, urban relations, and displacement of policing efforts in the port of Piraeus
A chapter of hers on Organised Crime in an innovative textbook came out as well in the past few months, Security Studies: An Applied Introduction, by Sage, edited by Reimand & Rossi. She is looking forward to using chapters of this book for teaching SC304: Globalisation and Crime, next year!
Dr Tara Mahfoud
The OECD Neurotechnology Toolkit, developed to support policymakers with implementing the OECD Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology, draws on research she conducted while in the Ethics and Society division in the EU Human Brain Project. The Toolkit highlights the work they did on dual use neuroscience and neurotechnology as examples for policymakers to consider when “innovating for the public good” and “ensuring safety and security”. Available to view here: https://www.oecd.org/health/emerging-tech/neurotech-toolkit.pdf
The workshop report has been published by the Society for Social Studies of Science blog, Backchannels.
Photo above: Re:Constructs Workshop in the Lakeview Room. (Photo by Linsey McGoey)
In December, the Department of Sociology hosted an international workshop organised by Tara, Noortje Marres (Warwick) and Michael Guggenheim (Goldsmiths) titled “Re:Constructs | Exchanges between Sociology and STS”. They investigated how the development of specific concepts has been enabled by exchanges between STS and Sociology. The workshop report is forthcoming with the Society for Social Studies of Science blog, Backchannels, and they have submitted a proposal for a book manuscript based on the workshop proceedings.
In February, Tara attended a workshop in Dunkeld, Scotland with researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Colorado State University, University of Vienna, University of Exeter, and the Technical University of Denmark titled “Studying with: building infrastructures for collaborative work”. They are developing a thematic issue based on the workshop, to which she is contributing.
Photo above: Tara (left) with Jane Calvert (right, Edinburgh) in Dunkeld, Scotland. (Photo by Robert Smith)
Professor Nick Allum
Nick Allum recently published a paper in PLoS ONE:
Sturgis P, Brunton-Smith I, Allum N, Fuglsang S (2024) Testing the cultural-invariance hypothesis: A global analysis of the relationship between scientific knowledge and attitudes to science. PLoS ONE 19(2): e0296860.
Nick also presented the above paper at the 79th American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Annual Conference, Atlanta GA.
Dr Sobia Ahmad Kaker
A research article that has been very close to her is finally online. The idea was formed as she engaged in research for her PhD project, and it was developed while working on the Urban Uncertainty project with colleagues at LSE Cities. She appreciated the support provided by colleagues at Sheffield, LSE, Goldsmiths and Essex, who invited her to present this work and provided feedback to draft versions.
The article introduces ‘ordinary’ uncertainty as a routinized experiential terrain of insecurity. One that is anticipatorily navigated by social actors operating at the micro-social scale. Based on fieldwork on ordinary uncertainty in Karachi, this article calls attention to the incredible amount of time and energy spent by urban residents who try to ‘stay updated’ with the ever-shifting security situation in the Pakistani megacity. They do this by gathering, exchanging and making sense of information circulating in their social circles, on the street, news channels and/or on social media platforms. By drawing attention on critical practices of information production and exchange, this article reveals the politics of governing ordinary uncertainty in an unequal sociopolitical context.
The full article is available here: Kaker, S. A. (2024). Governing ‘ordinary’ uncertainty: Circulating information and everyday insecurity in Karachi. Security Dialogue, 0(0).
Dr Alejandra Diaz De Leon
Alejandra published the article “Towards a social determination of health framework for understanding climate disruption and health-disease processes” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
Abstract:
In this article we compare the social determinants of health (SDOH) and the social determination of health (SDET) from the school of Latin American Social Medicine/Collective Health. Whereas SDET acknowledges how capitalist rule continues to shape global structures and public health concerns, SDOH proffers neoliberal solutions that obscure much of the violence and dispossession that influence contemporary migration and health-disease experiences. Working in simultaneous ethnographic teams, we interviewed Honduran migrants in their respective sites of Honduras, Mexico, and the United States. These interlocutors connected their experiences of disaster and health-disease to lack of economic resources and political corruption. Accordingly, we provide an elucidation of the liberal and dehumanizing foundations of SDOH by relying on theorizations from Africana philosophy and argue that the social determination of health model better captures the intersecting historical inequalities that structure relationships between climate, health-disease, and violence.
Professor Michael Halewood
Michael Halewood organised and participated in a workshop on the footnotes in A. N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality at the Bergische Universitat, Wuppertal in July.
Dr Samuel Singler
Samuel published an article in Geopolitics titled ‘“Do It Yourself!” Pedagogical Performances, Technical Expertise, and Crimmigration Control in the IOM’s Capacity-Building Practices in Nigeria’.
He also convened a panel at the STS-MigTec annual workshop in Utrecht together with Nina Amelung (University of Lisbon) and Sanja Milivojevic (University of Bristol), on the topic: ‘The technopolitics of digital crimmigration control: Expertise, experimentation, and democratic politics’.
In May, Samuel was invited to attend a workshop for thinking about creative ways to foster collaborations between academics, civil society representatives, and journalists. The workshop was hosted by AlgorithmWatch and the Hertie School in Berlin.
He will spend the remainder of the summer term writing his book, Outsourcing Crimmigration Control, under contract with Oxford University Press.
Dr Anna DiRonco
Anna DiRonco and Nigel South presented a paper on “Contestation and resistance concerning eco-justice and health justice in Italy and Colombia” at the University of Manchester.
Dr Giacomo Vagni
Giacomo presented a paper on “Intensive Parenting in the UK” at the INVEST Conference: Digitalization, Social Inequality and Behavioural Change at the University of Turku, Finland, in May.
Giacomo gave interviews for the Colchester Gazette, the Financial Times, and the Daily Mail. His research was also picked up by the BSA Network and Vogue.
Departmental visitors
Our Department staff were featured in the newsletter of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. The photo showcases a visit from Dr Sirima Thongsawang, who joined our department this term at Chulalongkorn University.
Other visitors include Pilar Torres-Pereda, a doctoral student visiting from U. Rovira i Virgili (Spain), and Prof Nuria Romo, professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Granada (Spain), funded by the Erasmus + Staff Mobility Scheme.
Thanks to our colleagues for joining us – and to our wonderful Partnership Director Carlos Gigoux for helping to facilitate the visits and offering a very warm welcome.
YouTube
We have published two videos on our new YouTube Channel
Failure Lab UW: Revolutionary Epistemology/University of Essex 2024
Video link: https://youtu.be/_1RriYohI5I?si=H7AzN407egBJboNN
The video features the seminar on Revolutionary Epistemology, with contributions from ignorance and failure studies co-organised by Linsey McGoey (University of Essex), with Lukas Griessl (University of Tübingen), Adriana Mica (University of Warsaw), Mikołaj Pawlak (University of Warsaw), Paweł Kubikcki (SGH Warsaw School of Economics), and Matthias Gross (University of Jena).
Sociological Conversations: Michael Mann's book "On Wars"
Video link: https://youtu.be/W1ET9BiyPX8?si=ZL9uoe_nbWoWnTV2
The video is an hour-long interview of Professor Michael Mann by Giacomo Vagni.
