Department of Sociology
  • Les Back has published a new article in Twentieth Century Society: The Journal of the Academy of the Social Sciences entitled 'Researching Community and its Moral Projects'.  The article is based on his twenty year experiences of researching 'community' in soth east London.  It argues for a new mode of critical engagment with the moral projects of community and the development a multi-modal approach to the exploration of urban life.
  • Marsha Rosengarten &  Mike Michael have published a new article entitled 'Rethinking the Bioethical
    Enactment of Medically Drugged Bodies: Paradoxes of Using Anti-HIV
    Drug Therapy as a Technology for Prevention' in Science as Culture, June
    2009, Volume 18, Number 2, pp 183-200.

  • Alberto Toscano has published an article in The Guardian about the arrest of cleaners at SOAS as part of a crackdown on immigration.  The case raises fundamental questions about the role and values of Universities and their culpability in the politics of immigration. 
  • Goldsmiths Sociology PhD student Michael E. Leary has published an article entitled  'The Production of Space through a Shrine and Vendetta in Manchester: Lefebvre's Spatial Triad and the Regeneration of a Place Renamed Castlefield' in Planning Theory & Practice, Volume 10, Issue June 2009 , 189-212.

  • Dr Marsha Rosengarten and Prof Mike Michael publish two new articles on Anti HIV treatment:

    Rosengarten, M.  and Michael, M. (2009).The performative function of expectations in translating treatment to prevention: the case of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. Social Science & Medicine, 69,1049-1055.

    Rosengarten, M.  and Michael, M. (2009). Rethinking the bioethical
    enactment of drugged bodies: On the paradoxes of using anti-HIV drug therapy as a technology for prevention. Science as Culture, 18, 183–99

  • Professor Mike Michael has published three new articles:

    Michael, M. (2009). ‘The-Cellphone-In-The-Countryside’: On Some Ironic Spatialities Of Technonature. In Damian White And Chris Wilbert (eds). Technonatures (pp. 85-104). Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press.

    Michael, M. (2009). Publics Performing Publics: Of PiGs, PiPs and Politics. Public Understanding of Science, 18, 617-631.

    M. Michael and W. Gaver (2009). Home beyond home: Dwelling with threshold devices. Space and Culture, 12, 359-370.

  • Brett St Louis and Les Back have contributed to a special issue of Cultural Studies dedicated to the work of Stuart Hall on 'race'.   Brett St Louis' article is entitled On ‘the necessity and  the “Impossibility” of Identities’: The politics and ethics of ‘new ethnicities.’  Les Back's contribution is a co-authored dialogue with Stuart Hall called 'At Home and Not At Home' in which Stuart Hall relfects on the themes of the special issue and his work on racism, empire and belonging.   

  • Nirmal Puwar and Les Back with Azzedine Haddour have edited a special issue of The Sociological Review  entitled Post-colonial Bourdieu.  The issue explores the relationship between Pierre Bourdieu's sociological writing and experience of field work in colonial Algeria.  The articles include re-readings of Bourdieu's work and an examination of his use of a range of methods including photography to capture the devastating realities of colonialism.  The issue includes a number of articles from Goldsmiths staff including Nirmal Puwar, Les Back, AbdouMaliq Simone and Ben Gidley

  • Alberto Toscano has edited a collection with Lorenzo Chiesa entited The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics with re.press.

    This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’.

  • ALBERTO TOSCANO's new book FANATICISM:  On the Uses of an Idea will be published 7th June 2010

    Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, City of Quartz decribes the book as:“A tour de force in every sense – Toscano wipes the smug smiles off the self-righteous faces of the New Philosophers.”  On Thursday 3 June at 1pm FANATICISM will be launched at the RSA, London.  The event will include a special introduction to the book and a discussion of its core ideas.



  • The Archi-texture of Parliament: Flaneur as Method in Westminster

    An article by Nirmal Puwar in The Journal of Legislative Studies (Volume 16, Issue 3, 2010; pp 298-312)

    How does one approach a study of the archi-textures of parliamentary spaces? How do the walls, floors, doors, grilles, sculptures, murals and glass sensate legitimate parliamentary rites, rituals and performances? How do they also provide researchers with opportunities for telling altered iterations of how parliamentary space has both contained and been taken apart? If the buildings and its textures are embedded with iconography and haptic architectures which provide containers of democracy, how can we, as researchers working through different occupations of architectures, evacuate a different imagination of political space?

  • Vikki Bell has an article and interview published in Theory, Culture and Society Journal: ‘On Fernando’s Photograph: On the Bio-Politics of Aparición in Contemporary Argentina’ Theory, Culture & Society 2010 Vol 27: 4 pp69-89 AND Interview: ‘New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality: An Interview with Judith Butler’ Theory, Culture & Society (2010) Theory, Culture & Society, 27:1 pp130-152

  • Professor Caroline Knowles' new book entitled Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys (University of Chicago Press) is a collaboration with visual sociologist Douglas Harper.  The book explores the lives and landscapes of the British expatriates who chose to to remain in Hong Kong after the transition of British control to China.  This extraodinary and aesthetically beautiful reveals the paradoxes and conflicts of a city still haunted by the lingering affects of empire.  

    "Knowles and Harper have created an extraordinary rich account of how and where immigrant experiences intersect with Hong Kong social structure." Jon Wagner, University of California

  • Dr Marsha Rosengarten has published a new booke entitled HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic between Information and Flesh. The book is published by the University of Washington Press in the Book Series In Vivo: Cultural Mediations Of Biomedical Science.

  • Les Back has published a series of new articles:

    (2009) "Beaches and Graveyards: Europe's Haunted Borders," Postcolonial Studies, Volume 12(3): 329-441

    (2009) (with John Solomos, Kalbir Shuckra and Michael Keith) ‘Islam and the New Political Landscape: Faith Communities, Political Participation and Social Change,’ Theory, Culture and Society (with Michael Keith, Azra Khan, Kalbir Shukra and John Solomos) Volume 26, 4: 1-23

    (2009) “Portrayal and Betrayal: Bourdieu, Photography and Sociological Life,”  Sociological Review, Volume 57, 3: 471-491
    also jointly edited the Special Issue - Bourdieu In Algeria with Nirmal Puwar and Azzedine Habour

    (2009) “Global Attentiveness and the Sociological Ear” Sociological Research On-line Volume 14, Issue 4, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/14/4/14.html

    (2009) (with Stuart Hall) “At Home and note at home”, Cultural Studies, Vol 23, 4: 660-688

    (2009) ‘Researching Community and its Moral Projects’, 21st Century Society, vol 4, 2: 2001-14

  • Professor AbdouMaliq Simone has published a new book City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Global Realities) Routledge, 2009

    City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process—an "anticipatory politics"—that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.

  • Kate Nash has published 'Between Citizenship and Human Rights', in Sociology Volume 43 Issue 6, December 2009

  • Alex Wilkie and Micheal have published a new article:

    Wilkie, A.  and Michael, M. (2009). Expectation and Mobilisation: Enacting Future Users. Science, Technology and Human Values, 34, 502-522. (ISSN 0162 2439)

  • Aidan Kelly's chapter 'Enterprise Culture and the Welfare State' is available on Google Books (published in 'Deciphering The Enterprise Culture', edited by Roger Burrows, published by Routledge, 1991)

  • A special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory (February 2009; volume 12, no 1) has been published, to discuss the themes addressed at the 'What is the Empirical?' conference held in June 2007 and featuring contributions by conference speakers. The issue is available at http://est.sagepub.com/current.dtl.

  • Alex Wilkie and Mike Michael are publishing an article entitled: "Expectation and Mobilisation: Enacting Future Users" in a forthcoming edition of Science Technology and Human Values. The Online First version is available from Sage Publications

  • Mike Michael publishes chapter in: - Michael, M. (2010). Sticking Plasters and Standardization. In V. Higgins and W. Larner. (eds). Calculating the Social: Standards and the Re-configuration of Governing. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

  • A new updated and revised second edition of Les Back & John Solomos' book Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader has just been published. Patricia Hill Collins, President, American Sociological Association called the book: "a remarkable synthesis of important theoretical works in the study of race and racism."

  • Dr Yasmin Gunaratnam recently published two poems in E. Earle and C. Bartholomew (2008) (eds) Death, Dying and Bereavement: An Anthology. London: Routledge. "For Phyllis" and "Blind Date" demonstrate her extraordinary talent for poetic sociology.

  • Professor AbdouMaliq Simone has published a new book City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Global Realities) Routledge, 2009

    City Life from Jakarta to Dakar focuses on the politics incumbent to this process—an "anticipatory politics"—that encompasses a wide range of practices, calculations and economies. As such, the book is not a collection of case studies on a specific theme, not a review of developmental problems, nor does it marshal the focal cities as evidence of particular urban trends. Rather, it examines how possibilities, perhaps inherent in these cities all along, are materialized through the everyday projects of residents situated in the city and the larger world in very different ways.

  • Professor Beverley Skeggs has contributed a chapter to the Runnymede Trust's publication 'Who Cares About the White Working Class' (2009). Professor Skegg's chapter 'Haunted by the Spectre of Judgement: Respectability, Value and Affect in Class Relations' explores the relationship between moral judgment and class hatred and contempt.

  • Keith Kahn Harris has written with David Hayes 'The Politics of ME ME ME' on Open Democracy - 'British Jews and Israel: A New Relationship' on Guardian Comment Is Free and 'How Diverse Should Metal Be? The Case of Jewish Metal' at 'Heavy Fundamentalisms: Music, Metal and Politics', Salzburg, 3-5 November 2008 'Arguing about Israel: Is there another way?' and 'How secure is Anglo-Jewry?' at Limmud (www.limmud.org), December 2008.

  • Kate Nash has published 'States of Human Rights' in the online journal Sociologica Issue 1/2011 on how sociologists need to understand the paradox that states are both the violators and the guarantors of human rights in terms of 'autonomy' rather than 'sovereignty'. There are responses to the argument from Daniel Levy, Giovanna Procacci, George Steinmetz, and Bryan Turner, and then a Reply to those comments.

    http://www.sociologica.mulino.it/journal/issue/index/Issue/Journal:ISSUE:13



Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK
Telephone: + 44 (0)20 7919 7171

Goldsmiths has charitable status

© 2012 Goldsmiths, University of London. Copyright, Disclaimer and Company information

Sitemap

Edit