Dan Silver, Taking Research Beyond the University

Dan Silver is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester. He spoke at our 2016 Autumn event #Visual16 about communicating academic research in new and innovative ways. In this blog post, he explores ways in which researchers can make sociology more public. Research that it produced through the university but which remains closed within…

Public sociology and the role of the researcher: engagement, communication and academic activism

A BSA Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Regional event Wednesday 29 March 2017, Queens Building, De Montfort University What is the role of the researcher outside the academy? This event invites Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers to innovate and critically reflect on three related areas of public sociology: academic activism, public engagement, and participation and…

Reflections on ‘Breaking our Silences on the Neoliberal Academy’ Workshop

Poster by Chloe Parkes On 26th October 2016, PhD students at Warwick University organised a workshop entitled 'Breaking Our Silences on the Neoliberal Academy'. In this blog post,  organisers  Elizabeth Ablett, Heather Griffiths and Kate Mahoney reflect on what PhD students everywhere can learn from the discussions. As PhD students, we often hear the refrain…

William Outhwaite, Newcastle University

1) What/Who inspired you to become a researcher in the first place? This was more or less automatic, with a heavy dose of luck, as I moved from my undergraduate degree to an MA and then PhD. For my MA I chose to go from Oxford to Sociology at Sussex, rather than doing more philosophy…

Les Back: Scholarly Life and the University in Ruins

At the 2015 Autumn Postgraduate forum event on The Making of the Sociological Researcher, Les Back gave this thought provoking keynote. He has kindly agreed to share the text in full in addition to the podcast of his talk which can be found below.   Ros Gill has argued that the neo-liberal university, with its…