A new article by Dr Thom Davies (Warwick) and Dr Arshad Isakjee (Birmingham) reflects upon some preliminary research in the informal refugee camp in Calais, northern France. The short piece, titled ‘Geography, Migration and Abandonment in the Calais Refugee Camp’ is published in Political Geography, Vol. 49. You can read the article here.

Dr Stella Chatzitheochari is co-author of a short article on measuring time allocation of young people in the Millennium Cohort Study Age 14 survey, with colleagues from the University of Oxford, University College London, and Ipsos MORI. The article appears in Volume 12 of the electronic International Journal of Time Use Research (eIJTUR) and can be accessed here: eijtur.org/content.php  

Professor Gurminder K Bhambra will be delivering a keynote address on ‘Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions: The Difference that Haiti Makes’ at an international conference at the University of Kassel, Germany. The conference is on 14-15 January and is titled, Beyond the Master’s Tools: Post- and Decolonial Approaches to Research Methodology and Methods in the Social Sciences. For more details, see: http://www.uni-kassel.de/veranstaltung/beyond-the-masters-tools/welcome.html

The Department of Sociology are delighted to announce that Professor Wing Chan and Professor John Ermisch have had an article pulished in Population Studies. The article entitled 'Residential proximity of parents and their adult offspring in the United Kingdom, 2009–10' can be found in Population Studies, 2015, Vol. 69, No. 3, 355–372.

Dr Simone Varriale has just published two new journal articles: 'Beyond Distinction: Theorising Cultural Evaluation as a Social Encounter' (Cultural Sociology), and 'Cultural Production and the Morality of Markets: Popular Music Critics and the Conversion of Economic Power into Symbolic Capital' (Poetics).

Dr Stella Chatzitheochari will be speaking at the forthcoming 2-day event Time Use in Britain. Stella will talk about time diary data from the Millennium Cohort Study. The event is being hosted by the Centre for Time Use Research of the University of Oxford and will take place on 9/10 November 2015 at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

The event is free but registration is required. For further information and to register please visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/time-use-in-britain-tickets-18887752777.

Dr Stella Chatzitheochari will be chairing an event on Preventing and Tackling School Bullying, hosted by Inside Government. The event is aimed at School teachers and practitioners and will take place on Thursday 10th December 2015 in Central London. Further information about the event can be found on the Inside Government website http://www.insidegovernment.co.uk/event-details/school-bullying/547/#agenda.

25th November 2015, 11:00 to 17:00

WT0.05, University of Warwick

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This workshop and symposium will explore the, mostly implicit, conceptions of the human, humanity and human nature that underpin various contemporary conceptions of social life. In the context of much-publicised post-human futures, this is an invitation to reconsider the idea that social life itself is predicated on the fact that human beings are capable of such collective existence. Humans are beings who have a continuity of consciousness so that they see themselves as themselves throughout their life; human are beings who negotiate a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory identities and recognise each other as members of the same species, and they are also beings who can create and interpret cultural artefacts. Crucially, humans are beings who can deploy a sense of self-transcendence so that they are able to look at the world from somebody else’s point of view and thus conceive new social institutions.

The main focus throughout the day will be on how questions about the human are encountered in social theory and social research and what are the various implications and challenges of taking these seriously in our work. The day of activities will be divided into two parts. During the morning, we will have a participatory workshop for PhD students and early-career researchers. The goal of the workshop is to help participants negotiate the sometimes abstruse scientific, philosophical, moral, and even theological underpinnings of asking questions about ‘the human’ in the context of their own research projects. Dr Daniel Chernilo (Loughborough University) will offer a general overview of this field of enquiry as well as reflect on its various implications. We will also invite participants to reflect on their own research projects by making a brief (10-minute) presentation of their research projects and how questions about the human have been or are expected to be encountered within them. We’d like to ask all participants to reflect in advance on conceptions of the human and how they pertain to their projects. Uncertainty here is not a problem, in fact it will be a useful contribution to discussions on the day! In the afternoon, we will have a symposium in which Dr Mark Carrigan, Professor Margaret Archer and Daniel Chernilo will engage with questions of the human as they unfold in their own work on digital sociology (Carrigan), the morphogenetic society (Archer), and philosophical sociology (Chernilo).

To register your interest, please contact D.Chernilo@lboro.ac.uk and Mark@Markcarrigan.net with a brief description (500 words or less) of your research and how questions of the human are relevant to it by October 31st, 2015. The event is free but places are limited. Travel bursaries are available for those in need of it, please ask for more details.

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Dr Stella Chatzitheochari will be speaking at a free ESRC seminar in London on Monday 9th November from 9.30am-12.00pm.

The seminar, organised by Centre for Longitudinal Studies at UCL Institute of Education, is hosted as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, in collaboration with the Anti-Bullying Alliance.

For further information and to book your ticket, visit the website now.

June 23rd, University of Warwick, 10am – 4pm

R1.15, Ramphal Building

Social ontology is integral to the study of society. It is impossible to inquire into the social world without some understanding, at least tacitly, concerning the entities which make up that world and their properties and powers. However social ontology remains an often confused and contentious matter within the social sciences.

The conference is open to all PhD students and Early Career Researchers with an interest in social ontology.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/centre-for-social-ontology-phdecr-conference-tickets-17016640229