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.

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).

Disabled Children Conference 2015: Promoting and Empowering the Rights of Disabled Children and Young People - Children in Wales takes place on 11 November 2015 in Cardiff. Dr Stella Chatzitheochari will be speaking about the Trajectories and Transitions of Disabled Children and Young People, an 18 month ESRC-funded research study which looked into the outcomes for disabled children and young people in England. For further information about the conference and to book a place, please visit:

http://www.childreninwales.org.uk/item/disabled-children-conference-2015-promoting-empowering-rights-disabled-children-young-people/.

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.

The Festival of the Imagination will take place on campus on 16-17 October 2015 and will be the centrepiece of the University's 50^th anniversary celebrations, showcasing the work we do at Warwick through a diverse programme of events all focused around the central theme 'Imagining the Future'.

As part of this festival, there will be lots of talks and acitivities for staff and students to get involved in.

Highlighted below are some events which might be of particular interest to our Sociology community:

• ‘Is Diversity Academic in UK Universities?’ - Prof. Gurminder Bhambra is on the panel exploring this issue on Saturday 17 October at 2.15pm. This event free, but you should book tickets: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/warwick50/events/imagination/talks/diversity/
• ‘Solving Inequality’ - Inequality is one of our most urgent social problems. Poverty in Britain is at a post-war high and set to increase yet further. What prevents us from plugging the gap between rich and poor, and how can we redress the balance? This talk will take place on Saturday 17 October at 12pm. Students can attend for the discounted price of £5. More information and booking can be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/warwick50/events/imagination/talks/inequality/

We hope that you'll join us there!

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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Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry

ERC PROJECT LAUNCH, WITH WINE AND NIBBLES

4 November 2015, 5pm-7pm

Zeeman Building (Mathematics) Room MS.04