Early in my career I researched smoking in areas of multiple deprivation in Scotland. At the time these were places where the social, economic and physical fabric had been severely weakened due to overlapping stressors. High crime, low income, low economic activity and widespread health problems were multiple challenges for …
🎵 In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive 🎵 Projects such as the Clock of the Long Now, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and deep time Nuclear Semiotics work with time horizons of millenia. These are about changing our time perspective in response to …
This post is about crime script analysis as a method of bridging micro- and meta- analysis of criminal activity. It lays out what crime script is and how it can be used to understand the relationship between the material criminal context and the patterning of criminal action. The origins and …
Some further thoughts on the long term future of illicit drug markets. 10-15 years ago most people buying drugs would do it from a known contact, arranged by telephone, handing over cash in person. Now a deal typically is arranged by social media, sometimes through the open web or darknet, …
The internet has been turned into a disclosing machine. Anonymous communication is rare and difficult to achieve. Digital worlds are characterised by affordances, the technological qualities that enable and promote some kinds of human action and which hinder or disable others. Some of these qualities are so fundamental we scarcely …
The future has arrived, said William Gibson. It just has not happened to you yet. Count yourself lucky. Participating in discussions on the future of policing gives me a chance to think about the role of futurology in social science. Futurology often shows up in a way that gives it …
Okay, someone writing a crime script analysis should probably not be saying this but here we go. One of the lightulb moments in teaching sociology is when you introduce Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It tells on us. In a compelling way it shows what we are like …
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash This post was inspired by reading David Buil-Gil and Patricia Saldaña-Taboada’s article cited below. It helped crystalise my thinking about what colour of sociologist I am. One of the fundamental insights of critical sociology or criminology is that what we are studying is a …
The end of European empires contributed to the rise of methodological nationalism. That is the set of infrastructures and habits of mind that treats each nation-state a single coherent container of a population. Global datasets like that held by the United Nations are typically aggregates of national ones so preserve …
There’s been much referencing to techno-social hybrids and as with anything else the term can lose its specificity as it becomes used to refer to any novel combination or arrangement of technologies. Almost any technology we encounter is a combination of other systems so if we are not to just …
