… or possibly it will make you feel very much worse. Not sure. But I think you need to know this. Discussing with research students about the many troubles of PhD life we often come back to a disagreement or misunderstanding about what a PhD is. So I want to …
‘Common Swindles of India’ (Daly, 1931) is an impressionistic criminology where the author gathers together accounts from colonial Indian police on frequent cons they encounter. It is written with genteel disdain towards the Indian population who are portrayed as variously greedy and gullible, liable to fall for cheap and obvious …
Yes, absolutely, all the time, 100%, this is what you are here for, you must be prepared to do this and you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t. Don’t pretend that you do not, and that you do not secretly think you know better than the people you …
I used to teach my students that they had to get the unit of analysis right and everything in their research design would flow from that. It is always important to avoid category errors but especially here. The example I used was if the unit of analysis was opinion. Institutions …
I often say to students ‘describe, then analyse’. Well, how do you know which one you are doing and what the difference between them is? And while we’re about it, what’s the difference between method and methodology, hmmm? There is really no fundamental difference. Description always involves a choice of …
<img> ‘Motherfuckin’ Critcal Thinking – How does that work?InsaneClownPosse.jpg'</img> A regular comment on students’ work from essays to PhD drafts is that they could improve by adopting a more critical perspective. Martin Booker explores it very effectively in his blog, Critical Turkey. He defines it as common-sense scepticism plus social …
One part of the academic skillset I have always thought made you a real academic is the ability to argue in wholly abstract terms. I have no idea how to do that and I never shall. I can talk about specific cases but debating scientific progress as characterised by Kuhnian …
Social science writing is a set of conventions or styles. These conventions can be used to create distance on the subject, the impression of an objective standpoint, or to get close in and give the reader a sense of what it is really like to be there. You can learn …
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 best software is accessible, extensible and community supported. However because reasons we tend to end up with tools that are centralised and ‘heavy’ – they do too much, much more than you will ever need, they have high lock-in and can’t be easily adapted or customised, they are opaque …
