Sociology Updates: Improving your subject expertise to help your students achieve success

Young people today are less likely to be Christian than previous generations. Why this is so has been debated widely: are there changes in psychology? Society? Technology? Media?

Abby Day will discuss how these changes are generational and indicate an ethical shift towards caring for others and the planet, stressing values of equalities, diversities, sharing and sustainability

Drawing on qualitative longitudinal multimodal data from 38 families with children in the UK, Katherine will discuss the extra everyday labour which individuals experience in going about their daily lives during COVID-19.

She will highlight the gendered and classed differences in experiences of COVID labour, which help to explain the underlying reasons behind the disparities in COVID and mental health outcomes across different gender and socioeconomic groups.

The research contributes to a greater understanding of both everyday life ‘under lockdown’ for families with children, and the processes which contribute to unequal experiences of the pandemic. 

Rima will discuss sociological approaches to teaching about race, racism and social justice from decolonial and critical race perspectives. She will provide case studies and examples from her own teaching and scholarship, specifically focusing on how to engage critically with data and methods in the sociological classroom and resources that can support this.

She will also discuss findings from her own mixed methods scholarship on race, class and exclusion amongst socially mobile ethnic minority groups.

Lambros will discuss the policing and criminalisation of UK drill music as a case study of police racism.

His talk will demonstrate the various ways in which drill rappers are targeted by the police, prosecutors and judges in illegitimate and unjust ways, while also exploring some sociological concepts - like racial neoliberalism - that help us make sense of state-sanctioned racial(ised) criminalisation.

The ways we talk, think and know about gender are ever changing, but the increased awareness of trans and non-binary genders in recent years has brought new aspects of gender to the fore.

In this talk Francis will introduce some of this shifting terrain and its associated language and offer some illustrative examples.