50 years, 50 ideas
Top 20 from our blog
Well, we’ve really enjoyed looking back over 50 years of Sociology at the University of Manchester on our blog this year, and we hope you have too. We’ve collected together a Top 20 list of our most popular posts, pages and videos which we’ve been counting down in December. Here […]
49. Understanding ‘the sacred’ and the secular in society
It’s the time of year in Britain to traditionally start talking about how Christmas has become taken over by capitalism and lost its spirituality, but it’s worth thinking about what we mean by spirituality. In Sociology, debates about ‘the sacred’ are often framed in terms of a binary opposition between […]
47. Family practices and David Morgan
Professor David Morgan, in honour of whom the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives has been named, was one of the original staff members of the Sociology department at the University of Manchester in 1964. David is now Professor Emeritus in Sociology and continues to be actively involved in […]
46. Purifying ‘the social’
There has been a longstanding tendency in sociology either to think of society as a certain kind of ‘thing’ or to think of ‘the social’ as a domain made up of uniquely ‘social’ stuff. This traces back to the origins of the discipline and its attempts to define itself vis-à -vis […]
45. Kinship
For many years, sociologists were more interested in studying households, marriage and ‘the family’ than kinship. Despite some important ‘community’ studies that looked at informal and kinship ties in the 1950s,1960s and early 1970s, for the most part ‘kinship’ was seen as the domain of anthropologists documenting kinship systems. However, […]
43. Carol Smart and researching personal life
The Sociology of Personal Life deals with a cluster of loosely related and overlapping themes such as, family, kinship, friendship, sexualities, acquaintanceship, generations and consumption. It develops earlier sociological research on ‘the family’, which tended to focus on traditional, and narrow, ideas of who counts as ‘family. And it adds […]