For this episode I spoke to Michael Rosino about his book Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and the Media which comes from a detailed analysis of the discourse on drug policy and race in newspapers and the comment sections of their online versions. Michael tells me about the discourses he identified which often deny racism and racial oppressio…

For this episode I spoke to Peter Bloom who is a Professor of Management at the University of Essex, Owain Smolović Jones who is Director of the Open University's Research into Employment, Empowerment and Futures academic centre of excellence and Jamie Woodcock who is Senior Lecturer at the Open University. We talk about their new book Guerilla Dem…

This episode is a really great chat I had with Ben Jacobsen and David Beer both of The University of York. We talk about their new book Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past which is an exploration of the ways in which social media engages with memory and how this becomes significant…

In this episode I spoke to Scott Timcke who is a comparative historical sociologist, with an interest in race, class, and technology in modernity. He is a research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and a fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies. The basis of our discussion is Scott's book …

There has been a huge gap since the last episode as life, work and then Covid got in the way. I will be putting out a few episodes over the next few weeks which have all been recorded recently with the exception of this first interview with Mark Wong. This was recorded in 2019 and was intended to be the first of a series which I didn't manage to do…

In this episode I am talking to Elinor Carmi who is a Postdoc Research Associate in Digital Culture & Society at the University of Liverpool. She tells me about how her experience of working in radio and music production and as a feminist has influenced her current analysis of digital media work. In particular we discuss her comparison and analysis…

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Susan Halford who is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol and the President of the British Sociological Association. Amongst other things she explains the emergence "semantic web" to me and we discuss why this is of interest to sociologists and what sociology my have to offe…

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Huw Davies who is a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Huw tells me about his research into young peoples' use of technology (and particularly the internet). His research has shown that there are significant social class differences between how yo…

On the latest Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Dr Jess Drakett who is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Jess shares some fun and fascinating insights from her PhD research into representations of gender in meme culture and sexism in the tech industry. She conducted qualitative, discourse analysis of probably the …

For this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Nick Couldry who is Professor of Media, Communication and Social Theory at the London School of Economics He suggests that digital platforms are appropriating "human life without limit" as all aspects of our life become transformed into data. Nick and his co-author Ulises A. Mejias descri…

In this episode I am speaking to Frank Pasquale who is Professor of Law at the University of Maryland. We talk about his work which has addressed the impact of big data and algorithmic processing on reputation, search and finance. We discussed how the data we generate an hour every day lives has enabled a drive to assess, rank and judge ourselves a…

For this episode I spoke with Tom Brock who is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University.He tells me about his research into e-sports and video games and how the changes in the political economy of video games leads to a more rational approach to games. Is this damaging to the experience of play if it becomes instrumental…

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I am talking to Kylie Jarrett who is a lecturer in Department of Media Studies at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. She writes and researches on internet cultures and has written on the “culture of search” inspired by Google. But in this episode we are mainly talking about her feminist ana…

In what is likely the most fun episode I spoke to Penny Andrews. This started out as a chat about Penny’s research into current research information systems, institutional repositories and academic social networking services such as academia.edu. Penny gives some fascinating insights from her research into how people use these systems and the polit…

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke with Mark Carrigan. Because it has taken me ages to upload this podcast my introduction to Mark on the podcast is a bit out of date now. But Mark is the Digital Engagement Fellow at The Sociological Review and a researcher in the Culture Politics and Global Justice cluster in the Faculty of E…

For episode 13 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I had a chat with Karen Gregory who is a digital sociologist at the University of Edinburgh. She tells me about her work on the exploitation enabled by the rise of digital labour. She tells me about the importance of challenging the individualised and empowering picture of digital technologies and pla…

For this episode I spoke with Murray Goulden of the Horizon centre at the University of Nottingham and he told me about the projects he is working which, amongst other things, use digital traces as a memory aid as part of ethnographic research. To do this him and his colleagues have designed methods and technologies to extract data from people’s di…

This episode was turning up in a lot of podcast apps in a shorter version so I have uploaded it again as a separate episode which will hopefully fix this. So if you have the first version as a 13 minute audio delete that one and download this (should be 39 minutes).For this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Harry Dyer about his wo…

For this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Harry Dyer about his work on online social platforms and identity. Harry tells me about his thoughts on the development and design of different platforms and how they make different actions and connections possible and restrict others. Harry told me about what he has found from his resear…

In this episode of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Mariya Stoilova who is working on a project called Global Kids Online. Mariya is based at the London School of Economics but the project is an international one which looks at the experiences, opportunities, risks and rights and how these relate to inequalities.The project developed out of…

In this episode I spoke to Rachel Thomson who is Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies at the University of Sussex. Rachel tells me about the “Everyday Childhoods” project (which is part of the long-running “Mass Observation Project”). This is a project which both archives young peoples’ lives and studies their use of digital media and devices. …

The Digital Sociology Podast is having a break for a couple of weeks but I'll be back soon with more interviews with researchers of the digital.

For episode 8 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I had a chat with Warren Pearce who is the Faculty Fellow (iHuman) at the University of Sheffield. He is working on the “Making Climate Social” project which is investigating how climate change debate happens across the web. Warren tells me about some of the innovative digital methods he is using to un…

In episode 7 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to Justine Gangneux about her work on how social media users engage in the practice of “checking” and “Facebook stalking”. The empirical research she has conducted shows the importance of humour and of taking “guilty pleasure” in monitoring what others are doing. Justine told me about how people…

For episode 6 of the Digital Sociology Podcast I spoke to the world renowned sociologist Deborah Lupton. Deborah has been a leading figure in the sociology of health, public health, the body and risk as well as many other areas. More recently she has been a pioneer of digital sociology. Here we talk a bit about her biography and how she came to be …