Irish Society

In this episode Conor and John are joined by Tom Boland of the Economic Sociology Study Group of the Sociological Association of Ireland. Tom gives us the lowdown on platform capitalism - the proliferating form of business which has Google, Linkdin, Amazon, Uber and more as major examples. He explains the effect it has on people and how they relate to themselves.

SAI Members are welcome to join our Study Groups, which provide an avenue for diving deeply into a specific area of sociology. If you are interested in joining the Economic Sociology Study Group email us at [email protected], and we will put you in touch with the convenors.

The path from PhD to career is generally not a simple one. It is also a journey that we often ignore as we fight to get to the finish. In this episode Dr. Lucy Michael expands our thinking on the opportunities that exist after finishing a PhD. An academic post may be calling to you, but these may not be all they are cracked up to be, and this dream can put blinkers on, distracting from a range of other possibilities, that are just waiting to be seized.

Lucy Michael runs 'Lucy Michael, Research, Training and Consultancy', with more details at: http://lucymichael.ie. She is an expert on Integration, Diversity and Equality, and is a member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.

Introductory and closing music is Cali by Wataboi, from Pixabay, free music archive

Our second episode is an interview with Dr. Matt Bowden of Technological University Dublin. Matt is a sociologist and criminologist, and a very good friend and supporter of the SAI. We were talking to him about his book Crime, Disorder and Symbolic Violence : Governing the Urban Periphery, which is the first of a type of episode that we plan on doing much more of, interviewing authors on sociology books that have analysed in long-form an aspect of Irish Society. Anyone who is interested in crime, urban development, youth and social class should get a lot from this episode.

As usual there is a reading list available to SAI members in the Members Section of our website, sociology.ie.

For anyone looking for more information about the Sociological Association of Ireland, or looking to join, please find more details on: http://www.sociology.ie

In this episode, Anne Byrne of the Department of Sociology and Politics in National University of Ireland, Galway, discusses 'the gift of sociology'. 

We asked Anne, as a long-standing friend of the Sociological Association of Ireland, to give a talk based on her approach to sociological research, discussing the methods that she uses, but also the spirit in which she suggests we can approach our research. Anne, works very much in the spirit of C. Wright Mill, who defined the task of sociology as linking history and biography, of taking disconnected lives, and even fragments of lives which lie dispersed in objects, and to tell their stories through how they are linked with a wider context of history and their place in society, which can recover their meaning and give sense to them, and give society in general a sense of itself, where it is going, and how individual lives and destinies are shaped.

For related readings, visit the Members Section of Sociology.ie.

Intro and concluding music is 'Algorithms' by Chad Crouch, taken from the Free Music Archive