News

A democratic cacophony

23 October 2015: India is home to one of the most vibrant, engaged and mystifying democracies on the planet. Cambridge academics, across a wide range of disciplines, are working on the ground – with citizens, charities, NGOs, fellow scholars and politicians – to try to untangle it. The country is absolutely teeming with...

Preparing social scientists for the world of big data

18 June 2015: The UK lags behind other countries in preparing social scientists for the world of big data, says Dr Brendan Burchell, Director of a new centre set up to teach undergraduates the advanced quantitative skills they will need to work with massive datasets. Over the next few decades – the career span of current...

Mining for corruption

15 June 2015: Researchers have developed a new technique that trawls the enormous amounts of public procurement data now available across the EU to highlight unscrupulous uses of public funds: from national and regional levels to individual contracts, companies and politicians. I think we’ll start to see the potential for...

Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society

May 2015: Dr Manali Desai has published her new book, Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society , edited with Dr Cedric de Leon (Providence College) and Dr Cihan Tuğal (University of California, Berkely). Description: Do political parties merely represent divisions in society? Until now, scholars and other observers...

Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals

8 April 2015: Dr Marcus Morgan and Professor Patrick Baert have published a new book at Palgrave, Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. Description: Examining an intramural conflict that erupted within the English Faculty at Cambridge University in the early 1980s, this book develops a...

Can the revolution in Kurdish Syria succeed?

2 February 2015: We can but hope, argue sociologist Dr Jeff Miley and Gates Scholar Johanna Riha, who here summarise some of their observations following a recent field visit to Rojava in northern Syria, and give a brief overview of the political and social ideologies underpinning the Kurdish revolution. Democratic...

IMF lending undermined healthcare provision in Ebola-stricken West Africa

22 December 2014: Researchers criticise reforms advocated by IMF for chronically under-funded and insufficiently staffed health systems in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. They say these policies contributed to “lack of preparedness” of West African health systems to cope with disease and emergencies such as Ebola...

Egg freezing: An empowering option for women?

17 November 2014: Katie Hammond, a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology researching the experience of egg donation in Canada, discusses the recent decision by tech giants Facebook and Apple to offer egg freezing to female employees, and why she co-authored a recent commentary on this subject. This technology should...

Inside the Brotherhood

November 2014: Dr Hazem Kandil has published his new book, Inside the Brotherhood. Description: This is the first in-depth study of the relationship between the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its own members. Drawing on years of participant observation, extensive interviews, previously inaccessible organizational...

Tiny sperm, big stories

10 September 2014: Sperm will take centre stage at a conference in Cambridge later this week as researchers from a wide range of disciplines gather to consider the narratives that surround the male gametes necessary for human reproduction. Sperm testing was by no means easy to introduce. Medical and religious objections...