What Makes Something Deviant?
What makes behaviour deviant, and who gets to decide? This article explores social norms, labelling, stigma, power and why definitions of deviance change across time, place and social groups.
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Tag: inequality
What Do Sociologists Mean by Social Class?
Social class is about more than income. This article explores how Marx, Weber and Bourdieu help us understand class, life chances, cultural capital, social mobility and the unequal distribution of opportunity.
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What Is Sociology Actually About?
Sociology asks us to look beyond individual choices and question the wider patterns, institutions and inequalities that shape everyday life. This introduction explores what sociology is, what the sociological imagination means, and why the subject still matters in a rapidly changing world.
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Where Do Young People Belong Anymore? Skills for Life, Capital and the Social Spaces of Growing Up
We expect young people to reach adulthood with confidence, communication skills, resilience and leadership, but rarely ask where they were supposed to develop them. Drawing on Bourdieu, research on youth participation and the idea of opportunity structures, this article explores how skills, relationships and social capital are built, recognised and unequally distributed.
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Who Gets Accused? AI Detection Bias, Academic Integrity, and the Uneven Field in Higher Education
When universities reach for AI detection tools to police academic integrity, they reach for instruments that are neither accurate nor neutral. Research shows that non-native English speakers, neurodivergent students, and those whose natural writing style resembles AI output face disproportionate false accusations. This article applies a moral panic framework to ask what the response to AI in higher education actually reveals — and who it disadvantages.
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The Hidden Curriculum of Soft Skills: Recognition, Capital, and Who Gets Left Out
Job adverts demand communication, leadership, and resilience. But who actually gets credit for them? Drawing on Bourdieu, Puwar, and Rivera, this article argues that soft skills are not recognised neutrally — they are filtered through class, race, and cultural capital. The result is a hiring system that mistakes social advantage for individual merit.
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Are Your Student Recruitment Dashboards Misleading You? Funnels, Conversion, and Inequality in HE
Student recruitment dashboards promise a single version of the truth about who will enrol. This article shows how small choices about funnels, conversion and melt can create competing “truths”, quietly shape who gets attention, and reproduce inequality in HE – and suggests practical ways to use dashboards, AI and KPIs more reflexively.
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The Debt Trap and the Class Gap: Why Student Loan Warnings Are a Form of Gatekeeping
This article uses Johanna Noble’s recent column on Plan 2 student loans to ask who is really put off university by talk of a “graduate tax”. Drawing on research on first-in-family and working-class students, it shows how fear of debt, school guidance, and weak vocational routes combine to reproduce classed access to higher education.
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Is Durkheim Still Relevant? Social Facts, Solidarity and Culture Wars
Durkheim never saw a social media pile-on, but he worried about what holds societies together and how they draw moral boundaries. This article introduces his ideas on social facts, solidarity, crime and anomie, and uses them to analyse contemporary “culture wars” over statues, values and offence – and to show where his framework now needs updating.
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Is Weber Still Relevant? Rationalisation, Bureaucracy and Algorithmic Power
Weber wrote about files and offices, not welfare portals, tickets and AI chatbots. Yet his ideas on rationalisation, bureaucracy and legal-rational authority still help make sense of why “the system” feels both neutral and overwhelming. This article introduces Weber for undergraduates and tests his relevance against contemporary forms of algorithmic power.
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