Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

Today’s issue of BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed was discussing slum-dwelling and poverty.  Interviewing Mike Davies and Patrick Wakely, Laurie Taylor examines the growth of slums and some of the issues around living conditions such as access to clean water.

There is also some discussion of the power struggles around slums that are tied up with issues such as water supplies where the authorities are reluctant to provide any services that might legitimate the existence of the slum-dwellers, and residents are often exploited through the illegitimate sale of land or the sale of water.  There is also a brief discussion of places where slum-dwellers have started to organise themselves in order to attain some rights.

A little while ago I visited the National Pioneer Women’s Hall of Fame in Alice Springs, Australia. Possibly not very handy for your next college or school outing but a fascinating visit all the same! However there is a good website which has lots of information for those unable to visit the museum, including pictures and brief biographies of various pioneer women. The intention seems to be to expand the site over time and to include more educational resources. Go to www.pioneerwomen.com.au to have a look.
The museum has displays about women’s lives in Australia over the past 200 years, looking at the roles women played in the early white ’settlement’ of Australia and also in their pioneering roles in science and technology and other areas. The exhibitions also look at the ways in which individual women have pioneered the breakdown of male dominance in a wide range of fields.

Essentially the exhibitions cover women’s lives from the very ordinary to the extra-ordinary and give an insight into what life has been like in the past and tells some of the often forgotten stories about women’s roles in creating modern society.

My only criticism of the exhibitions is that they centre heavily on the contributions and lives of white European women. There does seem to be some attempt to redress this and the oral rather than written tradition of Aboriginal culture, as well as Australian society’s tendency to ignore and even suppress its Aboriginal heritage until recently, is no doubt partly to blame. However, in attempting to redress the power imbalance between men and women in Australia’s past the Hall of Fame seems to gloss over the role that white European women must have played in the oppression of less powerful groups such as Aborigines and in particular Aboriginal women.

Overall though this is a website (or a venue!) which is worth a visit for the ways in which it highlights women’s lives in what is a predominantly male history.

You may remember that in December I reviewed a talk given by Les Back at a conference I went to. Well last Thursday (22nd March 2007) I went to Goldsmith’s College in London to interview Les Back about some of the themes he raised in that talk. Les Back is best known for his work on ethnicity, racism and ethnic identities in the UK, but he was talking to me about his new book The Art of Listening which will be published this July and about the role of sociology in today’s rapidly changing society.

The interview covers issues around the media, politics, social change and challenges to sociology and can be listened to by clicking on the buttons below.

Introduction

Les talks about his new book, The Art of Listening

Les talks about how sociology can relate to our moral system

Big brother

The art of listening

The role of theory, the role of history, and individuals and structures

Dark times

To read an extract from the book just follow this link: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-11-15-back-en.html

Here is an image of the cover of The Art of Listening - look closely at the photo! If you want to pre-order a copy of Les’ new book you can of course do so - just click on the link below:

The Art of Listening

This article highlights the ongoing, but often hidden issue of prostitution, sex slavery and human trafficking in the UK:

BBC NEWS | England | Sex slavery widespread in England

Women in the sex trade are often forced into it - either by socio-economic circumstances or by boyfriends or other males with power over them (eg traffickers). As well as the bare facts about women being forced into the sex industry against their wills, articles like this also raise wider issues about inequalities of power between men and women in wider society - although women are increasingly able to be independent of men both socially and economically, inequalities remain and these are seen at their most extreme in areas of the economy such as the sex trade.

Human trafficking associated with the sex trade can also be related to World Sociology and issues of power relations between the “developed” and “developing” world. Many of the foreign women involved in the sex trade in Britain are here because they were lured here with promises of ordinary jobs - waitressing, cleaning, kitchen work - where they would earn more than they could earn in their home countries and which would allow them to send money home to their families. International wealth inequalities can of course be linked to issues around international debt.
The issues and debates around the sex industry are explored in greater depth by an exhibition currently on show at The Women’s Library in London, they are also running workshops for groups of A-level Sociology students.

I stumbled across the Worldmapper project by accident and my first thoughts were “Wow! Brilliant for World Sociology”. Actually I suspect it will be useful for a wide range of things throughout sociology including poverty, gender and religion.

The key idea is to represent statistics on a range of topics in the form of a map, so that countries and regions change size according to the statistics - so for example for statistics of people living on less that $1 a day the US and Western Europe are tiny but Africa is relatively large. It is a very powerful visual way to display international comparisons and brings the statistics to life, making them easier to understand at a glance.

As well as viewing the maps online you can also download them as PDFs as well as the graphs and data that have been used to create them, meaning that as well as having a powerful overview of the statistics you can also look more in depth at different countries.

The project is ongoing so new maps will be added over time.
Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before