'The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war...' George Orwell, 1984. The Board of Peace created to govern Gaza...

Digital ID + tracking immigrant volunteering for ILR gets more than half way to a Chinese-style social credit society. Is this a path we really want to go down?

Is there a reason I ask that the Times are using a picture of asylum seekers in a boat to describe rules for migrants who came on legal routes such as skilled worker visas for doctors?

On the morning of Keir Starmer's conference speech here's a new post on an odd psychopathology in British politics - our main parties don't like the people who vote for them - the dreaded Professional Managerial Class. And so they are acting out like a divorced dad seeking cooler voters. 1/n

A meme for the modern university...

When I was a teenager there was a bus direct from my hometown in Germany to London - we had a British army base, and this direct bus connection was one of the benefits of that. One summer I went on that bus to go volunteer in an old people's home in Southend-on-Sea. I had just turned 18 and was... 🧵

Would raw milk devastate US public health - or just allow artisan cheesemakers to create a more interesting product? www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/09/publ...

If #Railway200 has sparked or rekindled your interest in #RailwayHistory, and you fancy study at Masters or PhD level - then come & study with Dr Mike Esbester at the University of Portsmouth! An expert in railway, transport & mobility history: www.port.ac.uk/about-us/str...

Today's post delves a bit into the history of #sociology, memories of Erving #Goffman, and his use of #metaphor as method makingsciencepublic.com/2025/09/26/e...

UK sociologist of health? Next call for @fshi.bsky.social awards closes 30th october www.shifoundation.org.uk/schemes/

So Northern cities get their rail investment kicked further down the road while the SE continues to steam ahead (metaphorically, of course)...?

Every time economists discover occupations exist, a sociologist dies

Are we vaccinating under 2s more than a generation (30 years) ago? We used fewer vaccines, protecting against 8 infectious diseases. These complex vaccines, containing over 3000 antigens, were good, but there was room for improvement. 1/8

My quote of the day James Madison Federalist 51

The hullabaloo over Covid-19 vaccine recommendations in the US raises some interesting questions about other areas where public health elites have been outraged about shifts towards policies that many of us in Europe would take for granted. www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/09/publ...

Good to recall that Elon Musk remains a fellow @royalsociety.org - so pleased they took no action when he was busier undermining science than threatening other countries’ governments with violence

Treating syllabi as legal contracts harms student learning. To be a good prof, you have to be able to deviate from syllabus. Students may be especially interested in a topic & want more time on it, or struggling & need more time on it. A new, course-relevant discovery or event may break. Etc.

Congratulations to the winner of this year’s Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize, Elizabeth Chiarello, for her book, ‘Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis’ es.britsoc.co.uk/announcing-t...

Well done Lib Dems. Reform's 5 (now 4) MPs but clocked up 353,660 mentions, which is 70,732 mentions per MP, highest of any party with thier 14.3% vote share in 2024 Lib Dems returned 72 MPs with 12.2% of the vote in 2024. They received 46,468 mentions; their coverage works out at only 645 per MP

To Northumbria University for #BSAMedSoc Not many of the old guard left!

When the malaria vaccine first rolled out in Uganda’s West Nile region, hesitation was high initially. Parents had questions, rumours were swirling and official messaging didn’t always reach remote communities. But one group kept showing up: community health workers.

'Biomedical and public health élites are not a fourth branch of government under the US Constitution. It is time that some of them remembered that.' www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/08/cdc-...

From the observer today, great cartoon from Rob Murray.

It’s time to bring back Stanley Cohen’s ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’ for contemporary journalists to see how their words amplify social problems.

Dynamics of endemic virus re-emergence in children in the USA following the COVID-19 pandemic (2022–23): a prospective, multicentre, longitudinal, immunoepidemiological surveillance study Yes the infection pause or immune gap is measurable. www.thelancet.com/jo... 1/10

Is there a serious problem at CDC - or just a refusal to accept the relationship between expertise and democracy? www.socialsciencespace.com/2025/08/cdc-...

My Oxford Year is wrong to normalise staff-student romances www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/my-o...

🔎 New research identifies 19th-century welfare cuts as a major cause of rise in early-childhood mortality. The findings - from researchers incl. @camhistory.bsky.social's Prof Simon Szreter - reveal a politically-induced cause of the irregular drop in survival rates during this period. Read more⬇️

Why is Turner and Pidgeon, Man-Made Disasters, out of print and so hard to obtain. Even Abe Books don't have copies. Lucky enough to have a xerox from Pidgeon but somebody must own the rights and be missing a trick.

Funny they don't seem so bothered by Jenrick's three homes (including a grade 1 listed manor) plus his forth home in his constituency rented at taxpayer expense. Wonder why.

Just back from 10 days in Chicago. Downtown felt as safe as my visit to Warsaw in July. Much more so than when I used to visit for work in the 1980s.

it's unfortunately extremely UK gov behaviour to get taken in by a charlatan in the belief that somehow this will contribute to growth even in the best case scenario, how will using the ofuscated plagiarism machine go beyond diminishing returns? no-one ever explains that

A Modest Proposal. The OfS must spearhead a dilution of the UK’s lavish student experience www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/ofs-...

Amongst all the fun of this it’s, once again, worth pointing out that I couldn’t convince a single university in the UK of the value of this sort of public history work or the benefits of a REF impact case study built around computer games and Lucasfilm. Worth reflecting on for academia I think. 🗃️

Opinion: If the UK has decided it can no longer afford the sub-Oxbridge university model, expectations need to be systematically lowered, says Robert Dingwall #academicsky #edusky

The GDPR is a new headache for social scientists www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/gdpr...

If Trump gives Putin any more extensions, he'll be able to open a South London hair salon

Very few people seem to understand university finances and, distressingly, this includes many academics and most policymakers. This is an attempt to condense the key points you need to know. open.substack.com/pub/profseri...

AI will never locate a new archive. It will never uncover a new source. It will never find a small, privately held collection of papers that can upend what we think we know about the past. It can never work with undigitized sources. It can never do real oral history or ethnography.

Full article: Can Systemic Corruption be Prevented by Legal Means? The Market for Pharmaceuticals in Southern Ethiopia www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Obligatory XKCD for this thread (date: 2010) xkcd.com/773/

On #YorkshireDay, enjoy this lovely railway poster of the Yorkshire Dales by Ladybird artist Ronald Lampitt

✍️ The big Yorkshire Day debate: God’s own county or country? Yorkshire Day isn’t just about a county – it’s a celebration of a historic region with the identity, power, and ambition of a nation By Colin Speakman #HappyYorkshireDay

Happy Yorkshire Day everyone!

Hurd was right. ID cards have always been proposed as a magic bullet for the moral panic of the day. In the 1940s it was bigamy (a fear of breakdown of traditional family structures) In the 1980s it was football hooliganism In the 1990s (and now) benefit fraud and illegal immigration

I am the largest language model anyone could ever need I’m trained on hefty datasets that no one sane would ever read I’ll answer any question with great eloquence and attitude As long as you indulge me with a little factual latitude stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/t...

*So* much research starts with difference-based questions and researchers' categories/assumptions - helping to feed or legitimise communication myths and stereotypes. But the evidence about what people say/do in actual non-lab non-post-hoc accounts of interaction shows something else entirely #EMCA

Our latest paper challenges a powerful myth: that investing in performance-sport straightforwardly benefits health. We explore how this belief persists, why it's misleading, and how it can influence harmful personal and policy decisions. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....