Archived news
28 January 2010: Recent publications on conceptions of punishment, cosmopolitanism and advertising/market research
Dr Eamonn Carrabine's paper 'Imagining Prison: Culture, History, Space' has been published in the Prison Service Journal (Jan, 2010). Stories of crime and punishment are central to every society as they address the universal problem of human identity and this paper explores the diverse ways in which stories of prison and punishment have been told in the literary and visual arts in order to help us understand the complex cultural landscapes of punishment.
Research on cosmopolitanism conducted by academics in the Department has featured in a number of recent issues of the British Journal of Sociology. Prof. Lydia Morris published "An emergent cosmopolitan paradigm? Asylum, welfare and human rights" on cosmopolitan paradigms in legal argument in June 2009. This has now been followed by Dr Yasemin Soysal's response ("Unpacking cosmopolitanism: an insider–outsider's reading") to Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider's "Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda" in the 2010 BJS Special Issue: "Shaping sociology over 60 years".
Finally Dr Sean Nixon's paper "Understanding Ordinary Women: Advertising, Market Research and Mass consumption in Britain, 1948-67" has been published in the Journal of Cultural Economy. The paper examines the way that market research in Britain helped produce understandings of and information about the 'mass housewife' in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper does this through a case study of the market research used and generated by the London subsidiary office of J. Walter Thompson advertising. The paper shows that US-derived techniques had a strong presence within post-war British market research and were a key point of reference for British-based practitioners. This influence was neither totalizing nor did it go unchallenged, but even as they rejected elements of 'American' approaches to the consumer, British practitioners still had to reckon with their intellectual authority and commercial force in this period. An earlier version of the article is also available as a CRESI working paper.