Wednesday, November 01, 2006
BSA Annual Conference, York, March 2005
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
BSA Annual Conference, York University, March 2005
I attended this conference with financial assistance from the Staff Development Fund, and gave a paper, with Dr H Arksey of York University, called 'The Neutralisation of Risk in Higher Education'. The main themes of the Conference were life course approaches, social fragmentation, diversity and risk, although as is common with BSA Conferences a wide variety of topics was addressed in the various 'open streams'. All the papers will be available from the BSA website, and a copy of ours can also be found on my personal website here This is the paper that I tried out with colleagues at a meeting of our Research Seminar, and I am grateful for the feedback there. The audience at York was small but we gained some helpful links.
One link in particular led us to a main stream of papers produced by the ESRC-funded project on risk (see their website here). I am still a bit unsure about the emphasis on risk as a topic in social investigation and the papers reinforced my doubts -- maybe there are indeed new kinds of risk in 'second modernity', and new responses to it, but that particular line is a bit played out. Almost no-one (except for Hilary and me) seemed interested in the pleasures of risky leisure, although I think that could add a major new direction to the work.
Another major theme was provided by the new ESRC-funded work on popular culture and the issue of 'taste' . A team based at the OU is undertaking some major research to duplicate the French study by Bourdieu (see their website here). They presented their initial findings on music, reading and TV, but there is substantial work to come on tastes and choices in sport and 'embodiment' (physical activity).
I attended several other presentations on leisure -related activities, including one on the heritage industry. I also found the plenaries on life-course methods interesting, and it made me think of revisiting some of the early work on the 'life-cycle' and its impact on sport and leisure. Basically, life course approaches want to retain the notion that events mean different things to people at different stages of their lives, but break away from biological stages alone and include significant social events as formative -- such as wars, political reforms and social changes.
BSA Annual Conference, York University, March 2005
I attended this conference with financial assistance from the Staff Development Fund, and gave a paper, with Dr H Arksey of York University, called 'The Neutralisation of Risk in Higher Education'. The main themes of the Conference were life course approaches, social fragmentation, diversity and risk, although as is common with BSA Conferences a wide variety of topics was addressed in the various 'open streams'. All the papers will be available from the BSA website, and a copy of ours can also be found on my personal website here This is the paper that I tried out with colleagues at a meeting of our Research Seminar, and I am grateful for the feedback there. The audience at York was small but we gained some helpful links.
One link in particular led us to a main stream of papers produced by the ESRC-funded project on risk (see their website here). I am still a bit unsure about the emphasis on risk as a topic in social investigation and the papers reinforced my doubts -- maybe there are indeed new kinds of risk in 'second modernity', and new responses to it, but that particular line is a bit played out. Almost no-one (except for Hilary and me) seemed interested in the pleasures of risky leisure, although I think that could add a major new direction to the work.
Another major theme was provided by the new ESRC-funded work on popular culture and the issue of 'taste' . A team based at the OU is undertaking some major research to duplicate the French study by Bourdieu (see their website here). They presented their initial findings on music, reading and TV, but there is substantial work to come on tastes and choices in sport and 'embodiment' (physical activity).
I attended several other presentations on leisure -related activities, including one on the heritage industry. I also found the plenaries on life-course methods interesting, and it made me think of revisiting some of the early work on the 'life-cycle' and its impact on sport and leisure. Basically, life course approaches want to retain the notion that events mean different things to people at different stages of their lives, but break away from biological stages alone and include significant social events as formative -- such as wars, political reforms and social changes.
# posted by A Sociologist : 1:13 PM
