SSPEL Newsletter: Research and Scholarly Activities

Monday, April 24, 2006

I attended the British Sociological Association's annual conference in Harrogate with the support of the School. It had the theme of social orders and disorders, and one of the best-attended streams concerned crime and deviant behaviour. A number of interesting papers were given on matters related closely to some of our interests -- community disorder and regeneration for example or deviant youth activities -- and I have some copies (or notes) if required.

I also attended two meetings of special Study Groups. One (of which I am a founder member) sets out to research the student experience. This is a nicely unbounded Group, with links to the SRHE, with the intentions to involve psychologists and others interested in HE. The emphasis on student experience as a whole includes work on leisure and outside work (paid and unpaid domestic) and how that is interconnected with study. A famous leisure theorist -- Prof Ken Roberts -- proposed education/leisure links as major topic for the future and we agreed to run a day conference on some of the implications. I will inform colleagues when and where.

The other group was a revived Leisure and Recreation Study Group. The academic stimulus was the perception that lots of papers and articles in Sociology seem to focus on leisure topics but without acknowledging the long series of debates in Leisure Studies about matters like work and leisure, gender, commercialism and the like. This clearly linked with Roberts' intervention above and led to a quite ambitious proposal to reinstate leisure (in its broadest sense, to include sport and outdoor adventure) as central to sociological analyses of modernity. There seemed to be some parallels with Aaron Beacom's work on sport and development, and with the convergence we have noted in our School between sport, health, activity and community regeneration.This discussion also led to discussing the politics of the forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise (considerable sums were at stake for colleagues in larger institutions). I would be happy to pursue this with any colleagues interested in RAE submissions at our local level.

Finally, I attended a session on getting published. The focus was the specific journal Sociology but there were some general implications too which I would be pleased to share with any interested colleagues.

Dave Harris