News

Dr Audrey Alejandro, Assistant Professor of Qualitative Text Analysis in the Department of Methodology, has been selected for an online exhibit of 50 scholars who have contributed to theoretical debates in International Relations. The exhibit is curated by the students of University Madrid Complutense.

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LSE Fellow Dr Daniele Fanelli was a keynote speaker at the ENRIO 2021 Congress on Research Integrity Practice.

Daniele opened the session talking about What new challenges lie ahead for research integrity officers?, and took the opportunity to illustrate how science may be challenged by some downsides of new ICTs and new online cultures.

ENRIO 2021 conference, FI, Online, 2021, keynote: What challenges lie ahead for research integrity officers? video recording and slides

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LSE Fellow in Qualitative Research Methodology Dr Edward Ademolu has been featured in this year's Black History Month Staff showcase.

Edward's showcase profile offers a chance to learn more about his reflections on Black History Month and the theme Black 365. Edward comments that "The theme positively denotes a Blackness with an indefinite leave to remain, without cause to prove a meritorious claim— a rightful permanence of British settlement beyond October’s 31 days. Better yet, it suggests a certain normalcy in/of Blackness which is almost Godly in its airy omnipresence spanning across the seasons of time.".

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Assistant Professor Dr Audrey Alejandro's new article Do international relations scholars not care about Central and Eastern Europe or do they just take the region for granted? A conclusion to the special issue interrogates the representation of Central and Eastern Europe’s (CEE) in International Relations (IR), its relative absence in the worlding IR literature and assesses initiatives to provincializing IR from the region.

Audrey argues that CEE has been relatively neglected in the ‘worlding IR’ literature 1) due to local factors, 2) because it might have been turned into an ‘unimportant other’, 3) and because the history of the region challenges the macro-categories – ‘West/non-West’, ‘North/South’, ‘core/periphery’ – that structure this conversation. I show how the special issue offers promising endeavors to provincialize IR that are transferable to other contexts, for instance small states. Doing so, I use CEE as a case study to build a bridge between the special issue and the different debates it contributes to – making IR a less Eurocentric/parochial field, decentering European IR from the IR produced in UK/Scandinavian countries, and exploring the conditions of formulating critiques that produces something other than the problems they denounce.

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LSE Fellow Dr Daniele Fanelli has been invited as a guest speaker to the online Lab Talk #5 - Replication crisis - lifting the lid on reproducibility organised by Clustermarket, a platform to bring people, equipment and data together all-in one lab management tool for scientists to get more research done.

In this 5th panel discussion they have discussed the replication crisis, its most common causes and threats it brings to the science world. While the replication crisis can be a commonly mentioned issue, the background and causes of it may not be clear to all. Originating in the early 2010s, the term replication crisis refers to the fact that findings of many types of scientific research are often difficult or even impossible to replicate due to one or multiple issues raising concerns about the credibility of the findings. Along with this, the accuracy of existing scientific findings as well the matter of following correct procedure may be questioned.

Watch the talk

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Reinventadas is the result of a 'remote participatory video' project led by LSE Fellow Dr Sonja Marzi. 

This project explores the realities of women living in Medellín, Colombia during the COVID-19 pandemic and uses an innovative and pioneering method of ‘remote participatory video’ utilising smartphones.

The film was directed by the women themselves in online workshops over 10 months during the pandemic.Throughout the project, they were trained on how to best use their smartphones and available technology to film and edit a documentary that discussed the impact of the pandemic on their everyday lives.

Watch it here

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Professor Patrick Sturgis has been working on a new report with Wellcome, Global Monitor: Mental Health, a new global survey into people's experiences and views on mental health and science. 

The Wellcome Global Monitor: Mental Health is the world’s largest survey of how people consider and cope with anxiety and depression and explores the perceived role of science to find new solutions.

Key findings

People worldwide think mental health is important. The Wellcome Global Monitor shows 92% of people worldwide believe mental health was as important or more important than physical health across all countries.

They are not sure that science can help. The Wellcome Global Monitor shows more people saw science as highly relevant to being able to help address infectious diseases (53%) than anxiety and depression (31%). 

A combination of different approaches are used by people globally to manage their mental health. 

Mental Health Science must rise to this challenge together, building on the evidence of what works to find next-generation treatments, and thoroughly investigate all possible solutions.

View and download the full report

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LSE Fellow Dr Sonja Marzi has been invited to take part at the 'Latin American Migration and Participatory Research Symposium' hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies Centro de Cultura, Arte, Trabajo y Educación (CCATE).

This virtual symposium will build upon Latin America’s longstanding tradition with participatory and action-oriented research methods. It will explore how global partnerships that bring together university- and community-based researchers can shed new light on the push and pull factors of Latin American migration to address educational inequities in sending and receiving countries. The symposium will also provide a unique context to consider how these partnerships can create new pathways to more equitable educational outcomes at home in Latin America and in host countries across the globe.

Drawing on lessons learned from Latin America, participants will engage in interactive, dialogic sessions to expand on and create new pathways to sustained institutional partnerships with community-based researchers, including high school students, and both local and global organizations. Collectively, participants will develop a joint research agenda focused on reducing inequities in educational outcomes for global Latinx communities.

Please see the agenda here and register through this registration link

LSE's next Virtual Graduate Open Events will take place between 8-19 November 2021. Advance booking is required. Event times are UK local time.

Information about entry requirements, programme structure and courses and graduate destinations can be found on the LSE programme pages

The Department of Methodology will be hosting three online events:

• Studying MSc Applied Social Data Science at LSE. Tuesday 9 November 2021, 10-11am. Book your place here
• Studying MSc Social Research Methods at LSE. 
  Wednesday 10 November 2021, 4-5pm. Book your place here
• PhD study in Methodology at LSE. Wednesday 10 November 2021, 11.30am-12.30pm. Book your place here

Designed by Assistant Professor Dr Blake Miller, Assistant Professor Milena Tsvetkova and colleagues from the Department of Statistics, the LSE Data Analytics Career Accelerator aims to accelerate careers through both its subject focus and education model. 

As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, the ability to transform this information into actionable business insights is a key capability in the ‘Age of Analytics’. Demand for data analytics skills is rocketing as a result, offering career starters and established professionals alike the opportunity to align to a high-growth path valued by organisations across industries

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When does reputation lie? Dynamic feedbacks between costly signals, social capital and social prominence is a new paper from Dr Eleanor Power and co-authors.

Performing a dramatic act of religious devotion, creating an art exhibit, or releasing a new product are all examples of public acts that signal quality and contribute to building a reputation. Signalling theory predicts that these public displays can reliably reveal quality. However, data from ethnographic work in South India suggests that more prominent individuals gain more from reputation-building religious acts than more marginalized individuals. To understand this phenomenon, they extend signalling theory to include variation in people’s social prominence or social capital, first with an analytical model and then with an agent-based model. 

The second paper titled Networks of reliable reputations and cooperation: a review Reputation has been shown to provide an informal solution to the problem of cooperation in human societies. After reviewing models that connect reputations and cooperation, they address how reputation results from information exchange embedded in a social network that changes endogenously itself. Theoretical studies highlight that network topologies have different effects on the extent of cooperation, since they can foster or hinder the flow of reputational information. Subsequently, they review models and empirical studies that intend to grasp the coevolution of reputations, cooperation and social networks. They identify open questions in the literature concerning how networks affect the accuracy of reputations, the honesty of shared information and the spread of reputational information. Certain network topologies may facilitate biased beliefs and intergroup competition or in-group identity formation that could lead to high cooperation within but conflicts between different subgroups of a network. Their review covers theoretical, experimental and field studies across various disciplines that target these questions and could explain how the dynamics of interactions and reputations help or prevent the establishment and sustainability of cooperation in small- and large-scale societies.

These articles are part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’

Keep up to date with Elly on Twitter 

The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling is the theme of the new special issue of the Royal Society Publishing co-edited by Assistant professor dr Eleanor Power.

Large-scale non-kin cooperation is a unique ingredient of human success. This type of cooperation is challenging to explain in a world of self-interested individuals. This theme issue promotes an interdisciplinary approach that allows to explore and to understand the evolution and the maintenance of reputation systems, with emphasis on gossip and honest signalling. The articles in this special issue draw attention to the complexities of the workings of reputation systems, asking: (i) What are the necessary conditions for reputation-based systems? (ii) What is the content and context of reputation systems? (iii) How can reputations promote cooperation? And (iv) What is the role of gossip in maintaining reputation systems and thus cooperation?

The effects of reputation on inequality in network cooperation games is the title of a new article from Assistant Professor Dr Milena Tsvetkova.

This study investigates how public and objective reputational information affects payoff inequality in repeated social dilemma interactions in large groups. Milena considers two aspects of inequality: excessive dispersion of final payoffs and diminished correspondence between final payoff and cooperative behaviour. She uses a simple heuristics-based agent model to demonstrate that reputational information does not always increase the dispersion of final payoffs in strategically updated networks, and actually decreases it in randomly rewired networks. More importantly, reputational information almost always improves the correspondence between final payoffs and cooperative behaviour. She analyses empirical data from nine experiments of the repeated Trust, Helping, Prisoner's Dilemma and Public Good games in networks of ten or more individuals to provide partial support for the predictions. The research suggests that reputational information not only improves cooperation but may also reduce inequality.

Keep up to date with Elly on Twitter 

Keep up to date with Milena on Twitter

Assistant Professor Dr Aliya Rao's new article titled 'Gendered Interpretations of Job Loss and Subsequent Professional Pathways' is now available open access on Gender and Society, the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society.

While we know that career interruptions shape men’s and women’s professional trajectories, we know less about how job loss may matter for this process. Drawing on interviews with unemployed, college-educated men and women in professional occupations, I show that while both men and women interpret their job loss as due to impersonal “business” decisions, women additionally attribute their job loss as arising from employers’ “personal” decisions. Men’s job loss shapes their subsequent preferred professional pathways, but never in a way that diminishes the importance of their participation in the labor force. For some women in this study, job loss becomes a moment to reflect on their professional pathways, often pulling them back from paid work. This study identifies job loss as an event that, on top of gendered workplace experiences and caregiving obligations, may curtail some women’s participation in paid work.

Keep up to date with Aliya on Twitter

Would you be able to guess how other people voted? The answer is not so simple is the new paper from our PhD candidate Noam Titelman and Visiting Professor Ben Lauderdale.

They report results from two experiments where subjects were provided with randomly selected demographic profiles of voters and were asked to assess either which party that individual was likely to have voted for in the 2017 election or whether they were likely to have voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 referendum. They find that, despite substantial overconfidence in individual responses, on average citizens’ guesses broadly reflect the actual distribution of groups supporting the parties and referendum positions.

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LSE Fellow Dr Kate Summers has organised and will be speaking at an event on Thursday, 7 October 2021.

Stick or Shift? Attitudes towards inequality, the Welfare State and social security benefits during COVID-19 paints a more detailed picture of what has happened to attitudes and why. Covering attitudes towards the welfare state, inequality and social security benefits they ask what has happened to attitudes, why this might be, and what this means for policy formation and change.

This online event is free and open to all, please register here

Keep up to date with Kate on Twitter

Assistant Professor Dr Aliya Rao will be presenting at the Stanford University's VMware Women's LeadershipInnovation Lab on Wednesday, 6 October 2021.

The VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford University generates foundational research to advance women's leadership by diagnosing barriers, developing and evaluating interventions to get beyond barriers, and disseminates research-based solutions by bridging the gap between research and practice.

Keep up to date with Aliya on Twitter

Participatory video from a distance: co-producing knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic using smartphones is the new paper from LSE Fellow Dr Sonja Marzi. 

In this paper, Sonja outlines an innovative remote participatory video (PV) methodology that makes use of participants’ smartphones. It was developed as an alternative to co-production research and can be employed when face-to-face contact is impossible or undesirable. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face research interactions have been disrupted or become impossible. Yet it is vital to reach those who are most affected by emergencies and to include their voices. The research reported here was a collaboration between women in Medellín, Colombia, and a team of filmmakers and researchers. They developed an innovative remote PV methodology using participants’ smartphones, researching how women from poorer neighbourhoods were affected by the pandemic in their everyday lives. Here, she reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of the remote PV methodology, arguing that it offers new avenues for participants to take control of the filming and editing process, and builds technical skills and capacities that have value beyond the timeframe of the project.SheI concludes that the remote PV method has great potential as a stand-alone method, moving the landscape of co-production research away from a requirement for geographical co-presence and potentially shifting power and ownership towards local co-researchers and participants.

 Keep up to date with Sonja on Twitter

Associate Professor Dr Alasdair Jones and Dr Andri Ottesen will begin work on the project Breaking the Internal Combustion Engine Reign: A Mixed-Methods Study of Attitudes Towards Using and Purchasing Electric Vehicles in Kuwait.

The research project addresses a broad gap in electric vehicles (EV) research in settings like Kuwait, namely a lack of attitudinal and customer preference research into perceptions of EVs. Research into the technical and infrastructural dimensions of EV-adoption in GCC countries is well underway, including research funded by KFAS and KISR in Kuwait. Much less well understood, however, are social attitudes towards EVs and EV-use in Kuwait, and how best to market EVs there once those attitudes are better understood. In addition, the research fills two smaller gaps in the existing research into attitudes towards EV-adoption in the Middle East. First, existing studies rely on survey data, but fail to explore the attitudes reported in surveys in more depth using qualitative data. Second, these same studies also concern prospective EV owners only, and fail to include the perspectives of early adopters.

LSE Fellow Dr Kate Summers is the author of a new blog 'Did COVID-19 transform our attitudes to welfare?' published by YouGov.

This is part of the 'Welfare at a social distance' research project summarising some of their recent work on what's happened to attitudes towards benefits during the pandemic. They found that COVID-19 prompted little change in public welfare attitudes. Attitudes did become less anti-welfare during the first wave of the pandemic, only to rebound quickly in the summer of 2020. The second COVID wave prompted another small fall in anti-welfare attitudes. However, this appears unlikely to have endured.

The best way to test this comes from YouGov’s welfare policy trackers (part of the wider YouGov trackers series). These trackers provide comparable data on public attitudes at regular intervals throughout the pandemic.

Keep up to date with Kate on Twitter

Professor Jon Jackson and co-authors Ben Bradford, Julia Yesberg, and Zoe Hobson have a new open access paper 'Artificial fairness? Trust in algorithmic police decision-making' published in the Journal of Experimental Criminology (2021).

An online experiment tested whether different decision-making methods, outcomes and scenario types affect judgements about the appropriateness and fairness of decision-making and the general acceptability of police use of this particular technology. People see a decision as less fair and less appropriate when an algorithm decides, compared to when an officer decides. Yet, perceptions of fairness and appropriateness were strong predictors of support for police use of algorithms, and being exposed to a successful use of an algorithm was linked, via trust in the decision made, to greater support for police use of algorithms.

Keep up to date with Jon on Twitter

Assistant Professor Dr Aliya Rao will be presenting a seminar as part of Trinity College Dublin's Sociology Department Research Seminar Series.

Aliya's seminar 'Crunch time: How married couples confont unemployment' will take place 15 September. 

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Professor Jon Jackson will be giving a talk 'Legitimacy: A psychology and law perspective' at the Centre for Research on Discretion and Paternalism on 9 September as part of the Centre's RDV seminar series. 

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Along with co-authors Olga Maslovskaya, Gabriele Durrant and Ian Brunton-Smith, Professor Patrick Sturgis has a new article 'The Interviewer Contribution to Variability in Response Times in Face-to-Face Interview Surveys' published in Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology. 

Survey researchers have consistently found that interviewers make a small but systematic contribution to variability in response times. However, we know little about what the characteristics of interviewers are that lead to this effect. In this study, we address this gap in understanding by linking item-level response times from wave 3 of the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) to data from an independently conducted survey of interviewers. The linked data file contains over three million records and has a complex, hierarchical structure with response latencies nested within respondents and questions, which are themselves nested within interviewers and areas. We propose the use of a cross-classified mixed-effects location scale model to allow for the decomposition of the joint effects on response times of interviewers, areas, questions, and respondents. We evaluate how interviewer demographic characteristics, personality, and attitudes to surveys and to interviewing affect the length of response latencies and present a new method for producing interviewer-specific intra-class correlations of response times. Hence, the study makes both methodological and substantive contributions to the investigation of response times.

Keep up to date with Patrick on Twitter

Associate Professor in Research Methodology Dr Flora Cornish features in the Making Contact podcast 'The Response: The Fight for Justice After the Grenfell Tower Fire'. The fire was the United Kingdom’s deadliest disaster since World War II and this podcast examines the events that led up to the Grenfell Tower fire, looking at how the community has responded through the voices of survivors, their families, and others who were impacted.

Flora's current research investigates the process of community-led recovery in West London in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. 

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Funded by the Nuffield Foundation, Jon Jackson and colleagues Naomi Creutzfeldt, Ben Bradford, Arabella Kyprianides and Heidi Bancroft will begin work on the project 'The court reform programme and the response to the pandemic'.

This project will be examining the administrative justice system and the impact of COVID-19.

The pandemic forced the justice system, where possible, to go digital. This rapid and radical shift presents a huge opportunity to draw positive lessons for the future. 

The research team will be examining the effect of rapid digitalisation on the delivery of justice, identifying the effects on access for marginalised groups and exploring how trust can be built and sustained in parts of the justice system affected by the pandemic. This will be done by partnering with housing, special education needs and disability organisations. These are areas of law which are exceedingly important during a pandemic and serve as an excellent platform to explore trust and access to justice.

Keep up to date with Jon on Twitter 

LSE Fellow in Quantitative Methodology Dr Joshua Townsley has a new paper out today with co-authors Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, Siim Trumm and Caitlin Milazzo. Published in Parliamentary Affairs, the paper is titled 'Who Vote by Post? Understanding the Drivers of Postal Voting in the 2019 British General Election'. 

While most voters in democratic countries still cast their ballot on election day, the proportion of the electorate which opts for postal voting has been steadily, and often dramatically, increasing. This transformation in electoral politics, however, is under-researched, particularly with regards to the motivations underlying the decision to cast a postal vote. In this article, the authors analyse the factors that drive an individual to vote by post rather than at the polling station using data from the 2019 British Election Study.

Keep up to date with Joshua on Twitter 

Associate Professor Dr Flora Cornish and LSE Fellow Dr Sonja Marzi have been invited to host the the invited speaker session 'Un-bordering ‘knowledge exchange and impact’; Reinvigorating participatory methodologies of scholar-activism' as part of RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2021. The session will discuss, question and challenge the status quo and future of participatory research and methodologies and scholar activism. 

The Department of Methodology welcomes two new members of staff today. Dr Patrick Gildersleve joins as LSE Fellow in Computational Science. He has recently completed a PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute where he held a number of supplementary research and teaching roles. 

Dr Jonathan Cardosa-Silva joins as a Research Officer in the Department of Methodology and the Data Science Institute. Prior to joining us, Jonathan led several data science projects (forecasting, regression, classification and clustering of static and temporal structured data as well as text documents) at a Brazilian data science consultancy startup.

Keep up to date with Patrick on Twitter

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Professor Patrick Sturgis and co-authors Emma Gorman and Franz Buscha have a new open access paper 'Spatial and social mobility in England and Wales: A sub-national analysis of differences and trends over time' published today in the British Journal of Sociology.

Using ONS Longitudinal Study data, the paper looks at sub-national trends in social mobility in England and Wales. Recent studies of social mobility have documented that not only who your parents are, but also where you grow up, substantially influences subsequent life chances. The paper brings these two concepts together to study social mobility in England and Wales, in three post-war generations, using linked Decennial Census data. The findings show considerable spatial variation in rates of absolute and relative mobility, as well as how these have changed over time. While upward mobility increased in every region between the mid-1950s and the early 1980s, this shift varied across different regions and tailed off for more recent cohorts. Also explored is how domestic migration is related to social mobility, finding that those who moved out of their region of origin had higher rates of upward mobility compared to those who stayed, although this difference narrowed over time.

Keep up to date with Patrick on Twitter

Associate Professor Dr Alasdair Jones will be speaking at the Co-designing Publics symposium taking place 16 - 17 September. 

The symposium will bring together the Co-Designing Publics Research Network team, project partners and special guest speakers to discuss emerging themes for research and practice on co-designing publics.

Assistant Professor Dr Audrey Alejandro will be part of the panel discussing International Organisations through a Discursive Lens: Challenges, Contributions and Emerging Issues at the ECPR 2021 virtual conference taking place 31 August - 3 September. 

In addition, Audrey will be presenting the paper 'From evidence-based knowledge to technicisation: the controversial medicalisation of male genital cutting by global health IOs' as part of the discussion panel Knowledge in International Organizations on 2 September.  

Keep up to date with Audrey on Twitter

LSE Fellow in Qualitative Methods Kate Summers will be speaking at the report launch Solidarity in Crisis? Trends in attitudes during COVID-19 on 2 September. 

How has the pandemic affected public opinion on welfare benefits? There were good reasons to think COVID-19 would increase the public’s appetite for social security. The last year and a half has been a time of solidarity in the face of a collective crisis; large numbers of people became unemployed for a manifestly ‘good’ reason; media coverage of welfare has become dramatically more positive; and more and more people have had direct experience of the benefits system. And yet, the limited evidence collected so far suggests that attitudes have not changed.

Using new nationally representative survey data, alongside many in-depth interviews with claimants themselves, the report will show how attitudes have changed, and how they have stayed the same. Based on our findings, we will ask: how can we frame a better social security system that is grounded in public support?

The report is part of Welfare at a (Social) Distance, a major national research project funded by the ESRC as part of the UK Research and Innovation's rapid response to COVID-19. 

Keep up to date with Kate on Twitter

LSE Fellow in Computational Science Dr Siân Brooke has a new article today titled Trouble in programmer’s paradise: gender-biases in sharing and recognising technical knowledge on Stack Overflow published in Information Communication and Society.

In the article, Siân conducts a computational nonbinary analysis of gender on the world’s largest programming forum, Stack Overflow.This is based on 11-years of activity, across levels of expertise, language, and specialism, to assess if Stack Overflow is hostile to women & feminine users.

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ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Rishita Nandagiri has been invited to chair the session 'Qualitative demographic research: Challenging paradigms' at the BSPS online conference taking place 14 - 15 September 2021.

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Co-authored with Professor Nichola Raihani, the article No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour is published today in Evolutionary Human Sciences.

Performing costly helpful behaviours can allow individuals to improve their reputation. Those who gain a good reputation are often preferred as interaction partners and are consequently better able to access support through cooperative relationships with others. However, investing in prosocial displays can sometimes yield social costs: excessively generous individuals risk losing their good reputation, and even being vilified, ostracised or antisocially punished. As a consequence, people frequently try to downplay their prosocial actions or hide them from others. The review explores when and why investments in prosocial behaviour are likely to yield social costs.

Keep up to date with Eleanor on Twitter

LSE Fellow Dr Sonja Marzi's new article 'Participatory video from a distance: co-producing knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic using smartphones' is published today in Qualitative Research.

The article outlines an innovative remote participatory video (PV) methodology that makes use of participants’ smartphones. It was developed as an alternative to co-production research and can be employed when face-to-face contact is impossible or undesirable. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, face-to-face research interactions have been disrupted or become impossible. Yet it is vital to reach those who are most affected by emergencies and to include their voices. The research reported here was a collaboration between women in Medellín, Colombia, and a team of filmmakers and researchers.

Keep up to date with Sonja on Twitter

LSE Fellow in Computational Social Science Dr Siân Brooke was invited to contribute and talk about gender and online trolling in Screenshot magazine.

Read the full article 'Why do men troll? Unpacking the psychology of internet trolling'.

Keep up to date with Siân on Twitter.

Professor Patrick Sturgis has a new working paper 'Selective Schooling Has Not Promoted Social Mobility in England' out today. 

Co-authored with Emma Gorman and Franz Buscha, the paper links estimates of absolute and relative mobility from the census to the extent of selecting schooling in Local Education Authorities for children born between 1956 and 1972.

Keep up to date with Patrick on Twitter.

LSE Fellow Dr Sonja Marzi's new article 'Having money is not the essential thing...but...it gets everything moving' is published today in Sociologial Research Online. 

Drawing upon insights from fieldwork, Sonja extends the discussion of aspirations as a conceptual tool by exploring how young Colombians plan to pursue them and by seeking to understand their aspirations as a way of navigating towards what they see as a good life. 

Keep up to date with Sonja on Twitter. 

Congratulations to Dr Siân Brooke, Martin Lukac and Dr Aliyah Rao who have been awarded a STICERD grant for their research project "Equity in Freelancing: Interventions in Intersectional Discrimination on Online Labour Markets".

Professor Jon Jackson will be working on a new 18 month study looking at the effect of rapid digitalization on the delivery of justice in the areas of housing and special educational needs and disability.

Funded by the Nuffield Foundation and led by Professor Naomi Creutzfeldt at the University of Westminster, this study examines the effect of rapid digitalization on the delivery of justice in the areas of housing and special educational needs and disability. Covid-19 has forced the justice system, where possible, to go digital at a rapid pace. By empirically understanding areas that work well and those that need improvement, there is a huge opportunity to draw positive (potentially radical) lessons from this crisis. What lessons about digitalization and pathways to justice can be learned? How can trust in justice – the belief that justice system is fair, effective and open to all – be maintained? We seek to (1) better understand the effect of rapid digitalization on the advice and redress systems as well as its users; (2) identify the effects on access for marginalized groups; and (3) explore how trust can be built and sustained in two specific parts of a justice system affected by the pandemic.

Keep up to date with Jon on Twitter