Research Seminars
The Sociology Research Seminar is the main venue for scholars at the department to present work in progress and strives to feature innovative sociological research from a variety of perspectives.
Autumn Term 2025
Wednesday 22 October 2025
Speakers: Carla Rivera-Blanco and Jan Gilles
Topic: Normativity by Analytical Function: An Alternative Typology for Social Theory
Wednesday 19 November 2025
Speaker: Professor Kate Nash
Topic: How (Some) Films Do Social Theory
Winter Term 2026
Wednesday 21 January 2026
Speaker: Fuyun Wei
Topic: Reflexive Nationness: Soft Nationalism and the Affective–Ethical Infrastructure of Cultural Belonging in Contemporary China
Wednesday 4 February 2026
Speaker: Lucy Garbett
Topic: Behind the Building: Administrative Infrastructure as Urban Process in Jerusalem
Wednesday 4 March 2026
Speaker: Dr Olivia Rutazibwa
Topic: Reading Toni Cade Bamabara in Seoul: On Westerncentrism and Postcolonial Literacy
Wednesday 11 March 2026
Speaker: Dr Philipp Golka
Topic: From Beck to Backlash: Climate Change and the Sociology of Threat
Spring Term 2026
Wednesday 20 May 2026
Speaker: Dr Giulia Torino
Topic: TBC
Wednesday 27 May 2026
Speaker: Dr David Pinzur
Topic: The Sociology of Crude Oil Prices
Wednesday 10 June 2026
Speaker: Dr Niina Vuolajarvi
Topic: Governing in the Name of Caring: Sex Work, Migration and the Nordic Model
Past events
Autumn Term 2024
Wednesday 20 November 2024
Speakers: Dr Kristin Surakand Johnathan Inkley
Topic: Ghosts in the Neighborhood: How the Owners of Expensive Property Use Offshore Structures to Disassemble Themselves
Winter Term 2025
Wednesday 22 January 2025
Speaker: Marta Pagnini
Topic: The Royal Touch Network: Aristocratic Consecration and Social Reproduction in the Field of Traditional Professions (1870 – 1949)
Wednesday 5 February 2025
Speaker: Dr Ida Birkvad
Topic: Global Romanticism
Wednesday 12 March 2025
Speakers: Dr Don Slaterand Dr Elettra Bordonaro
Topic:Ageing, Urban Spaces and ‘Quality of Life’: Dialogues between Lighting, Social Research and Design Thinking
Wednesday 19 March 2025
Speaker: Benjamin Brundu-Gonzalez
Topic: Who Gets to Be Smart? Gender, Class, and the Making of Intellectual Reputations at an Elite University
Spring Term 2025
Wednesday 14 May 2025
Speaker: Dr Marco Perolini
Topic:"We are All Refugees": Migrant Justice Movements and Human Rights from Below
Wednesday 28 May 2025
Speaker: Professor Paul Watt
Topic: "It's just over £1million on the market - I haven't even got a million pence": Social inequality and social mixing at a mixed-tenure neighbourhood in London
Wednesday 11 June 2025
Speaker: Dr Andrea Espinoza Carvajal
Topic: Nadie es profeta en su tierra. National and Transnational Tensions in Ecuadorian Women’s Organisations around the 1975 World Conference on Women in Mexico City
Wednesday 18 June 2025
Speakers: Dr David Kampmann and Dr Nils Peters
Topic: Subordinating ‘Alt-Finance’: How British Venture Capital became dependent on the US
Spring Term 2024
Wednesday 29 May 2024
Speaker: Dr Svetlana Ruseishvili
Topic: Transnational Childbirth, Migration, and Meanings of Citizenship
Wednesday 5 June 2024
Speakers: Dr Mai Taha and Dr Sara Salem
Topic: Sonic Lives: Radio and Anticolonial Solidarity
Winter Term 2024
Wednesday 14 February 2024
Speaker: Professor Annette Lareau
Topic: Studying Class, Cultural Knowledge, and Inequality Using Qualitative Methods: The Importance of Hard Choices
Wednesday 24 January 2024
Speaker: Victoria Gronwald
Topic: A clean City? The UK’s surprising leadership on beneficial ownership transparency
Wednesday 13 March 2024
Speaker: Professor Paul Watt
Topic: Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London
Wednesday 20 March 2024
Speakers: Dr Thierry Rossier, Professor Mike Savage, Jonathan Schulte and Ben Brundu-Gonzalez
Topic: Analysing inequalities within the LSE student body: bringing social class into the mix
Wednesday 8 May 2024
Speaker: Dr Mai Taha
Topic: Homes in Revolt: Social reproduction as struggle in Mandate Palestine
Autumn Term 2023
Wednesday 8 November 2023
Speaker: Dr Faiza Shaheen
Topic: The rise of divisive narratives and what this means for progressive policy-making
Wednesday 15 November 2023
Speaker: Professor Suzi Hall
Topic: Edge Syntax: vocabularies for violent times
Michaelmas Term 2021
Tuesday 7 December 2021
Dr Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou (UCL)
Topic:
Tuesday 23 November
Professor Colin Jerolmack(NYU)
Topic:
Tuesday 19 October
Dr Thierry Rossier (LSE)
Topic:
Lent Term 2021
Wednesday 24 March
Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa (University of Cambridge) and Professor Peter Wade (University of Manchester)
Topic:
Lent Term 2020
Wednesday 11 March
Joanna Tsiganou (National Centre for Social Research)
Topic:
Wednesday 4 March
Javier Auyero (University of Texas-Austin)
Topic:
Wednesday 19 February
Michael Sauder (University of Iowa)
Topic:
Wednesday 5 February
Lucy Mayblin (University of Sheffield)
Topic:
Wednesday 22 January
Rohan Deb Roy (University of Reading)
Topic:
Michaelmas Term 2019
Wednesday 20 November
Yossi Harpaz(University of Tel Aviv)
Topic: Citizenship 2.0: Dual Nationality as a Global Asset
Wednesday 30 October
Liene Ozolina(LSE), Discussant: Lisa Baraitser(Birkbeck)
Topic: Politics of Waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet Austerity and the Ethics of Freedom
Wednesday 16 October
Ruben Andersson(University of Oxford)
Topic: Fighting and Fearing the Other: Notes for a Global Ethnography of Nefarious Systems
Wednesday 2 October
Daniel Beunza (Cass Business School, City University London)
Topic:Taking the Floor: Models, Morals and Management in a Wall Street Traing Room
Lent Term 2019
Wednesday 27 March
Gabriel Abend (NYU)
Topic: Choices and Conceptual Choices
Wednesday 20 March
Michael McCarthy (Marquette University)
Topic: Dismantling Solidarity: capitalist politics and American pensions since the New Deal
Wednesday 6th March
Professor Gargi Bhattacharyya (University of East London)
Topic: Rethinking Racial Capitalism
Wednesday 30 January
Yasemin Soysal (University of Essex)
Topic: University Rankings, Transnationalized Imaginaries, and International Student Mobility
Michaelmas Term 2018
Wednesday 5 December
Clive Nwonka (LSE)
Topic: A Sociology of Film: the black neoliberal aesthetic
Wednesday 21 November
Sara Salem (LSE)
Topic: Reading Fanon in Egypt: racialized sovereignty, anticolonial nationalism, and global capital
Wednesday 17 October
Cheris SC Chan (Hong Kong University)
Topic: A Market of Distrust: toward a cultural sociology of unofficial exchanges between patients and doctors in China
Wednesday 3 October
Stephanie Mudge (University of California, Davis)
Topic: Leftism Reinvented: Western parties from socialism to neoliberalism
Lent Term
Wednesday 21 March 2018
Bart Bonikowski (Harvard)
Topic: Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive? Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti-Muslim Attitudes in Europe
Abstract and bio
Wednesday 7 February 2018
Tod van Gunten (Edinburgh)
Topic: Overconfident hedgehogs? Subjective certainty and political ideology in the economics profession
Abstract and bio
Wednesday 21 February 2018
Sivamohan Valluvan (Warwick)Topic:New Nationalism, Old Ideologies and Left Problems
Abstract and bio
Wednesday 17 January 2018
Michaela Benson (Goldsmiths)Topic: Brexit and the politics of belonging among Britons resident in the EU27: recasting formations of migration, privilege and identity
Abstract and bio
Michaelmas Term
Wednesday 6 December 2017
Dingeman Wiertz (Oxford)
Topic: Durable civic disparities across the United States: Civic deserts, hotspots, and their destinies
Wednesday 22 November 2017
Neil Gross (Colby College)Topic: On the Role of Idées Fixes in Economic Life: The Case of the 2008 Financial Crisis
Wednesday 18 October 2017
Chana Teeger (LSE)
Topic: "Apartheid is Boring": The Politics of Disinterest in South African History Classrooms