PODCAST

Social Science Bites

SAGE Publishing

Bite-sized interviews with top social scientists

society & culture social sciences

All Episodes

19:52

Sabina Alkire on Measuring Poverty

Social Science Bites ·

2017/11/01

Is it just a low wage that conjures up the term when we talk about “crushing poverty”? Or is it really a host of other issues that likely accompany that lack of money? Economist Sabina Alkire has spent her career crafting the measures that demonstrate that latter proposition, work that with fellow economist James Foster resulted in what is known as the Alkire-Foster Method for determining level of poverty. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Alkire – director of the Oxford Poverty and Human

31:10

Tom Chatfield on Critical Thinking and Bias

Social Science Bites ·

2017/10/02

Philosopher Tom Chatfield’s media presence – which is substantial – is often directly linked to his writings on technology. But his new book is on critical thinking, and while that involves humanity’s oldest computer, the brain, Chatfield explains in this Social Science Bites podcast that new digital realities interact with old human biases. As Chatfield tells interviewer Dave Edmonds, while he defines bias as “an inaccurate account of the way things actually are,” this like confirmation, affect and

16:39

Ioanna Palaiologou on Play

Social Science Bites ·

2017/08/31

Amid all the handwringing about kids and the damage smartphones are doing them, child psychologist Ioanna Palaiologou is upbeat. “I don’t think,” she says, “we should worry as much as the media is making it. ... If the elements are there, it’s another toy for them.” Palaiologou, an associate at the Institute of Education, University College London’s Centre for Leadership in Learning, has the background to make a judgment in that regard. Among other things, she’s an expert on children and play, as

25:13

Al Roth on Matching Markets

Social Science Bites ·

2017/08/01

Al Roth on Matching Markets The system that runs the ride-sharing company Uber doesn’t just link up passengers and drivers based on price. It also has to connect the two based largely on where they are geographically. It is, says Nobel laureate Stanford economist Alvin E. “Al” Al Roth, a matching market. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Roth explains to interview David Edmonds some of the ins and outs of market matching, starting with a quick and surprisingly simple definition. “A matching

24:14

Theresa Marteau on Healthy Environments

Social Science Bites ·

2017/07/07

Under normal circumstances, if something was hurting you, you’d likely stop doing it. Except, well, as Theresa Marteau of Cambridge University’s Department of Public Health and Primary Care has explored deeply, in some key areas, you’re likely not stopping. In a conversation with Social Science Bites host David Edmonds, she notes that the majority of premature deaths are due to four non-communicable diseases – diabetes, cancer, cardio-vascular disease, and lung disease. In turn, there are four main

25:35

Mary Bosworth on Border Criminology

Social Science Bites ·

2017/06/01

“Borders,” says Mary Bosworth, “are the key issue of our time.” And so, says the criminologist, “in response to the mass migration that’s happening, the criminal justice system is shifting. This shouldn’t surprise us – all other aspects of our society are changing.” One of those changes is the creation of a new subfield of criminology, one explicitly evolved to understand immigration control and criminal justice. In this Social Science Bites podcast interview with Dave Edmonds, Bosworth talks about

11:47

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science...

Social Science Bites ·

2017/05/16

Ask a number of influential social scientists who in turn influenced them, and you’d likely get a blue-ribbon primer on the classics in social science. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination. Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Emile Durkheim’s Suicide. Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge. During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science

18:14

Chris Grey on Organizations

Social Science Bites ·

2017/05/01

What is an “organization?” According to Chris Grey, the guest in this Social Science Bites podcast, in many ways it’s a moment in time. “An organization,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is also a momentary crystallization of an ongoing process of organizing.” Grey is a professor of organizational studies in the school of management at Royal Holloway University in London and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. And while he’s been heavily involved in management studies – he’s actually

23:32

Scott Atran on Sacred Values

Social Science Bites ·

2017/04/03

How lightly, or how tightly, do you hold your values? Are there things you hold dear, which almost automatically excite your emotions, for which you would make the costliest of sacrifices? These are the sorts of questions Scott Atran discusses in this Social Science Bites podcast. Atran is a “classically trained” anthropologist (he was once an assistant to Margaret Mead) and is the research director in anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, a research professor of public

12:35

Whose Work Most Influenced You? Part 2

Social Science Bites ·

2017/03/15

The Communist Manifesto. Novelist Don DeLillo’s account of a big moment in baseball. Works by Wittgenstein and Focault. And a famous –and shocking – behavioral experiment. These are a few of the supremely inspiring works which have influenced some of the leading social scientists at work today. During the recording of every Social Science Bites podcast, the guest has been asked the following: Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? And now, in honor of the

26:11

Gary King on Big Data Analysis

Social Science Bites ·

2017/03/01

It’s said that in the last two years, more data has been created than all the data that ever was created before that time. And that in two years hence, we’ll be able to say the same thing. Gary King, the head of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, isn’t certain those statements are exactly true, but certain they are true in essence. And he’s even more certain that the growth in the amount of data isn’t why big data is changing the world. As he tells interviewer Dave

13:04

Whose Work Most Influenced You? A Social Science...

Social Science Bites ·

2017/02/15

Which piece of social science research has most inspired or most influenced you? This question has been posed to every interview in the Social Science Bites podcast series, but never made part of the audio file made public. Now, as we approach the 50th Social Science Bite podcast to be published this March 1, journalist and interviewer David Edmonds has compiled those responses into three separate montages of those answers. In this first of that set of montages, 15 renowned social scientists –

15:48

Michelle Baddeley on the Herd

Social Science Bites ·

2017/02/01

Human beings are social animals, notes economist Michelle Baddeley, and as such the instinct to herd is hardwired into us. And so while this has changed from (in most cases) physically clumping into groups, it does translate into behavior linked to financial markets, news consumption, restaurant-picking and Brooklyn facial hair decisions. In this latest Social Science Bites podcast, Baddeley – a professor in economics and finance of the built environment at University College London -- tells

19:38

Sandy Pentland on Social Physics

Social Science Bites ·

2017/01/03

For Alex “Sandy” Pentland, one of the best-known and widely cited computational social scientists in the world, these are halcyon days for his field. One of the creators of the MIT Media Lab and currently the director of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs, Pentland studies ‘social physics,’ which takes a data-centric view of culture and society. In this Social Science Bites podcast, he tells interviewer Dave Edmonds about the origins of social physics in the barren days before the

19:57

Jennifer Hochschild on Race in America

Social Science Bites ·

2016/12/01

Between a series of high-profile shootings of black men by police and the election of Donald Trump by a bifurcated electorate, the racial divide in the United States has achieved a renewed public prominence. While discussion of this divide had faded since the election of Barack Obama, it’s an issue that has always been at the forefront of the scholarship of Harvard’s Jennifer Hochschild. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hochschild explains to interviewer David Edmonds some of the pertinent data

20:49

Anna Machin on Romance

Social Science Bites ·

2016/11/01

Imagine if we could find the secret to romance and love, the real secret, one vetted by science. Wouldn’t that be … well, what would that be. According to Anna Machin, an anthropologist who actually does study romance, it would be disheartening. “I don’t want to find the formula for love,” she tells interviewer Dave Edmonds in the latest Social Science Bites podcast. “I think that would be incredibly depressing.” But Machin, a professor at the University of Oxford and part of an experimental

18:15

Karenza Moore on Dance Culture

Social Science Bites ·

2016/10/03

The culture of dance clubs has a way of popping up in policy debates around the world. In September, for example, the closure of London’s Fabric nightclub – called “one of the most influential and internationally renowned electronic music venues on the planet” by a major newspaper half that planet away – created a huge debate. In Los Angeles in July, the deaths of three people at the Hard Summer Music Festival -- on the heels of more than two dozen drug-related deaths at raves across the U.S

21:11

Michael Billig on the Royal Family and Nationalism

Social Science Bites ·

2016/09/01

“One of the values of the social sciences,” argues Michael Billig, “is to investigate what people take for granted and to bring it to the surface.” In this Social Science Bites podcast, Billig, a professor of social science at Loughborough University since 1985, discusses a particular strain of something taken for granted, what he terms “banal nationalism.” That refers to the idea that much of what we would consider markers of the nationalistic impulse pass without notice, the “unwaved flags” we’d

17:54

Mirca Madianou on Technology and Everyday Life

Social Science Bites ·

2016/06/15

It's often remarked that technology has made the world a smaller place. While this has been especially true for those with the wherewithal to buy the latest gadget and to travel at will, but it's also true for economic migrants. Those technological ties are one of the key research interests of Mirca Madianou, a reader in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Madianou details several foundational shifts "transnational

16:13

Iris Bohnet on Discrimination and Design

Social Science Bites ·

2016/05/10

While intentional bias generally is an ugly thing, it's also relatively easy to spot if the will exists to do so. But what about bias where individuals or institutions haven't set out to discriminate -- but the net effect is bias? "[M]uch of discrimination is in fact based on unconscious or implicit bias," says Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist at Harvard Kennedy School, "where good people like you and me treat people differently based on their looks." At times, even the subjects of implicit bias

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