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These eleven chapters look at sociology in Britain from a number of intriguing perspectives. How important is it for British sociologists to be aware of the historical development of their subject in this country? How is British sociology seen by British scholars working in related fields, such as social history, social anthropology and demography? And how are British sociologists perceived by their colleagues working abroad, in particular in continental Europe? A concluding chapter by the President of the British Sociological Association identifies the recurring themes in these reflections.

These chapters in this book trace the evolution of British geography as an academic discipline during the last hundred years, and stress how the study of the world we live in is fundamental to an understanding of its problems and concerns. The principal themes covered in this volume are those of environment, place and space, and the applied geography of map making and planning. The book also addresses specific issues such as disease, urbanization, regional viability, and ethics and social problems.

This is an account of the establishment of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) from among the Research Councils of the United Kingdom in 2005. It focuses on the campaign carried forward from the 1997 Dearing Report to the 2004 Higher Education Act to establish a public agency investing in humanities and arts research that would be equivalent to those funding natural and social science research. Built on interviews with leading participants, regional and national press coverage, and analysis of influential national studies, this book shows how engagement with contemporary issues — the knowledge economy, devolution, and the expansion of higher education — as well as a long tradition of scholarly excellence, led to the fashioning of a new model funding agency: an agency that addressed frontier issues in the arts and humanities such as increasing the scale of research, substantive collaboration with scientific fields, and explicit consideration of the results of research.

This book explores the extent to which forced migration has become a defining feature of life in the Middle East and North Africa. The chapters present research on refugees, internally displaced peoples, as well as ‘those who remain’, from Afghanistan in the East to Morocco in the West. Dealing with the dispossession and displacement of waves of peoples forced into the region at the end of World War I, and the Palestinian dispossession after World War II, the volume also examines the plight of the nearly 4 million Iraqis who have fled their country or been internally displaced since 1990. The chapters are grouped around four related themes — displacement, repatriation, identity in exile and refugee policy — providing a significant contribution to this developing area of contemporary research.

India's society, economy, and polity have been transformed at a gathering pace since the early 1990s, and India's growing role on the world stage makes it imperative to understand the roots and consequences of these changes. The eleven chapters in this interdisciplinary volume review the growing body of data that help to make sense of these changes and to understand their likely significance. The volume provides systematic, macro-level studies of economic, demographic, social, and political change in India but also micro-level analyses of the detailed mechanisms ‘on the ground’ of how Indian society is being re-shaped. This combination of micro- and macro-level analyses thus gives a picture not only of national trends but also of the underlying processes of change. Each of the chapters showcases the fruits of previously unpublished scholarship across the social sciences.

Evidence — its nature and interpretation — is the key to many topical debates and concerns such as global warming, evolution, the search for weapons of mass destruction, DNA profiling, and evidence-based medicine. In 2004, University College London launched a cross-disciplinary research programme ‘Evidence, Inference and Enquiry’ to explore the question: ‘Can there be an integrated multidisciplinary science of evidence?’ While this question was hotly contested and no clear final consensus emerged, much was learned on the journey. This book, based on the closing conference of the programme held at the British Academy in December 2007, illustrates the complexity of the subject, with seventeen chapters written from a diversity of perspectives including Archaeology, Computer Science, Economics, Education, Health, History, Law, Psychology, Philosophy, and Statistics. General issues covered include principles and systems for handling complex evidence, evidence for policy-making, and human evidence-processing, as well as the very possibility of systematising the study of evidence.

Growing up in Diverse Societies provides a comprehensive analysis of the integration of the children of immigrants in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden, based on the ‘Children of immigrants longitudinal survey in four European countries’ (CILS4EU), including harmonised interviews with almost 19,000 14- to 15-year-olds. The book studies the life situation, social relations, and attitudes of adolescents in different ethnic minority groups, and compares these systematically to majority youth in the four countries. The chapters cover a wide range of aspects of integration, all addressing comparisons between origin groups, generations, and destination countries, and elucidating processes accounting for differences. The results challenge much current thinking and simplified views on the state of integration. In some aspects, such as own economic means, delinquency, and mental health, children of immigrants are surprisingly similar to majority youth, while in other aspects there are large dissimilarities. There are also substantial differences between ethnic minority groups, with the economic and cultural distance of the origin regions to the destination country being a key factor. For some outcomes, such as language proficiency or host country identification, dissimilarities seem to narrow over generations, but this does not hold for other outcomes, such as religiosity and attitudes. Remaining differences partly depend on ethnic segregation, some on socioeconomic inequality, and others on parental influences. Most interestingly, the book finds that the four destination countries, though different in their immigration histories, policy approaches, and contextual conditions, are on the whole similar in the general patterns of integration and in the underlying processes.

Established in the 1930s to rescue scientists and scholars from Nazi Europe, the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL, founded in 1933 as the Academic Assistance Council and now known as the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics) has had an illustrious career. No fewer than eighteen of its early grantees became Nobel Laureates and 120 were elected Fellows of the British Academy and Royal Society in the UK. While a good deal has been written on the SPSL in the 1930s and 1940s, and especially on the achievements of the outstanding scientists rescued, much less attention has been devoted to the scholars who contributed to the social sciences and humanities, and there has been virtually no research on the Society after the Second World War. The archive-based essays in this book, written to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the organisation, attempt to fill this gap. The essays include revisionist accounts of the founder of the SPSL and some of its early grantees. They examine the SPSL's relationship with associates and allies, the experiences of women academics and those of the post-war academic refugees from Communist Europe, apartheid South Africa, and Pinochet's Chile. In addition to scholarly contributions, the book includes moving essays by the children of early grantees. At a time of increasing international concern with refugees and immigration, it is a reminder of the enormous contribution generations of academic refugees have made — and continue to make — to learning the world over.

The problem of obesity is of increasing national and international importance. This book, which provides a solid foundation for the social interpretation of obesity, assessing the role of institutions rather than the individual, argues that obesity is a response to stress and that some types of welfare regimes are more stressful than others. International comparisons show that English-speaking market-liberal societies have higher levels of obesity as well as higher levels of labour and product market competition, leading to inequalities that induce uncertainty and anxiety.

This book is a ground-breaking study of the phenomenon of migration in and to England over the medieval millennium, between c. AD 500 and c. AD 1500. It reaches across traditional scholarly divides, both disciplinary and chronological, to investigate, for the first time, the different types of data and scholarly methods that reveal evidence of migration and mobility within the medieval kingdom of England. England offers the opportunity for studying migration and migrants over the longue durée, because it has been a recognisable political unit for over a millennium and because a wealth of source material has survived from these centuries. The data vary unevenly in quality and quantity across this period, but become considerably more powerful through multi-disciplinary approaches to data collection and interpretation. Fifteen subject specialists synthesise and extend recent research in a wide range of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, genetics, historical linguistics, history, literature and onomastics. They evaluate the capacity of different genres of evidence for addressing questions around migration and its effects on the identities of groups and individuals within medieval England, as well as methodological parameters and future research potential. The book therefore marks an important contribution to medieval studies, and to modern debates on migration and the free movement of people, arguing that migration in the modern world, and its reverberations, cannot be completely understood without taking a broad historical perspective on the topic.

This volume analyses the representation and self-representation of homelessness. It argues that the representation of homelessness is not a peripheral issue, but in fact is key to tackling the problem. The volume is interested in ‘representation’ in the media, literary texts and social policy documents, but also in the political sense of how charity and governmental organisations seek to ‘represent’ people with experience of homelessness. It describes how people affected by homelessness are perceived as objects (‘dehumanised perception’) created by the process of Othering. Homelessness Studies publications typically focus on the social sciences. This volume, in contrast, is innovative in its cross-disciplinary nature. It features research from the arts, humanities, science and the social sciences, exploring what these areas can offer each other. It also includes writing by people with lived experience of homelessness. The volume argues that stereotypical representations of homelessness, while useful for charity fundraising, do more harm than good. It also argues that focusing on the talent and ability of people experiencing homelessness is a way to combat Othering and dehumanised perception. It concludes that organisations tasked with dealing with homelessness must include greater representation from people with direct ‘lived experience’ of homelessness.

These chapters not only describe the major changes in British society in recent years, but seek to understand and explain what is happening in British society. One of the themes running through this book is that, while there have been rapid changes in overall levels, there have been slower changes in relativities, and this analytical distinction is absolutely fundamental to a proper understanding of contemporary society. The book also considers the wide variety of mechanisms that underlie these changes, in particular processes of social interaction. The complex and often ill-understood nature of these mechanisms may be a major reason why so much social reform has proved ineffective. The verdict on social reforms in education, gender inequalities and ethnic inequalities is rather negative; and sociologists have long been concerned about the unintended consequences of social action, and in the policy field these are frequent. By highlighting the complexities of the causal mechanisms, sociological research can make a major contribution to policy and public debate. While these chapters do not claim that sociology will provide all the answers, they demonstrate that it has made real progress in understanding the social changes that Britain has experienced in recent decades.

This is a cross-national study of ethnic-minority disadvantage in the labour market. It focuses on the experiences of the second generation, that is, of the children of immigrants, in a range of affluent western countries (Western Europe, North America, Australia, Israel). Standard analyses, using the most authoritative available datasets for each country, enable the reader to make precise comparisons. The study reveals that most groups of non-European ancestry continue to experience substantial ethnic penalties in the second (and later) generations. But the magnitude of these penalties varies quite substantially between countries, with major implications for social policy. This account of minority groups in different countries provides important information for policy makers considering their own responses to ethnic-minority disadvantage.

This volume is the first to survey village institutions in Egypt during the first eight centuries AD, from the beginning of Roman rule to the early Arab period. Despite the many studies of society and administration in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, there are no general studies of village institutions or communities in any one period, let alone in a long-term perspective, or integrated investigation of their relationship to the wider state. This volume, which represents a first response to fill this gap in the current scholarship, aims to demonstrate that Egypt is a particularly productive place to develop study of this subject because the rich documentary evidence of the papyri, a large majority of which comes from village sites, permits us both to study specific topics in detail by place and time, as the eleven papers of this volume do, and also to make comparisons across a long chronological period. These comparisons across time are beneficial because they raise questions about changing patterns and perspectives of the surviving documents, which may skew interpretation, and enable us to outline what seem to emerge as recurrent issues in the power-relationships between central and regional authorities and the rural population, as well as some preliminary indications of the trends in those developments across our period.