Page 133 - DLIS407_INFORMATION AND LITERATURE SURVEY IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

Information and Literature Survey in Social Sciences

Notes The discipline of Sociology at LSE focuses upon the following key areas:
y Biomedicine, bioscience and biotechnology: the forms of social, political and cultural change
associated with the rise of biotechnology, biomedicine and bioscience are the subject of
an extensive research programme within the BIOS Centre for the Study of Biomedicine,
Biotechnology, Bioscience and Society. Key research themes include social aspects of synthetic
biology, the neurosciences, reproductive and regenerative technologies, bioeconomics and
biocapital, global ‘bio’ politics, changing definitions of life or ‘life itself’; the sociology of
bioethics, public engagement with science, and biosecurity’. BIOS is a leader in both theoretical
and methodological innovation in these fields and has extensive PhD, MSc and post-doctoral
training programmes.
y Cities and urbanism: the relationship between social, spatial and physical forms and processes
in cities: urban development and urban governance; urban environments, mobility and
morphology; social and spatial exclusion; privatised control strategies and urban regeneration;
urban economies, including criminal organisations, markets and cultures; crime and violence;
transnational urbanism, including cities in global networks, and the emergence of cross-border
criminal activity.
y Economy, culture and society: the nature of contemporary economic knowledges, including
a critical engagement with both economics and economic sociology, the role of economic
knowledges in economic life, and the reconstruction of economic categories from within social
research. Transnationalism, development and globalisation, engaged through clear empirical
focuses (for example, development discourses and practices, creative industries policy,
corporations and regulatory bodies). Finally, the cluster has a strong track record in several
substantive areas that group members in diverse ways, above all: work and employment,
risk and regulation, money and value, consumption and market society, creative and cultural
industries, technology and economy.
y Gender: analysis of gender relations and representations; transnational analyses of gender, race,
ethnicity and sexualities; intersectionality and new forms of discrimination; feminist pasts and
futures; gender and development; economic inequalities, social and political rights.
y Human rights: dimensions of inequality and exclusion locally, nationally and internationally;
gender and sexual divisions; issues of human rights in a global context; human rights as they
arise in the context of biotechnology and bio-ethics and in new forms of legal regulation
associated with security, war and terror.
y Politics and society: the social, economic, institutional and ideological bases of politics, the
interaction of states and societies, and comparative and historical approaches. Topics of central
interest are political parties and social movements, especially the study of labour movements
and the left. The area encompasses the evolution and impact of political ideas, including
liberalism, socialism, conservatism, populism and environmentalism, as well as political and
economic democracy, ethnic violence and political repression, and fundamental social and
political change.
y Race, racism and ethnicity: the social, cultural and governmental aspects of colonial and
postcolonial societies. Nationalism, challenges and transformations in geo-politics, governance
and citizenship in an era characterised by migration, flight, asylum, multiculture, cultural
hybridity, cosmopolitanism and supposed ‘civilisational’ conflict.
y Crime and control: criminological theory, criminal cultures, organisations and markets,
victimology, criminal investigation, the changing nature of crime, alcohol and public disorder,
punishment and control, the relationship between privatised control strategies and urban
regeneration, gender and social control, the emergence of cross border criminal activity,
violence.

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