Author Archives: Robert Dingwall

Coronavirus: Lockdown is another triumph of populism over science – most people have behaved rationally so far

All infectious disease outbreaks generate three social epidemics – of fear, explanation and action. The last describes the pressures to “do something”, however pointless or irrelevant. The Government’s lockdown represents another triumph of populism over science. Its approach is reminiscent of the line from the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht about the failure of the people… Read More »

Coronavirus – Managing the Social and Psychological Impact of Self-Isolation

A programme for Arriang TV – a Korean English-language channel. I joined forces with a psychologist from a local university to discuss the human consequences of self-isolation. On the video page

Coronavirus UK: Self-isolation must not mean self-imprisonment

In a democratic society, we should be very cautious about allowing the state to encroach on the space for individual decision-making and voluntary actions. This does not mean that states cannot signal preferred choices but that citizens have some freedom to interpret them in the light of their unique knowledge of their own circumstances. Even… Read More »

The Sociology of the Coronavirus COVID-19

I have now added two brief video clips to the video page. One is from CGTN, which is Chinese Television’s Global English-language network, and discusses the elements of nationalism and xenophobia in early international responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. The other is from Euronews, discussing the problems of self-isolation if you are not… Read More »

We Should Deescalate the War on the Coronavirus

The immediate reaction to the emergence of a novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Wuhan, China, has focused on its challenges to the biomedical sciences. But the new infection is at least as big a challenge to the social sciences. If we continue to neglect this, there is a serious danger that we end up with mistaken… Read More »

Shared decision making: doctors have expertise that patients want or need

The basic problem with shared decision making is that it has always been a matter of ideology rather than evidence…Shared decision making does not need to co-opt conversation analysis and sociolinguistics in its service but to use their findings about the nature of language and social interaction to reflect on the credibility of its own… Read More »

Dickens’s Heart of Darkness – Not your Muppet Christmas Carol

If you missed the broadcast of the new BBC/FX version of A Christmas Carol, it is well worth tracking down on a streaming service. While the production is occasionally bonkers, it brilliantly captures Charles Dickens’s passionate anger about social injustice in Victorian Britain. This is not a cosy story of a mean old man chivvied… Read More »

“Capturing and Analyzing Social Change: Opportunities of Analyzing Visual Data in the 21st Century”: 2019 Blankensee Colloquium

Most of the presentations from the 2019 Blankensee colloquium, “Capturing and Analyzing Social Change: Opportunities of Analyzing Visual Data in the 21st Century”, are now available online via YouTube. My contribution deals with Video Data–21st Century Methods and 20th Century Thinking. It is also available through this link. I discuss the rise of video data… Read More »

Universities – what is it reasonable to expect of them?

…This led me to think further about the weight of expectations that was being placed on the contemporary university and whether this was in any sense fair or realistic. A casual trawl of the trade press and social media identifies calls for universities to feed and house students for free or at highly subsidised rates,… Read More »

Robert Dingwall to Receive SLSA Prize for Contributions to the Socio-Legal Community

The SLSA Executive is delighted to announce that this year’s prize for contributions to the socio-legal community will be awarded to Professor Robert Dingwall. Robert has had a long and illustrious career in socio-legal studies and sociology of law, including positions at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, the University of… Read More »