The series

For Trinity Term we are focussing on research methods. The aim of these sessions is really to excite an interdisciplinary audience of graduates to understand how different methods are being used creatively across the social sciences. The panel discussions will be held during the first four weeks of term and will focus on 'interviews' in week 1, 'numbers' (quant methods) in week 2, 'archives' in week 3, and 'ethnogrpahy' in week 4.

Panellists:

[Joint work with Tugba Bozcaga, Harvard University)

Does land inequality undermine democratization and development? The dominant consensus is that land inequality provides incentives for landed elites to block democratization and undermines the provision of public goods. Two key assumptions underlie these theoretical accounts: that landowners identify uniquely with land-related activities and that asset mobility is exogenous. In this paper, I propose an alternative explanation on how land inequality affects landed elites' calculations on both democracy and the provision of public goods that breaks with these assumptions.

To celebrate the publication of ‘Women of Ideas: Interviews from Philosophy Bites’, join Suki Finn in conversation with Rebecca Roache, Teresa M. Bejan, and Sarah Fine, as they discuss the status, works, and experiences of women in philosophy.

Long-term social and demographic changes – and the conflicts they create – continue to transform British politics. In their new book Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarisation and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity and diversity.

Multilevel regression and post-stratification is a way of estimating opinion in small areas.

If you've ever needed to make a prediction as to what a small area thinks, or control for "district-level preferences", this talk is for you.

This talk will give an overview on the use of Twitter data for social science research. The talk will focus on an applied example using data from participants in the 2017 US Women’s March protests. It will be followed by some hands-on exercises describing how to access the Twitter API, including the new Academic Research Product Track.

In the span of three months in 2020, Belarusian and foreign journalists were arrested more than 310 times in the line of duty. As of April 2021, 12 journalists remain behind bars. Volha Siakhovich is a legal expert and human rights campaigner for the Belarusian Association of Journalists. She will tell us about the current climate, and what the international journalism community can do to bring attention to it.

Jessica Hamzelou reports on health and medical science for New Scientist. She has a BSc in biomedical science and was named BSME’s Best Digital Writer in 2018 and ABSW’s British Science Writer of the Year in 2017. In 2020, the biggest story her beat could conjure broke around the same time she found out she was expecting. Here’s how the story evolved for her, what it was like stepping back from it, and how she expects the coverage will evolve in 2021.