Kent Sociologists’ “Key Articles” Success

In celebrating their 60^th anniversary, the British Sociological Association has highlighted a selection of classic and contemporary articles (from the stable of BSA journals: Cultural Sociology; Sociological Research Online; Sociology; and Work, Employment and Society) that have been assessed by prominent members of the discipline as having made a particularly significant impact on sociology.

Three contributions from SSPSSR staff have been included in this select list.

Professor Frank Furedi’s ‘From the narrative of the blitz to the rhetoric of vulnerability’, published in Cultural Sociology, has been heralded in the area of crime and deviance for providing a ‘benchmark against which to think, critically, not only about the concept of fear but also about what the different theoretical perspectives currently in vogue assume about the nature of human beings and their capacity to prevent their minds from becoming “factories of fear”’.

In challenging the marginal place of the body in sociology, Professor Chris Shilling’s ‘Educating the body: physical capital and the production of social inequalities’, published in Sociology, has been identified as ‘one of the most significant stimuli to the sociology of sport in the last twenty years’, and as representing the beginning of what has become a significant interchange between the sociology of sport and the sociology of the body.

Also touching on issues central to our bodily being, Chris Shilling’s co-authored paper with Philip A Mellor, ‘Modernity, self-identity and the sequestration of death’, published in Sociology, has been included as an ‘often cited landmark article’ that ‘brought the study of death and dying out of specialities such as the sociology of medicine or religion, and into the centre of social theory.’