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On Friday 4th November, Year 12 and 13 sociology students were given the opportunity to attend a ‘Sociology in Action’ conference at the Emmanuel Centre, which featured 5 different speakers who touched on various topics that impacted sociology.

We arrived at the Emmanuel Centre at 10:30, in preparation for the first presentation on representation within education. Aisha Thomas spoke about how much positive representation of minority groups matters within our curriculum, specifically the importance of positive representation and how it needs to be implemented in our curriculum to help minority groups feel seen.. After this we had a talk on Feminist Technoscience by Judy Wajcman. She spoke on how technology has become gendered due to the lack of diversity of the people coding and creating the technology. She also briefly discussed the incredibly relevant topic of the male monopoly control of various technological platforms.

After a short break, we continued with a talk from Danny Dorling, a professor of Geography at Oxford University, on the unequal living conditions in and around the UK. He spoke about the harmful effects of growing up in countries where the income of children’s parents varies widely. He left us with a greater understanding of the large inequalities within the country we live in. He said we could change this by altering the education system to one similar to Finland, where they come out with not just academic knowledge, like in the UK, but worldly knowledge as well.  Then before lunch, there was a brief talk on exam technique, which proved incredibly helpful when thinking about revision for exam season.

After lunch we reconvened for a talk on the effect society has on disabilities, by Tom Shakespeare. He spoke about how social differences should not be classified by biological differences, because discrimination towards disabled people is due to opinions placed upon them by society rather than actual genetic differences. At 15:05 we had our last speaker, Craig Webber, on Criminal Profiling through AI and Social Media. He spoke about how criminal profiling and AI intelligence are no longer accurate or useful ways of profiling criminals. He also mentioned that, as social media presence increases, crime (specifically serial killings) decreases, as it makes it harder for people to actually commit crimes.

Overall it was a highly informative and enjoyable day, full of interesting and relevant sociological topics and speakers.

​Click here to read the leaflet from the day