Social and Political Sciences, School of
Established in 2001, the School brings together core social scientific disciplines to promote the critical understanding of social and political processes and the development of effective policy and practice through a wide range of teaching and research programmes. The School was formed from the departments (now subject groups) of Politics, Social Anthropology, Social Policy and Sociology; the Graduate School of Social and Political Studies; the Centres of African, Canadian and South Asian Studies; the Science Studies Unit, the Research Centre in Social Sciences and the Institute of Governance. It has recently been joined by Social Work, and now forms part of the College of Humanities and Social Science.
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Recent Submissions
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Fashioning labour rights? Understanding the efforts of transnational stakeholders in the responsible fashion and apparel (RFA) movement post-Rana Plaza, Bangladesh
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)In the wake of the 2013 Rana Plaza building collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, transnational stakeholders and stakeholder groups working within the global movement for responsible fashion and apparel (RFA) mobilised in ... -
Rhythms that matter: the kinetic melodies and matterings of autism and equine therapy practices in the UK and USA.
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis is an ethnography of practices of equine therapy used as interventions for autistic people in the UK and USA. It answers the overarching research question: How is autism enacted by models used to understand ... -
Political party learning in the European Free Alliance: inspiration and information in the (Trans)Nationalist Family
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)Recent years, and high-profile events such as the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and 2017 Catalan referendum, have shown that stateless nationalist and regionalist political parties remain relevant political forces ... -
Troubled rainbows: an anthropological study of LGB communities and sectarianism in Northern Ireland
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis examines the intersection of LGB communities with sectarianism in Northern Ireland. Against the widespread notion, maintained both within and outside LGB circles, that there was no space for divisions within ... -
Espiritista-as-woman, woman-as-mother: the gendering of practice in Espiritismo Cruzado
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Habana, this thesis examines Espiritismo Cruzado, an African diaspora religious tradition enmeshed in the wider matrix of Cuban religiosity of African origin, or as my ... -
Dealing with uncertainty: a historical sociology of evaluation practices in UK life insurance, 1971-present
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019)This dissertation examines the evolution of UK life insurance arrangements by investigating how the ways in which life insurers evaluate the economic worth of insurance contracts have changed since the early 1970s. It draws ... -
Towards a less reductive ethos of reality: judging responsibility-for-complicity
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)One of the main challenges facing contemporary political theory is how humans should respond to their complicity in systemic injustice and political oppression, so as to facilitate positive social transformation. The ... -
Azadi activists abroad: transnational activism in the New Kashmiri Freedom Movement
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)The Kashmir movement for azadi, or freedom, from India is rooted in pre-Partition mobilisation, but has evolved over time. With the end to the violent resistance throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a predominately ... -
American imperialism, anthropology and racial taxonomy in the Philippines, 1898-1946
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)Racial classification and taxonomy of the population in the Philippines was formed primarily based on the colonial perception of race. In the time of the Spanish colonial era that spanned across three centuries, the ... -
Turkish fathering today: an enquiry and discussion arising from the views of Turkish fathers and Turkish young people
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)Our knowledge of parenting is determined by what mothers usually do for children and ‘fathering’ is described by comparing it to mothering. Fathers, as far as their relationship within their families is concerned, are part ... -
Twenty first century contact: young people in care and their use of mobile communication devices and the Internet for contact
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)Under Section 34 of the Children Act 1989 local authorities have a legal duty to make every effort to ensure that a child in care can maintain links with his/her birth parents and other wider family members. For a child ... -
‘What nursing’s all about’: the caring ideal and ambivalence to ‘profession’ in nursing’s occupational discourse
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis examines the occupational discourse(s) of a group of nurses working on a single medical unit in a Scottish NHS hospital, in light of debates concerning the contemporary function and focus of nursing. There ... -
Private health insurance in China: a multilevel examination of its prevalence and distribution, and the impacts on access to healthcare and financial protection
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)Introduction: The role of private health insurance (PHI) in efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) is a matter of intense academic and policy debate. The government of the People’s Republic of China has sought ... -
Quickening steps: an ethnography of pre-birth child protection
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis is a study of pre-birth child protection practice in the Scottish context. The ‘quickening’ in the title refers not just to the movement in utero of the unborn babies at the centre of this research, but also ... -
Constructing legitimacy: an ethnography of the struggle for financial capital in two Paris-based private equity funds
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This dissertation uses an original qualitative empirical material (two ethnographic observations of private equity funds and 44 interviews with managers of these funds) to investigate how fund managers construct their ... -
Pigs, people, pathogens: health and multispecies relations in Central Uganda
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis describes the convergence of health and sickness in pigs and people in central Uganda. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic research, the chapters of this thesis trace diseases along the pig supply ... -
Tree of knowledge, tree of life: materials, intimacy and being Creole in London and Seychelles
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis interrogates discourses of kreolite (Creoleness) in the small island state of Seychelles, and among the Seychellois diaspora in London. While the literature on creolization often treats it as mobile and ... -
Biosocial journeys: care and community in experiences of body-focused repetitive behaviours
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-11-25)This thesis follows the emergence of a biosocial community and shows the importance of social relations for British and American people living with body-focused repetitive behaviours (BFRBs). It is based on sixteen months ... -
Life as-we-don’t-know-it: research repertoires and the emergence of astrobiology
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-08)This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the repertoires, sets of social and material practices, that scientists adopt to practice and promote the search for life in the universe, commonly known today under the ... -
Seeing like a second city: contested development in the African townships of late colonial Bulawayo, Rhodesia, 1949-1977
(The University of Edinburgh, 2019-07-08)This thesis is a historical ethnographic study of late colonial planning and development in the racially segregated townships of a southern African city: Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). It analyses how the municipal ...
