Andreas Hess' review on moral economy in the Irish Times

Associate Professor Andreas Hess just got published in the Irish Times with a review article on Samuel Bowles' new book "The Moral Economy. Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens" (published by Yale University Press).

Read the full review here.

Prof. Malesevic on BBC Radio about wars

Prof. Sinisa Malesevic from our School of Sociology at UCD was speaking on BBC Good Morning Scotland about wars in the Middle East. Here is your chance to listen to the show.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07vwz9p

Book launch: Amanda Slevin's new book "Gas, Oil and the Irish State"

Many congratulations to Dr Amanda Slevin, who graduated from UCD with a PhD in Sociology in 2013. The launch of her new book, published by Manchester University Press was held in Hodges Figgis and included speeches from guests Fintan O'Toole (The Irish Times) & Professor Kieran Allen (UCD).

For more information about the book see http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784992743/

Welcome Dr. Creighton and Dr. Flaherty at the School of Sociology!

We are extremely pleased to have two new faculty members at the School of Sociology! Both Dr. Mathew Creighton and Dr. Eoin Flaherty joined our School and University College Dublin in September 2016.

Assistant Professor Mathew Creighton

Mathew graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 with a joint PhD in sociology and demography. Before coming to Dublin he worked at the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and in the Department of Political and Social Science at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

His work is concerned with the causes and consequences of immigration. In the context of destination, he focuses on anti-immigrant sentiment and the implication of social incorporation for health inequality. Currently, his research explores the formation of the “other”, focusing on attitudes toward religion and immigration. In the context of origin, he considers the role of immigration and public policy in schooling and the interrelation of networks, decisions to migrate and health. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals in sociology, demography, public health, history and urban studies.

At UCD, Mathew's office is D407, Newman Building

Assistant Professor Eoin Flaherty

Before arriving at UCD, Eoin spent two years as post-doctoral fellow at the National institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (Maynooth University), and two years as lecturer in sociology at Queen's University Belfast.

His main topics of interest include income inequality, environmental sociology, comparative research, quantitative methods (time series, and pooled time series), 19th century Ireland, famine, common-pool resource systems, historical geography, spatial data analysis, complexity theory, and human ecology. He is always happy to speak with students about these topics.

He studies the socioeconomic and ecological processes which give rise to national and cross-national inequalities. He applies these approaches to the study of top income inequality, the division of national product between capital and labour, and the uneven impact of famine.

At UCD, Eoin's office is D413, Newman Building

Andreas Hess in the Irish Times

Associate Professor Andreas Hess (UCD, School of Sociology) writes in the Irish Times about a new book of Jeffrey Alexander on the crisis in journalism:

The separation of media studies from sociology hasn’t helped to throw light on the state of journalism. The apparent crisis of the profession often seems to be reduced to technological matters and to the question of how to best manage information overload: what to do about the acceleration and virtual omnipresence of information, and how to make sense of Twitter, Facebook, the number of reads (clicks), the endless stream of activists’ and politicians’ blogs or the noise that stems from constant media streaming. It often appears as if journalism’s purpose consists only in fairly reproducing the state of the world in miniature and, if possible, in an instant....

Read the full review


http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/is-journalism-really-in-crisis-what-does-the-future-hold-1.2754539

Congratulations to PhD student Roland Adorjani

Congratulations to our PhD student Roland Adorjani (supervised by Dr. Thomas Grund) for winning a prestigious Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Scholarship. The enterprise partner is MindBot.inc in Dublin. The project is titled "Social Computing in the Era of e-Health".

Social Computing in the Era of e-Health

The Internet is changing the ways in which we interact in our daily lives and has come to affect even healthcare. From trendy fitness apps to social applications that foster interactions between patients and professionals – transferring what was once face-to-face patient-doctor consultations into the cloud, the past couple of years have taken this trend a step further by introducing online text-based therapy to the world of e-health. An emergent online industry, e-therapy draws large communities, turning the Internet in what has become an alternative, modern-day arena for health treatments.


This research project attempts to study the impact of these novel online e-therapy outcomes, by focusing on the analysis of social text data. Previous research carried out on traditional therapy needs to be followed up by the study of novel, technology-mediated treatment interventions. This thesis proposal introduces a framework that models and quantifies aspects of dialog data in this new e-therapy setting, using data captured from applications that foster interactions between millions of users over online platforms and study their efficacy by using a social computational approach to large-scale conversational data. The target phenomenon, coordination in conversation has been described as a process whereby interlocutors align in a spontaneous, unconscious, and yet adaptive ways. A social mechanism that drives joint outcomes in multiple domains, research on doctor-patient communication has shed light on the adaptive nature of these social behaviours, showing that optimal engagement patterns can be linked to treatment outcomes. The findings of this proposed research are expected to follow up and augment this line of research by approaching e-therapy, a contribution also aimed at shaping the future of e-health systems, including Chatbots.

Masterclass with Prof. Jeffrey Alexander on 22 Oct

Saturday, 22 October, 2016, 10.00-16.00

School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Sociology Seminar Room (D418), Newman Building, Belfield, Dublin.

This Master Class is mainly directed at postgraduate students from those academic disciplines that study media, culture and journalism and to practitioners working in the field. For more information and registration details please contact Andreas Hess, School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4 (a.hess@ucd.ie)

On occasion of the publication of The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, June 2016), UCD’s School of Sociology has invited two of the editors, Jeffrey C. Alexander (Yale) and María Luengo (Madrid), and a former editorial board member of the Irish Times, Paul Gillespie, to discuss with us the book’s main themes in this Master Class: the relationship between journalistic practices, democratic culture(s), technological changes and challenges, and how these have impacted on the profession and its ethics. This one-day Master Class is limited to max. 25 participants, so registration is absolutely essential. A small contribution (€20) for catering and to cover some of the costs also applies.

Mike Hout awarded Honorary Doctorate

On 9 September 2016 Professor Mike Hout (New York University, Sociology) received an Honorary Doctorate from University College Dublin. Mike uses demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. His current work uses the General Social Survey panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and their place in society.

Furthermore, we congratulate our student Hang Xiaong for receiving his PhD degree at the same ceremony.