I love words: beautiful soft words which roll off the tongue and bloom as they meet the air; jagged hard words which contort the face and are spat from pursed lips; short words with immediate impact; long words which seep quietly into the atmosphere and resonate at an illustrious frequency.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) suffered from civil war from 1998 to 2003. This war mostly centred on the control of natural resources, and cost millions of lives. Whilst this war officially ended in 2003, violence remains part of the political environment in the country, mostly in the Eastern DRC where various rebel groups and the Congolese national army still engage in armed confrontations

We’re growing up. Inescapably, and probably faster than many of us would like. Ten years ago, I would have thought that at this stage I’d definitely feel like an adult. Lo and behold, I feel older, only slightly wiser, and certainly worse at staying up late.

I’ll confess that I’ve really struggled to gain a foothold in the social sciences. Coming from a background in chemistry and biology, I’m accustomed to poring over pages populated with Greek symbols, Arabic numerals, and seemingly endless streams of As, Ts, Gs and Cs.

One minute you’re walking down the street, carrying with you a feeling of stability and security. In the next, you’re being swept away by a current of chaos and panic, with nothing but a profound feeling of being completely trapped by the uncertainty of what’s to come next.

I strongly believe that the best scholarship does not merely present critical analysis, but ultimately draws the scholar back into an introspective gaze, to reflect on how what one has learned affects oneself.

When curious people discover I research prostitution policy they tend to jump to the very reasonable, though largely inaccurate, conclusion that my focus rests on the sellers of sex. Many are therefore perplexed, perhaps even disappointed, when they learn that my work concentrates not on people in prostitution, but on the activities of policy influential.

The media seems to suggest that bilinguals are smarter and healthier than monolinguals. And although slightly exaggerated, they appear to be based on scientific evidence. But if we examine the evidence, is this actually true?

Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Theory” develops a way of tackling technology and society which moves past the sterile tracing of relational networks of many techno-social theories and allows for a radical approach to discourse and hybridity in social theory and ethnographic research.

“We live in a complex world”. This sentence is constantly used by people around us, and occasionally we might use these words ourselves in conversation. But how complex is it? And, can we really understand its complexity? What about the social world and its complexity? In this post, I introduce the reader to Complexity Theory.

Having spent the past several months writing up a Master’s dissertation on Actor-Network Theory and its potential for expanding and developing the field of cybercrime research, I have had the eternal social science student experience of watching as an exciting, newly devoured work of social theory worms its way throughout my consciousness.

Science is a tricky thing to describe. Definitions can be reductionist; for example, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary states that science is “knowledge about, or study of, the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation”.