A big thanks to everyone who sponsored me for the Brighton Half Marathon I ran last Sunday, but a week on and I’m wondering what, exactly, this event had to do with charity. Don’t get me wrong, I do think the charity I ran for (Water- Aid) is a worthwhile charity, doing good and saving [...]

Part 1 I start off with a few statistical sites and then move onto a few ‘qualitative sites’.  1. The United Nations International Human Development Indicators – On this page of the UN’s international development site, you can see the HDI country rankings, get a link to the latest Human Development Report (last one published November [...]

A Buddhist inspired critique of conspicuous consumption

Water Aid works in 23 countries in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, with a total of 606 staff. Its mission is to ‘transform lives by improving access to safe water, hygiene and sanitation in the world’s poorest communities’ To give you an idea of what water aid does – watch this video According to this 2010-11 annual [...]

 I teach International Development as the option for A2 Sociology SCLY3 – I’m posting up most of my resources in order to encourage more people to teach it! Economic Globalisation – The Optimist View The main evidence for economic globalisation lies in the fact that there is now a single, fully integrated global economy. At one level, [...]

Gok Wan challenges the beauty myth – but not our obsession with self

A student left behind this picture after our lesson on ‘non-participant observation’ -I like to think of it as evidence of how ahead of the game we are in ‘hearing the learner voice’ – To my mind this is clear evidence of how much this student loves Sociology                 [...]

I’m in the middle of writing a critique of Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid - mainly because the book uses highly selective evidence to promote neo0liberal ideology – but I will concede that the way Moyo conceptualises the history of development aid from the 1940s is a fairly useful teaching tool for A level Global Development – so here’s a brief summary [...]

Apple recently reported $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales – and these are just the figures for the last three months alone!   This is, of course, thanks to the iphone and ipad – (Apple has sold 183 million iphones since its launch 5 years ago) which together now make up about [...]

No I don’t see the logical connection between running half marathons and donating to charity either, but its tradition, so why not just do it! I am actually running the Brighton half marathon at the end of February – In the time it takes me run it, 250 people would have died due to lack of access to [...]