Radio 4's Thinking Allowed

Listen to sociological research on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed.  Many of the researchers featured on Thinking Allowed are BSA members, Laurie is a regular visitor and occasional speaker at BSA events and together with Thinking Allowed we offered an annual BSA/BBC Ethnography Prize for a study that made a significant contribution to ethnography. It ran for five years from 2014-2018.

Thinking Allowed is a radio discussion programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday afternoons between 16:00 and 16:30 and repeated between 00:15 and 00:45 on Monday mornings. It focuses on the latest social science research and is hosted by Laurie Taylor, who was formerly a Professor of Sociology at the University of York. The programme was first broadcast in 1998. 

See below for details of the winners of the ethnography prize.

Occasionally, special editions of the programme are produced in co-operation with the Open University and you can find out more about these on the Open University website.

Winners of the BSA/BBC Ethnography Prize

• The winning entry of the 2018 Ethnography Award was Anna-Lora Wainwright with Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (Urban and Industrial Environments) (MIT Press, 2017)
• The winning entry of the 2017 Ethnography Award was Hilary Pilkington with Loud and Proud: Passion and Politics in the English Defence League, Manchester (Manchester University Press, 2016)
• The winning entry of the 2016 Ethnography Award was Maxin Bolt with: Zimbabwe's Migrants and South Africa's Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence.(Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• The winning entry of the 2015 Ethnography Award was Ruben Andersson with: Illegality Inc: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe.
• The winning entry of the 2014 Ethnography Award was Helen Sampson with: International seafarers and transnationalism in the twenty-first century (Manchester University Press, 2013).