A Fang-tastic First Event

The Experiencing Sociology Programme got off to a spook-takular start last week with the first event for first years on ‘Kick-Starting your University Career’ which was followed by a hair-raising Halloween social.

The session began with a marketplace of activities beyond the degree programme that are available at the University and to our students. This was a bespoke event where Sociology majors and combined majors could get one-to-one and face-to-face advice from staff from all across the university about opportunities and experiences they could get involved in while studying at Lancaster.

The marketplace gave students the time to talk to staff about the significance of building in particular opportunities to a degree specifically in Sociology.

It was a chance to talk to (among others):

• the Careers Service about prospects and pathways specifically for Sociology graduates;
• members of the Richardson Institute about how Sociology students can contribute to undergraduate research projects commissioned by businesses, charities, and government;
• the Global Experiences team about the fine details of what it would mean to build in a year studying abroad;
• the FASS Placements team and Dr Bron Szerszynski (the Sociology Department’s Employability Tutor) about how to fit in a period of work placement, switch to a four-year version of our degree with a year’s placement or do our third-year dissertation by placement.

We followed up the marketplace with a scary Halloween social which set our first-years a terrifying challenge – to represent a sociological concept through the medium of pumpkin carving!

 

 

Once our students had perfected their creepy creations, it was time to sit back with some gruesome snacks and enjoy a chilling lecture by Professor Elizabeth Shove on the ‘Sociology of Halloween’, its transformations over time, repulsive rituals, and frightening reflections of society’s fears.

 

 

You can see Elizabeth’s slides here: Halloween Presentation

Then it was up to Elizabeth to try to guess and judge how well the teams represented their concepts in pumpkin form.

One group used their pumpkin to provide an icky indictment of the Sociological ‘canon’ – carving a Karl Marx pumpkin with a startling spider on his head. (N.B. The significance of the spider was hotly contested.) Another team carved the face of a ‘stray cat’ into a pumpkin to invoke the abominable idea of alienation.

But the most successful and most easily guessed representation of a sociological concept was ‘panopticism’ and the panopto-pumpkin which a spider guard inside!

We had such a good time, one supernatural student cleared up at the Sociology Department’s Halloween party winning the award for best costume. See the giant cake and first prize being awarded by the Head of Department in official ceremonial garb below!

The next event is ‘Reading Fast, Reading Slow: How to Make More Useful Notes’ which will be followed by a Festive Winter Social including a Sociological Festive Winter Quiz! We look forward to seeing you then!