About

My name is Antje Bednarek and I am a sociologist. I started this blog so that I could write about inspiring books I come across. Books are an important part of my life; a good book moves and affects me so I will think and talk about it a lot. That’s what being a bookling is all about (though I have explained booklings in more detail here). Looking at the tag cloud one year into blogging, however, it’s quite obvious that books aren’t the only important thing: Politics, (this may sound stupid, but it’s not my fault – the tag names preceded me) Life and Photography are also important. I seem to be writing about academia heaps too.

Politics comes into this blog from my research in which I look at young Scottish Conservatives, ‘Life’ comes from WordPress and is a pretty vague tag but what can you do, sometimes you just write about life, maybe because it’s troubled or surprised you and there you go, ‘Life’ just grows larger and larger. Photography is my hobby and academia is where I work (and live? Hm.).

Being of German stock and having lived outside Germany for a good many years now, I usually come to topics sort of as an alien would, meaning: I find a lot of things quite strange, or interestingly weird. This is an attitude that many sociologists who look at everyday life have. We don’t only do research when there’s a huge problem that we need to quickly understand so that we can then, again quickly, implement policies; we also do research when things that could be problematic aren’t. For instance, and this is an obvious example, why is it that even emancipated women with a feminist consciousness still do most of the cooking? Or why is it that large corporations get away with murder whilst individual shop assistants are fired because they accidentally took a stale bread-bun home? When these things are happening and they are not perceived as problematic, well, that’s what I find pretty interesting. That’s when I go ‘hey, what’s going on here? Let’s explore.’

So that’s the gist of what I am doing here. I hope you enjoy reading my blog! I enjoy writing it.

If you feel offended by any of the things said here, well – I hope you’ll get over it quickly. I don’t aim to offend. You can’t know that of course but maybe it helps you taking things in context. Just take it with a grain of salt.