Michael Biggs B.A.
Hons (Victoria
University of Wellington), Ph.D.
(Harvard)
Professor of Sociology
and Fellow of St Cross
College, University of Oxford
Publications
Most sociology focuses on events of everyday life or on encompassing social structures. I'm particularly interested in times when ordinary people choose extraordinary actions, in defiance of powerful structures. Their collective action occasionally transform those structures, which of course lends it historical significance. But even when collective action fails, it is intrinsically interesting. Within the discipline, my research fits into the field of social movements, or more broadly political sociology.
The volatility of collective protest is my first theoretical interest. I have investigated two waves of protest which erupted suddenly, surprising even the participants: strikes for the eight-hour day in the United States in 1886 and sit-ins in the American South in 1960. I argue that it's not adequate to deploy the conventional explanatory strategy, seeking causes in exogenous shifts in political or economic circumstances, is not adequate. Instead, I argue for an endogenous process of positive feedback: people protest because other people have done so.
A second interest is self-inflicted suffering as a form of protest. Strikes and sit-ins inflict a cost on the opponent, and thus can coerce the opponent into offering concessions--a straightforward logic of bargaining. Why would it make sense to harm oneself, without harming others: to go on hunger strike or to set oneself on fire?
I have investigated the social contexts of mobilization in various contexts: from membership of the far-right British National Party to the 2011 London riot; from the massacre of Muslims in India in 2002 to Islamist students resisting the 2013 coup in Egypt. These analyses exploit original data including the leaked addresses of party members, records of arrests compiled by the police or by activists, and the locations of killings.
My research sometimes challenges orthodox methods and established findings. I show that the survey questions typically used to measure protest have distorted our understanding of trends over time, and that the most common metric for quantifying protest is misleading. My concern with scientific rigour led me beyond the discipline of sociology, to examine the evidence underpinning the medicalization of adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria, including the rate of suicide and the efficacy of puberty suppression. This strand of my research has had policy impact, most recently forcing the Office of National Statistics to admit that the Census of England and Wales had incorrectly measured the transgender population.Finally, I have written historical constructivist accounts of how various bodies of knowledge have reshaped institutions. My very first article traced the impact of cartography on European states. A recent article undertakes a similar exercise for the effect of queer theory on English prisons.
