Categories

Meaning as a system: what words and sentences denote, and how the meaning of a whole is built from its parts.

Signs and signification in general, of which language is the best-studied case: how meaning is carried by anything that stands for something else.

The Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic: Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic and the ancient languages of the Near East.

The theory of collections, from naive counting arguments to the axioms, cardinals and independence results that came out of them.

Extracting information from a measured signal: filtering, sampling, spectral analysis, and separating what matters from the noise around it.

The Chinese branch of Sino-Tibetan: Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, Min and the rest, together with the classical written language.

The Slavic branch of Indo-European, in its eastern, western and southern groups, from Old Church Slavonic to the modern standards.

The past of ordinary people and the structures they lived inside: class, work, family, migration and everyday life.

Collective action outside formal politics: how movements mobilise, what makes them cohere, and when they change anything.

Social structure treated as a graph: who is tied to whom, and what centrality, clustering and brokerage in that graph predict.

How other people change what a person thinks and does: conformity, attitudes, prejudice, group behaviour. Studied from the individual end by psychology and from the group end by sociology, which is why it belongs to both.

How societies sort people into layers, and what determines whether anyone moves between them: class, status, income, mobility.

The general frameworks sociology reasons with: structure and agency, power, class, and the traditions that argue about them.

The study of welfare provision and social intervention: how services are designed and delivered, and whether they work. The scholarship, not the casework itself.

Language and society: how class, region, gender and setting show up in the way people speak, and how variation turns into change.

The study of social life: how groups, institutions and inequalities form, hold together and change.

Schooling as a social institution: who it sorts and how, what it reproduces, and whether it is the ladder it claims to be.

Law as it is lived rather than as it is written: how rules reach people, who can use them, and what a courtroom does that the statute never says.

Religion as social fact: congregations and institutions, who believes what and why it changes, and the long argument about secularisation.

The principles and practices of designing, building, and maintaining reliable software at scale.