Personal Morphogenesis 
“So what’s your PhD about?”
It’s an attempt to develop an explanatory framework through which personal changes over the life course can be explained retroductively in a sociological way. I’m using an empirical case study (two years of longitudinal interviews with 18 students taking different degrees… Read More ›
voices and conversations; 'real' and 'pathological'
Reblogged from Ruminations on Madness: I have an upcoming presentation at the Society for Psychological Anthropology biennial in early April (loosely focused on the role of agency in the experience of psychosis) and hence have been thinking through recent experiences—shadowing… Read More ›
Moving beyond abstracted dichotomies in sociological treatments of decision making
Back when I planned to do a PhD in political philosophy, I was extremely interested in Michael Sandel’s critique of John Rawls. Particularly his attack on what he claimed was Rawl’s notion of an ‘unencumbered self’: Now the unencumbered self describes… Read More ›
The four characteristics of internal conversation
The four features of internal conversation: privacy, ellipsis, personalization and context dependency. The first refers to the unavoidable interiority of internal conversation, as well as the topical freedom and the impossibility of misinterpreting the literal meaning of our inner dialogues…. Read More ›
What does it mean to change as a person?
“it is quite a common experience for us to feel remorse without being able fully to articulate what is wrong about what we have done. In these cases we may seek to understand further. And if we succeed, our feelings… Read More ›
Becoming Who We Are – a realist approach to studying personal change
In this presentation I draw on critical realist theories of the person to offer an account of how persons change, or fail to change, over time. I argue that many of the substantive concerns of biographical and lifecourse research can… Read More ›
Why it’s a mistake to surrender learning to psychology…
Archer’s (2004) dispute with Collier concerning the relation between practical and theoretical knowledge illustrates this well, as both draw upon the same example (learning to ride a bike as children) to make opposing theoretical points regarding the role of discursive… Read More ›
Realism and Human Experience
consciousness is always to be conscious of something. Even if its referent is to an internal bodily state, this has an ontological status independence of the ideas we hold about it: experience is necessarily an experience of something, for the verb cannot be… Read More ›
Social Change and Reflexive Guidance
If a subject relies on interlocutors to sustain and confirm reflexive deliberations, it leaves them open to conversational censure in a way in which autonomous reflexives and meta-reflexives are not. If their interlocutor objects, mocks or fails to understand what… Read More ›
The Caterpillar’s Question: Cultural Resources and Identity
After the initial section of my first round of PhD interviews (discussion of different deliberative mental activities) I asked participants what Porpora (2003) calls ‘the caterpillar’s question’: “who are you?” I had two intentions in asking the question. Firstly I… Read More ›
Reflexivity and ‘drift’
Some can remain at the mercy of their first-order pushes and pulls, drifting from job to job, place to place and relationship to relationship. Drift means an absence of personal identity and the accumulation of circumstances which make it harder… Read More ›
Internal conversations and natural language use / question for qualitative researchers
Much of my thesis centers around the notion of internal conversation. Leaving aside broader theoretical issues (what it is, how it works and why it’s important etc) it also poses an obvious epistemic question: if you’re using interviews then how can… Read More ›
Morphogenetic personalism
Morphogenetic personalism aims to understand the four-dimensionality to human existence (conceptualised as each individual’s psychobiography) through ‘slicing’ into the temporal parts of psychobiography, identifying and unpacking processes of elaboration and reproduction in the organisation of that personhood and, through doing… Read More ›
What is an organisation?
Consider the Sociology Department of Warwick University. What is it? The department is not just the individuals within it. If you took all the staff and students from the department and plonked them down in a field in the middle of nowhere,… Read More ›
Emotions and Reflexivity
Archer’s account has recently been subject to criticism for allegedly marginalising the role of emotion in reflexivity (Burkitt 2012, Holmes 2010). Though largely stemming from reading her recent work in isolation, such that the elaborate account of the emotions given in… Read More ›
Youth Prospects in Late Capitalism
The changing circumstances faced in education and the labour market are often used to argue for a radical heterogeneity in the transitional pathways followed by young people (Biggart, Furlong and Cartmel 2008: 56). While an empirical evaluation of this claim is beyond… Read More ›
How to make sense of longitudinal qualitative data
These are the practical steps involved in the approach I’m taking to making sense of longitudinal qualitative data. In my case, these were 5 interviews with 18 people over 2 years. I had a interview guide for each one which… Read More ›
Tradition, Common Sense and The Emotional Burden of Reflexivity
One of the key concepts I’m trying to elaborate in my PhD is what I term the emotional burden of reflexivity: the difficulty of knowing what to do and who to be, given the lack of normative guidance in what… Read More ›
Reflexivity, temporality and ‘possible selves’
In recent decades the trajectory of young learners into higher education (HE) has become increasingly linear, with elective ‘gap years’ standing as the only usual interruption amongst those who move on to HE. However as Stevenson and Clegg (2012) observe the transition… Read More ›
