The Causal Power of Social Structures Dave Elder-Vass, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, £50.00, 240pp. Explaining the Normative Stephen Turner, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2010, £18.99, 240pp. Normativity is a concept with a contentious history. While most would accept its centrality to… Read More ›
The Discursive Gap 
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 ›
Subjects vs subjectification – getting beyond an unhelpful dichotomy (without irritating the Foucauldians too much)
One important objection to the notion of ‘internal conversation’ rests on a broader trend within contemporary social theory that is concerned with the possibility that theoretical claims about agency lead proponents to make claims about agents which are empirically inadequate…. Read More ›
“Oh! There are other people just like me? I’m not so weird after all”: the transformation of identity in the digital age
The internet was integral to the formation of the asexual community. While the details are slightly messier than such an account suggests, the sociologically important aspects of its history can be summarised as follows: Individuals who don’t experience sexual attraction are made… Read More ›
Why do people believe what they believe? Getting beyond the idea there’s something wrong with people who disagree with us
I’ve always been fascinated by the question of why people hold the political beliefs they do. In part this is because of how badly most people handle this question. From across the political spectrum, there is a pervasive tendency to explain away the… Read More ›
By far the best explanation of cultural realism I have ever encountered
You can think of culturally decodable information as a potential form of experience, very much as you can think of a brick resting on a ledge as storing potential energy. When the brick is prodded to fall, the energy is… 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 ›
From psychological selves to neurochemical selves
Human beings, characteristically try to reform and improve themselves. Inescapably, at any historical moment, they do so in terms of knowledges and beliefs about the kinds of creatures that they are. Over the first sixty years or so fo the twentieth century, human beings – at… Read More ›
Interrogating Sex and Gender Categories: an Asexual Case Study
Until 2001 there wasn’t an asexual community. Why was this? The question is more complex than it appears. The internet was a necessary condition because it allowed a geographically dispersed group to connect. Was it a sufficient condition though? It… Read More ›
The Discursive Gap
“I came to identify as asexual this way: I have never understood the desire to engage in the acts that define sex, from kissing on down the list. My body doesn’t function that way – it doesn’t excite me. Other… Read More ›
The Difficulty of Working Out Who You Are: Sexual Categories, Sexual Culture and Asexuality
The talk I gave at the recent Spotlight on Asexuality Studies event: http://markcarrigan.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/markspotlight.mp3
The Sex Drive Hypothesis
Characteristically, the scientist confronts a complex interaction system – in this case, an interaction between man and opium. He observes a change in the system – the man falls asleep. The scientist then explains the change by giving a name… Read More ›
Romance yields to ‘friendship with benefits’?
An interesting article in today’s Times (which I can’t link to because of the paywall) about the growth of ‘friendship with benefits’. It reports findings of research in the US which suggests that such relationships are becoming a lot more… Read More ›
