In 10 days I leave the University of Cambridge to start as Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester, which means I’ll be leaving the city of Cambridge in a few months to move back to the city of my birth. The Faculty of Education here has been a […]
I’ve been writing a lot recently about platform socialisation. I’m interested in how the proliferation of platforms brings about fundamental changes in the process of socialisation, as well as how we respond to these normatively and educationally.
I’m so excited the book I’ve been working on with Lambros Fatsis over the last few years is coming out in June. It’s the result of a long conversation we’ve had about our mutual frustrations concerning ‘public sociology’ which led us to rethink what it means to be public scholars once digital platforms are ubiquitous and the public sphere has been decimated by COVID-19.
I can be found in the garden, singing this song, when the last rose of summer is gone
Whilst the current COVID19 pandemic has brought home to many citizens in the Global North the fragility of their existence, including a lack of resilience in education systems and exacerbation of widespread learning inequalities, in the Global South this is but one more crisis in a long list that has punctuated daily lives and educational journeys. […]
Special Issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociology https://szs.sgs-sss.ch/en/home/ Deadline for Abstracts: November 15th, 2021 Guest-Editors: Luca Tratschin (Center for Higher Education and Science Studies, University of Zurich) Christian Leder (Center for Higher Education and Science Studies, University of Zurich) Philippe Saner (Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training, Zollikofen; […]
As an institution, the University faces the challenge of its own survival in the 21st century. The educational ecosystem that integrates it is under pressure and some hard conditions that restrict the work of teachers and researchers. The ‘Accelerated Academy’ project is promoted by an international group of academics willing to […]
I wrote in late 2019 about why I was deleting my personal Twitter account. This extract from Casey Newton’s newsletter perfectly captures my experience without the academic jargon I was leaning on to articulate it. My experience was that you either bleed time and energy into this dynamic or you feel like an asshole for ignoring people who misunderstand you.
Primary Role The Conference Coordinator will support CEDE! before, during and after our 2021 conference “Shifting power in aid: knowledges, violence, and justice”. Overview The Collective on Education, Decoloniality and Emergencies (CEDE!) is comprised of individuals and organisations seeking just practices for trans/national aid to learners, educators and education systems […]
One of the more depressing features of our information environment is the growing tendency to combine absolute scepticism of the ‘mainstream media’ with absolute credulity in relation to anonymous people stumbled across on social media.
I’ve struggled to articulate why I found this music so inspiring over the last 18 months. The melody is so simple yet is built through repetition into something that is striving, urgent and hopeful. It makes me feel there’s always the possibility for creation amidst destruction, as long as we […]
While clearing out my office I encountered this memorandum of understanding signed by representatives of the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University during the #USSStrikes in March 2018.
I’ve always loved this section from Treatise Book 1 Section 7 in which Hume describes how his philosophical musings seem so ‘strained and ridiculous’ after time with his friends.
I thought this was a lovely point by Zoe Williams about the tendency to romanticise pre-digital life, imagining infinite reserves of attention existing in the absence of contemporary digital technologies: Item three: some people – on this occasion, definitely not my kids – seem to think that we were all […]
As someone who just turned 36, the pandemic has occupied around 4.5% of my life.
“As Independent Sage’s most recent report suggests, given the real effectiveness of vaccines, to reach ‘herd immunity’ with the original variant of Covid-19 one would need 78.4 per cent of people to be vaccinated. With Alpha variant, the figure would have to be 91.5 per cent. With Delta variant, it would be 98 per cent”
This is a lovely piece from L. M. Sacasas on the limitations of digital literacy initiatives, tending as they do to abstract the intellectual problem of reliable truth-seeking practices from the moral problem of being committed to seeking that truth under conditions which make it difficult. In this sense, he’s arguing that virtue is something which the platform ecosystem requires of it as we try and flourish within and through the field of temptation it presents us with.
