Updates from April, 2012 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Mark 9:15 pm on April 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Dan Hind, ,   

    The fate of the individual in late capitalism 

    in the absence of a public space in which we can engage with one another in an attempt to discover and secure the common good, we fall back on private strategies to shore up both our material conditions and our sense of self. We try to tailor our personalities to become more competitive. We mange our moods and adjust our attitudes through a process of self-surveillance and voluntary intoxication that in its reach and effectiveness far exceeds the achievements of totalitarian government. Or we seek chemical oblivion, sudden enrichment thorough gambling or the narcosis of being well-known in conditions of deepening distress. Our energetic, even frenzied, preoccupation with the private self plays out as a civic listlessness. And even as the need to collaborate in the production of public goods grows ever more acute, the economy consigns an ever greater number of us to enforced idleness.

    Dan Hind, The Return of the Public, Pg 7-8

     

  • Mark 6:21 pm on April 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply
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    Use of web 2.0 tools amongst UK researchers 

    The research is two years old so it’s very possible this has changed dramatically but I’ve been preoccupied with this for the last few days:

    http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/use-and-relevance-web-20-researchers

     

  • Mark 5:52 pm on April 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply
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    The Arrogance of Publishers vs. Academic Culture – Why the Outcome Is Virtually Certain 

    Technologists also believe that publishing is transportable — anyone can be a publisher. All you need are some basic skills, access to a blogging platform, and some determination. While for certain forms of expression this can be true — this blog is an example — for a complex organism like an academic press or an academic journal, much more is needed, including people with the talent and experience to get it right. I may think I’m a good cook because I can occasionally prepare a surprisingly tasty meal on a Sunday night by following someone else’s recipe and using the right ingredients, but that by no means translates into my ability to create, finance, run, and manage a restaurant. If you’re a “cooking technologist,” you think all you need is an oven, pans, and ingredients.

    IT Arrogance vs. Academic Culture — Why the Outcome Is Virtually Certain

    Imagine a situation where homes had no kitchens and utensils were unavailable. We would all be dependent on cafes and restaurants to eat and, it follows, our idea of what it is to prepare food would be exhausted by those working in such a capacity within these establishments. Now introduce kitchens into homes and affordable utensils into shops. Suddenly we can cook meals at home. Obviously the quality of the infrastructure is lower and there’s less expertise. For the sake of the thought-experiment, assume kitchens and utensils appeared suddenly, to an extent profoundly disruptive of established practices of going out for every meal. The meals cooked at home would be of poor quality, probably pragmatically orientated and often imitating (poorly) the meals available in restaurants and cafes.

    With time, hobbyists become more adept at imitating such meals and, as cooking becomes an everyday activity, new kinds of meals emerge because the practical intent behind cooking is no longer constrained by the economics of the restaurant. Then the utensils get ever better and cook books become a market in their own right, with expert guidance being commercially (and sometimes freely) available to anyone who wants it. The gap between the professional chefs and enthusiastic amateurs becomes ever narrower. Likewise, the vast majority of the populace becomes capable of cooking in a purely functional way, with a range of outcomes shaped by personal preference.People can even, god forbid, cook for each other. Those who put the effort in are able to cook very well.

    None of this means that restaurants go out of business. But it does mean the economics of the restaurant business change profoundly. What was once, in the thought-experiment, a position of hegemony where everyone is reliant on the restaurant for all their meals becomes a position where the restaurant must offer some additional value vis-a-vis the meals people are able to cook at home. If everyone can cook in a way which is good enough for everyday purposes, the restaurant must offer something else. For a while, it might get by on the social convention that you don’t socialise or celebrate with meals at home. It might also get by on people either being unable to cook or choosing not to cook once they have that capacity. But once the infrastructure and the expertise is distributed widely enough, it simply has to innovate or its position will eventually become untenable. The fact the populace is able to cook for themselves doesn’t mean the restaurateur has no future, far from it. However if they spend this time arrogantly dismissing the pretensions of the amateur cooks rather than creatively redefining their role to take account of the fact they no longer have a monopoly on cooking then, frankly, they’re screwed and, more over, they deserve their fate.

     

  • Mark 10:09 am on April 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: clive barnett, rachel pain, social science research,   

    Impacting publics: striking a blow or walking together? 

    2nd Creating Publics keynote lecture event with Rachel Pain

    (University of Durham)

     Impacting   publics: striking a blow or walking together?

     Wednesday 16 May 2012, 14.00-16.00

    Open University, Milton Keynes, Michael Young Building Meeting Rooms 1 & 2

     

    The Creating Publics project was launched in March 2012 with the aim of innovating new ways of engaging publics in the on-going processes of social science research and public life.

    For the 2nd Creating Publics keynote lecture we are delighted to welcome Rachel Pain (University of Durham).

     

    Programme:

    14:00               Welcome and introduction: Jef Huysmans and Nick Mahony (CCIG)

    14:10               Keynote lecture: Professor Rachel Pain (University of Durham)

    15:00               Responses by Clive Barnett and Helen Arfvidsson (CCIG)

    15:30               Q & A and collective discussion

     

    The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

    In the spirit of public experimentation that this project promotes, the event will be webcast live and accessible here.

    Those viewing online will be able to post questions and comments, which will be relayed live to the event.

    To register to attend in person, please email socsci-ccig-events@open.ac.uk

    For further information on the event and more details on the lecture, please visit our website.


     

  • Mark 8:26 am on April 30, 2012 Permalink | Reply
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    Studying gender and sexuality psychosocially: Dialogue across perspectives, 15 May 2012 

    Studying gender and sexuality psychosocially: Dialogue across perspectives

    Tuesday 15 May 2012, 10:00-16:40

    The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

    Location: Michael Young Building 1,2 & 3

    Map and Directions:

    http://www8.open.ac.uk/about/main/faculties-and-centres/milton-keynes-campus

     Event

    This event brings together people who are studying gender and sexuality from a variety of psychosocial perspectives. There have been a number of events recently considering ‘new femininities’, ‘sexualisation’, ‘girlhood’ and other related topics, but few have explicitly focused on what different theoretical positions have to offer these areas. These topics are of great psychosocial interest because the key tension throughout the work is that between structure and agency.

    During this seminar a number of perspectives will be offered during the morning (psychoanalytic, phenomenological, Deleuzian, discursive, critical realist, etc.) in two panels of presentations. In the afternoon, two facilitated workshops will give attendees the chance to bring their own theoretical perspectives to bear on data in this field. Finally, responses to the day will be offered by some key writers in this area.

    Programme

    10:00-10:15       Introductions: Meg Barker and Ros Gill

    10:15-11.45       Panel 1: Valerie Walkerdine, Jessica Ringrose, EmmaRenold & Gabrielle Ivinson

    11:45-13:15       Panel 2: Mark Carrigan, Feona Attwood, DarrenLangdridge

    13:15-14:00       Lunch

    14:00-15:00       Workshop 1: Working psychosocially with participant data – led by Ester McGeeney

    15:00-16:00       Workshop 2: Working psychosocially existing data – led by Laura Harvey

    15:45-16:30       Responses: Ros Gill, Gail Lewis, Kesi Mahendran, Meg Barker

    Registration: Please e-mail socsci-ccig-events@open.ac.uk if you would like to attend.

    If you have any queries please contact Sarah Batt, Research Secretary,a.s.c.batt@open.ac.uk. Tel: 01908 654704.  Convenor: Meg Barker

     

  • Mark 8:00 pm on April 22, 2012 Permalink | Reply
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    Fast, cheap and out of control 

    Particular types of technology lend themselves to this digital, networked and open approach. Brian Lamb (2010) borrows the title from Errol Morris’ 1997 documentary to describe the kind of technology he prefers and thinks is useful in education as being fast, cheap and out of control. As with digital, networked and open, it is the intersection of the three that is the area of real interest. These three characteristics are significant for education in the following manner:

    • Fast – technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. The academic does not need to attend a training course to use it or submit a request to their central IT services to set it up. This means they can experiment quickly.
    • Cheap – tools that are usually free or at least have a freemium model so the individual can fund any extension themselves. This means that it is not necessary to gain authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means the user doesn’t need to be concerned about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
    • Out of control – these technologies are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element and are more flexible. They are also democratised tools, so the control of them is as much in the hands of students as it is that of the educator.

    Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services and the uses they put technology to in education. If someone has invested £300,000 in an eportfolio system, for example, then there exists an obligation to persist with it over many years. If, however, they’ve selected a free blog tool and told students to use it as a portfolio, then they can switch if they wish and also put it to different uses. [new paragraph] There are, of course, many times when this approach may not be suitable (student record systems need to be robust and operate at an enterprise level, for example), but that doesn’t mean it is never appropriate. Writing in Wired, Robert Capps (2009) coined the term ‘the good enough revolution’. This reflects a move away from expensive, sophisticated software and hardware to using tools which are easy to use, lightweight and which tie in with the digital, networked, open culture.

    The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice (chapter 1)

     

    • Robert O'Toole 12:20 pm on June 15, 2012 Permalink

      Just started reading this book. Very good. Now must persuade uni authorities!

    • Mark 9:47 am on July 6, 2012 Permalink

      any luck!?

  • Mark 1:27 am on April 20, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    I can’t sleep because of my endless coughing so I’ll play with Worldle instead… 

    Wordle: wordle for markcarrigan.net

     

  • Mark 7:08 pm on April 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    John Holmwood gets a spontaneous round of applause while talking about the future of #sociology at #britsoc12 during the @cwrightmills event 

     

  • Mark 6:34 pm on April 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Mike O’Donnell on “Charles Wright Mills and the (Continuing) Problem of Radical Agency” 

    Mike O’Donnell’s talk on “Charles Wright Mills and the (Continuing) Problem of Radical Agency” from the C Wright Mills session I organised at the BSA conference in Leeds. Will go up on Sociological Imagination once I’ve finished editing the session and gathering the related material I want to post up with it.

     

  • Mark 2:01 pm on April 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: exploring research, impact activities, , ,   

    Nine resources for academics getting started with Twitter 

    1. Register for Twitter and find researchers to follow
    2. Engage with your network on Twitter
    3. “Why do you find Twitter useful as an academic?”
    4. The LSE’s list of academic twitter users
    5. Support, engagement, visibility and personalised news: Twitter has a lot to offer academics if we look past its image problem
    6. 100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics
    7. 10 Ways Researchers Can Use Twitter
    8. Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities
    9. Exploring research networks on Twitter
     

  • Mark 10:03 am on April 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Multi-author blogging resources for academics 

    Does anyone have any suggestions of additional resources I can add to the list?

     

  • Mark 8:38 am on April 19, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: liz stanley, mass observation, ,   

    Mass Observation, Quantified Self and Human Nature 

    I woke up this morning to a great feature (at 7:38am) on Radio 4 about the 75th birthday of the Mass Observation project. The project was founded in 1937 by a team of young researchers with the intention of creating an ‘anthropology of ourselves’. Both through professional observers and the large scale recruitment of respondents from the public, it aimed to capture the everyday with a particular kind of approach which, to the best of my knowledge, had never been attempted before. As Liz Stanley describes the approach in her book ‘Sex Surveyed’:

    it saw research into any community or activity as an essentially collaborative activity, not necessarily in the details of being carried out but certainly in bringing together and using many different accounts in writing about such research. It also recognized that the informal aspects of research – just living and being in the context of study – could be as important in gaining knowledge as those activities defined as ‘research’ in the narrow sense. Relatedly, it made a fundamental distinction between obtrusive and unobtrusive research techniques and opted very firmly for the latter, eschewing direct questioning and instead focusing on ‘follows’ and ‘overheards’, in which interesting persons or groups were trailed, and overheard conversations were recorded in as much detail as possible. In doing so, it focused on ordinary life, on the rhythms and patterns of the ordinary at home’, which it argued remained largely unknown to social science research. (pg 20)

    The obvious observation to make here is the extent to which the large scale uptake of social media affords new opportunities for such ‘follows’ and ‘overheards’. Furthermore the infrastructure for the participatory aspects of the approach have been radically transformed by social media: the logistical costs involved in soliciting and processing contributions from respondents have been radically reduced e.g. private blogs would clearly fit.

    However what struck me this morning while listening to the feature on Radio 4 was the extent to which the ethos of Mass Observation was so ahead of its time and so congruent with the emerging ethics of social media. I don’t just mean this in terms of construing the research process in a collaborative way, although this is no doubt important. But in terms of what motivates people to respond and participate: not just the confessional but the possibilities for self-clarification and self-knowledge which participation in a project like this offers.

    I’ve long been fascinated both by the Quantified Self movement and, if this isn’t a self-defeatingly awkward expression, my own lack of desire to participate in it despite my intellectual fascination with it. It’s the idea of “self-knowledge through numbers”… it just doesn’t do it for me. But the idea of a grassroots communal exploration of the possibilities which digital tools afford as technologies of the self  is very much the sort of thing I’m interested in. I’ve been thinking recently about the idea of a qualified self, for lack of a better term i.e. self-knowledge through words. What would it look like? The thought that struck me this morning was that my images of what ‘Mass Observation 2.0’ and Qualified Self would look like are actually very similar: a communal and participatory exploration of what it means to be human in the 21st century?

     

  • Mark 8:41 pm on April 16, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    Digital tools and the transformation of scholarship 

    Digital content, distributed via a global network, has laid the foundation for potential changes in academia, but it is when the third element of openness is added in that more fundamental challenges to existing practice are seen, as I hope to demonstrate throughout this book. Let us take an example to illustrate this combination of a digital, networked and open approach, that of the life of a journal article.

    The authors, let’s call them Frank and Sally, know each other through a combination of commenting on each other’s blogs, being part of the same network on Twitter where they share many of the same contacts and some email exchanges. Following a blog post by Frank on pedagogy for networked learning, Sally posts a long piece in reply. They decide to collaborate on a paper together and work in Google Docs to produce it. Sally gives a presentation about the subject to her department and shares the presentation on Slideshare. She posts the link to this on Twitter, and it gets retweeted several times by people in her network, some of whom comment on the presentation. Frank posts a draft of their chapter on his blog and again receives a number of comments which they incorporate into the paper. They submit it to an open access journal, where it is reviewed and published within two months. They both tweet and blog about the paper, which gets widely cited and has more than 8,000 views. As a result of the paper, they give a joint presentation in an open, online course on networked learning.

    The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice (chapter 1)

     

  • Mark 7:40 pm on April 16, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    A round up of digital change & ePublishing stuff I’m going to come back to properly at a later date 

    Community Development Journal Plus – ePublishing as supplement to core journal

    End user online survey of eBooks in Higher Education 

    Sage encouraging and supporting the use of social media by their authors to reach a wider audience (see here and here)

    The History Blogging Project – a case study worth looking at in greater depth for the report and perhaps trying to interview the author

    Google Currents – I created a test account for Sociological Imagination which I  should go back to and have a proper play with at a later date

    Course Smart – interesting ePublishing initiative worth looking at as a (mini?) case study

    What fuels the most influential tweets – great analysis (and go through the original research) to substantiate a case about effective multimodal digital engagement for universities

    Cambridge’s rather attractive approach to profiling research – I want to have a proper look at how this varies across universities, think about strengths and weaknesses, plus see how, if at all, these initiatives connect to wider ePublishing projects

    Self publishing your own book is the new business card – what ideas does this hold for academic epublishing?

    Mobile publishing tools – great round up of resources. are any of them relevant to epublishing in higher education?

     

  • Mark 9:37 am on April 16, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    New NCRM funded network of methodological innovation – New social media, new social science? 

    NatCen Social Research, Sage and the Oxford Internet Institute will be launching our new network for methodological innovation at the end of May. The network will explore whether social science researchers should embrace social media and, if we do, what the implications are for our methods and practice? We know that social media tools are increasingly being used in social science research. The nature of these tools means that it is a fast changing environment, with new practice emerging all the time. Despite this, there is limited interaction of practitioners or synthesis of these methods; there are also few opportunities to reflect on the implications of social media tools for research participants, methods and ethics. Our network of methodological innovation will bring together academics, researchers and research stakeholders from all sectors. The aim is to develop a community of practice with members drawn from the cutting-edge of academia, market research and applied social research.

    Our community will be launched with a 1-day conference at the end of May 2012 with four further knowledge exchange e-events and a closing event across the next 12 months. We are hoping to live stream our events to enable the participation of network members from across the UK and internationally. We will build a collaborative online platforms to co-create think pieces, blogs, practitioner guides and develop lively discussion forums.

    To join the network you can email me directly, or follow this link to read more before signing up: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/research/NMI/2012/socialmedia.php

    We’ll look forward to hearing from you.

    Kandy Woodfield
    Head of Learning and Development

     

  • Mark 9:24 am on April 16, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: monash university epress, scholarly material,   

    This is how universities should do ePublishing… 

    Monash University ePress was established in 2003 as an initiative that would lead the way in using innovative information technology to publish scholarly material. Its aims were to:

    • advance scholarly communication by reducing the costs of and barriers to scholarly publications
    • provide a more direct link between readers and writers of scholarly material
    • promote the best of Monash University’s research activities and intellectual capital
    • provide a sustainable electronic publishing model that facilitates the identification and pursuit of commercial opportunities
    • use innovative information technology to capture, publish, retrieve, read and present scholarly material
    • lead by example and provide a body of expertise within the university

    The ePress focused on publishing electronic journals in underserved and emerging disciplines. It also published monographs and edited collections. The ePress primarily served the humanities and social sciences fields.

    About Monash University ePress

     

  • Mark 3:59 pm on April 15, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , ,   

    My notes on the digital scholar (chapter 1) 

    My summary notes of Martin Weller’s superb book The Digital Scholar, with my own reflections prompted by the book in brackets.

    • The resources involved in scholarship are changing in the digital age. This is not a case of new replacing old, as books and journals are as influential as ever, rather it is a diversification of the options available to scholars in the production of their work e.g. social bookmarking, blogs, youtube, wikipedia, slideshare, scribd, social networks, google alerts etc. After all, as the author observes, “books and journal articles still constitute a large part of the information sources I draw upon” and, furthermore, the output of the scholarship is itself a book. These have not been replaced, nor are they likely to be, they’ve merely been joined by a whole range of additional resources which are, in large part, freely available. Traditional resources for scholarship have been joined by “blog posts, videos, draft publications, conference presentations and also the discussion, comment and debate surrounding each of these” (which I think is the most significant pathway through which digital media will transform scholarship: all this gray literature, the provisional outputs of scholarship, were being produced anyway, in so far as there are provisional steps before ‘final’ products of scholarship emerged. but firstly as these have been increasingly produced in a digital form, rather than say just being paper notes, and, secondly, as a communications infrastructure has facilitated the effortless sharing of these digital outputs, a formerly private, though not necessarily non-social, aspect of academic life is increasingly able to stand as a public resources. the more these are seen as legitimate and organic aspects of scholarship which HAPPEN to be produced and disseminated digitally, the faster the digital revolution of scholarship will take place)
    • As well as the diversification of options available to scholars, the way in which we access ‘traditional’ resources has changed. The quantity available online has increased hugely in a relatively short space of time (although there’s been less of a change in the free availability of such resources). 
    • While this proliferation of resources might be seen to pose a problem, conveniently the same underlying processes have given rise to a whole range of social filtering practices which are still in their infancy. The author’s twitter feed (which I can very much identify with) provides an extremely useful way of cutting through the cognitive challenges involved in make sense of this abundance, both through direct crowd-sourcing appeals and indirectly simply through the aggregative filtering activity of people in the network (which becomes ever more useful as you engage more with Twitter, even perhaps promising to become more so in future, as we still lack any real vocabulary for conceptualising collective filtering in a sophisticated way and, without this, our attempts to maximise its effectiveness in our own digital lives are going to be constrained to some extent).
    • The fact that this book has been published online under a creative commons license (which is pretty admirable, to say the least) means that “the boundary to what constitutes the book is blurred; it is both the physical object and its complementary material” which, in this case, encompasses “videos, presentations and blog posts, which relate to the book, with comments and reaction to these“.
    • Digital scholarship has a broader institutional and structural significance. As the author puts it, “ in a digital, networked, open world people become less defined by the institution to which they belong and more by the network and online identity they establish” and, as a consequence, “a well-respected digital scholar may well be someone who has no institutional affiliation“.   (I’d add that the diminishing material reliance on institutional resources discussed earlier also plays an important structural role here, complementing the cultural point I take the author to be making, which is why pay-for-publication open access is something which those who support the transformative potential of digital scholarship must think VERY carefully about).
    • Particularly because of these changes, the question of how to define a ‘digital scholar’ becomes a bit tricky: it’s not just academics who use digital tools and it’s not just anyone posting something intellectual online. The author offers a (working) definition of it as “someone who employs digital, networked and open approaches to demonstrate specialism in a field”.
    • The changes to scholarship which digital tools bring about shouldn’t be construed as purely an extrinsic matter relating to the quality and quantity of resources available. These factors, in combination, “provide fertile ground for the transformation of practice“.
    • One aspect of this is a consequence of the fact that “much of the scholarly process we have currently can be viewed as a product of the medium in which they are conducted”. These aren’t just arbitrary constraints e.g. many aspects of the journal production cycle are a consequence of the economics of printing and many characteristics of conference activity stem from the logistical demands of getting all these people together in one place for intellectual interaction. Crucially, many of these restrictions are removed once the process goes digital – it doesn’t mean that there are no restrictions (the digital scholar still exists within structured institutions and digital scholarly activity is still subject to material constraint, no matter how much less constraining these are then non-digital scholarly activity) but it does destabilize many of the assumptions loaded into traditional forms of academic activity e.g. “a journal article can be as long or as short as it needs to be, a journal can be published whenever the articles are ready or a continual publication of articles“.
    • This doesn’t necessarily mean that all such scholarly practices could or should be transformed. But it means that the potential for the transformation is there (working out when, how and why these transformations should take place is something which requires us to move beyond debates polarised by technophobic conservatism and naive boosterism about digital tech).
    • This transformation of practice must be networked. Not just because the easy/free distribution of content across global networks was key to the dramatic transformation that’s visible in many content industries and, it seems, will potentially lead to similar transformations in academia if it’s embraced (not just by individuals, institutional resistances among, say, scholarly publishers will be key here). Also because of the potentially radical effect it will have on scholarly practice, rather than simply the dissemination of products emerging from that practice. As the author observes, “Networks of peers are important in scholarship – they represent the people who scholars share ideas with, collaborate with on research projects, review papers for, discuss ideas with and get feedback from. Prior to the Internet, but particularly prior to social networks, this kind of network was limited to those with whom you interacted regularly”. Given inherent limits (of many sorts) to the number of active connections we can sustain, this had a whole range of effects on how scholars chose to spend their finite material and attentional resources, with ensuing consequences for the kinds of scholarships they engaged in and the outputs that emerged from it. Social network tools haven’t liberated scholars from such constraints but they have radically loosened them: “Without having to attend every conference in their field, it is possible for scholars to build up a network of peers who perform the same role in their scholarly activity as the networks founded on face-to-face contact. Whether these are different in nature or are complementary to existing networks is still unknown, but for those who have taken the step to establishing an online identity, these networks are undoubtedly of significant value in their everyday practice.”
    • The lack of costs involved in sharing within digital systems, as well as the culture of openness as a default which has emerged within them, has radical implications for the dissemination of scholarship. As discussed earlier, many of the characteristics of ‘traditional’ outputs of scholarship are a consequence of the printed medium i.e. “if the only means of disseminating knowledge is a costly print journal then the type of content it contains tends to be finely worked and refined material”. In contrast, “if there are almost cost-free tools for instant sharing, then people can share ideas, opinions, proposals, suggestions and see where these lead“
     

  • Mark 2:14 pm on April 15, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: britsoc 2012, , , , , , sociology's moments,   

    John Holmwood on “Sociology’s ‘moments’: C. Wright Mills and the critique of professionalism” 

    John Holmwood’s talk “Sociology’s ‘moments’: C. Wright Mills and the critique of professionalism” from the C Wright Mills session I organised at the BSA conference in Leeds. Will go up on Sociological Imagination once I’ve finished editing the session and gathering the related material I want to post up with it.

     

  • Mark 1:07 pm on April 15, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , radical ambition, , ,   

    Les Back on Sociology’s Promise 

    Les Back’s talk ‘sociology’s promise’ from the C Wright Mills session I organised at the BSA conference in Leeds. Will go up on Sociological Imagination once I’ve finished editing the session and gathering the related material I want to post up with it.

    There are two books Les mentions in the talk which are fantastic. I’ve been meaning to write reviews of them for quite a while actually:

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Z4yNnGJLHU8C&lpg=PP1&dq=radical%20ambition&pg=PR4&output=embed

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ik9ZUywjcQC&lpg=PP1&dq=pamela%20mills&pg=PP1&output=embed

    (edit to add: for some reason the embedding isn’t working. that’s a bit irritating)

     

  • Mark 12:25 pm on April 15, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags:   

    Michael Burawoy and John Holmwood part 3: the future of sociology 

    Part 3 of a conversation recorded at the BSA conference 2011. Will go up on various sites once I’ve finished editing.

     

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