Month: August 2012
Originally posted on The Asexual Agenda:
HEY. I’m calling you out, ace community. I’ve seen something prevalent in our community, and I think it’s time that it needs to end. The way we talk about and portray allosexual folks is often almost a caricature. We often speak of them as if they are constantly horny,…
Traditionally, “Public places” refer to any regions in a community freely accessible to members of that community; “private places” refer to soundproof regions where only members or invitees gather” Erving Goffman, Behaviour in Public Places, Pg 9
The sexual assumption is the usually unexamined presupposition that sexual attraction is both universal (everyone ‘has it’) and uniform (it’s fundamentally the same thing in all instances) such that its absence must be explicable in terms of a distinguishable pathology. All from this Guardian article about asexuality earlier in the week: What, not even a bit of mild […]
consciousness is always to be conscious of something. Even if its referent is to an internal bodily state, this has an ontological status independent of the ideas we hold about it: experience is necessarily an experience of something, for the verb cannot be intransitive. Thus the experiencer is someone who encounters something prior to it, relatively autonomous […]
As Savage and Burrows (2007: 894) point out, the popularity of the in depth interview in British sociology stems from an intellectual reaction to the excesses of Parsonian functionalism: responding to talk of reference groups, norms and values with the valorization of intensely idiographic methods which are geared towards the elaboration of people’s own values in their own […]
A reply to Ewan Morrison stemming from a Twitter debate over this appearance on Radio 4. There seem to be two issues here which, though clearly related, remain distinguishable: The ramifications of the digitalization of culture (and the changing practices of cultural engagement which they facilitate) for the commercial sustainability of cultural enterprise. The wider moral and […]
I got completely sucked into this discussion all afternoon. I had three initial aims with my asexuality research: mapping out community in a ideographically adequate way, understanding the role the internet played in the formation of the community and exploring what the reception of asexuality reveals about sexual culture. There’s still more I want to […]
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 they are saying then the possibility of reaching a conclusion, at least in that instance, […]
I instantly thought of this video after spending way too much time arguing on this Guardian thread earlier today.
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 hoped that it would frame the subsequent discussion (centring around their life in university) in […]
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 to form one. Its obverse is not some kind of generalised conformity: its real opposite […]
Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it’s partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist. Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we’re trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some […]
Catnets exist where a set of actors are both internally densely networked in a relevant and meaningful manner and also share a common ‘category’ or ‘collective identity’. Actors can belong to a common category and even adhere to a common identity without necessarily enjoying meaningful and dense network ties: hermits are an obvious example. Likewise actors can […]
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 you claim to gain knowledge of people’s internal conversations? I’ve never thought this was much […]
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 so, ‘tracing out’ the specific connections with wider changes in social life which, in whatever […]
Semiosis is multi-functional (Jakobson 1990; Halliday 1994). It is simultaneously referential (or propositional, or ideational), social-relational (or interpersonal), and expressive. Thus, in the Habermasian terms introduced earlier, semiosis raises validity claims of truth, appropriateness and truthfulness/sincerity. Though it should hardly need saying, we insist on the importance of all three, including, contra Saussureans, the role of reference: there are not […]
critical realists distinguish the real from the actual and the empirical. The ‘real’ refers to objects, their structures or natures and their causal powers and liabilities. The ‘actual’ refers to what happens when these powers and liabilities are activated and produce change. The ’empirical’ is the subset of the real and the actual that is experienced […]
