Month: April 2014

  • Orphans

    Goodbye circus wheelMay you rest along the sea I have given you the fire of my youth And the triumph o’er my enemiesGoodbye fair weather home, and your faithless factoriesI have given you the blood and the truthfrom the wounds they laid onto meAnd whatever they left, well, I kept it for my own heartAnd the lonesome […]

  • And I hate these things but I always attend

    And I hate these things but I always attend, a little sip of something to take off the edge. And I make my way through the ghosts in the room, trying to crack a smile. And who you supposed to be? You look like heaven tonight And me I’m a tomb, a corpse in a […]

  • Spitting like a dragon with a similar demeanour

  • A Eulogy for Twitter

    Initially this article irritated me immensely. As clichés go, “it’s not as good as it used to be” is one I find peculiarly obnoxious, at least when it relates to the internet. But I think it actually makes some very interesting points: Those fictions have proven foolish, one-by-one. The service is filled with spam accounts: The […]

  • Queering Higher Education Panel at SRHE Conference 2014: Call for Panel Presenters

    Call for Panel Presenters Queering Higher Education Panel at SRHE Conference 2014 If your work is related to where Queer Studies meets the topic of Higher Education, academia or universities, you are cordially invited to consider participating in the panel I am convening at the SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education) annual conference this […]

  • Governing Academic Life – conference marking 30yrs since Foucault’s death

    This looks fantastic! If only it didn’t clash with something equally good at Warwick on those days… Governing Academic Life A conference at the LSE and the British Library, June 25-26, 2014 Register online* June 25, 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Governing Academic Life marks this anniversary by providing an occasion for […]

  • Elphinstone PhD Scholarship on technology and work-life bourdaries

    I’d love to do this. Shame I just finished one. Hmm, never thought I’d say that: (Dis)Connected Working: Managing Work-Life Boundaries in a Digital Economy The proposed project will explore organizational policies and practices related to technology and work-life balance, and the ways in which these make possible specific ways of working, living, and combining […]

  • Lisa Diamond on Sexual Fluidity

    I’ve intended to read Lisa Diamond’s Sexual Fluidity for a few years. I’ve finally got round to it and I’m kicking myself for not having read it earlier. I think I’ve been gradually losing interest in sexuality studies over the last year or two and this book has near instantly reawakened my enthusiasm for it. There needs to be […]

  • Why ask “why talk”?

    Well this is interesting (sort of). Though it reminds me of the ‘Free Hugs Society’ some peculiarly obnoxious students at Warwick established a few years ago, something which prompted them to go around grabbing strangers while being seemingly oblivious to how intrusive and problematic this was to many of the people being grabbed. The people behind […]

  • Overcoming ‘nature vs nurture’

    The psychologist John Money used the example of language to demonstrate the misguided nature of such assumptions. You were not born with your native language, and nothing in your “nature” predisposed you to learn English rather than Swahili. Nor did you “choose” English over Swahili. Rather, language was determined by your native culture. Yet our […]

  • Asexuality and Sexual Normativity: An Anthology

    Asexuality and Sexual Normativity: An Anthology

    The last decade has seen the emergence of an increasingly high profile and politically active asexual community, united around a common identity as ‘people who do not experience sexual attraction’. This unique volume collects a diverse range of interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical work which addresses this emergence, raising important and timely questions about asexuality and […]

  • PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?

    What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process of drawing this out and thinking through its implications for research can often be […]

  • Quantifying the time wasted by quasi-market systems

    I’ve just spent an hour and a half booking a stack of train tickets for the next few months. I do this a few times a year and, with practice, I’ve become pretty good at it. I object to subjugating my plans to the vagaries of the ticketing system but it seems obviously true to me […]

  • Digital Public Sociology at #BritSoc14

    It was interesting to follow the #BritSoc14 tweeting last week. The quality and quantity of the live tweeting was quite striking relative to previous conferences. Not surprisingly, it was the digital sociology sessions that provoked the most live tweeting. If Twitter is a reliable guide, which it probably isn’t, digital sociology seemed to be one […]

  • Theorizing Roles and Collective Intentionality: Contemporary Perspectives

    Theorizing Roles and Collective Intentionality: Contemporary Perspectives Monday 5 May 2014, 1-5pm Seminar Room 3, Chrystal MacMillan Building 15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD   Overview: Despite the arguments of committed critics, notions of roles and collective intentionality have persisted in social science and philosophy. They provide ways of conceptualizing aspects of our sociality and […]

  • 5 reasons why Evernote is overrated

    It’s astonishingly easy for the syncing process to get mixed up. The synch for Omnifocus, which surely has a much more complex database, never gets confused. I seem to generate synch conflicts on a small minority of occasions that I use Evernote. These synch conflicts sometimes lead me to lose data. Usually they’re just annoying though. The […]

  • How the “Internet of Things” is Killing Capitalism

    I think there’s a massive degree of overstatement in Rifkin’s argument here (not for the first time) but it’s nonetheless a powerful set of claims. Is he correct that “this is the first new economic paradigm to emerge on the world scene since the advent of capitalism and socialism in the early 19th century”?

  • Jerome Bruner’s six essential conditions of creativity

    From this Brainpickings article: Detachment and commitment. A willingness to divorce oneself from the obvious is surely a prerequisite for the fresh combinatorial act that produces effective surprise. there must be as a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition a detachment from the forms as they exist… But it is a detachment of commitment. For there […]

  • The Uncompromising Pessimism of Public Sociology

    Michael Burawoy on public sociology and sociological science: I have always insisted on a division of labor between professional and public sociology. The division of labor implies contradiction as well as interdependence but sociology is of little use if it cannot give some guidance to labor as to the tendencies of capitalism, a theorization that […]

  • PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?

    What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process of drawing this out and thinking through its implications for research can often be […]