Updates from April, 2016 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Mark 1:03 pm on April 30, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: anti-semitism, , , ,   

    Lucy Powell on Conservative anti-Semitism in the last election 

    Something to remember as the Tory-led condemnation of Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism reaches fever pitch:

    Shadow education minister Lucy Powell ran day-to-day operations for Labour’s 2015 general election campaign. That year’s dog-whistle consisted of telling the electorate, again and again, that Labour had never apologised for destroying the economy, and that Ed Miliband stabbed his brother in the back and would almost certainly do the same to Britain.

    Powell says she felt much of the coded language in the Tory campaign was about Miliband being Jewish, not least the focus on him mishandling a bacon bap. Other messages about his ethnicity verged on the subliminal: repeated references to his roots in north London, a more Jewish area of the city, for instance.

    While Powell thinks Crosby might well have been behind this strategy, she says she doesn’t believe for a minute that he is antisemitic or Islamophobic. It’s simply expedience: “It’s pure cynicism – he doesn’t care what the means are by which he can move swing voters. But once he finds it, he’ll just go after it, even if it’s wrong or personal or immoral, or in some cases all three.”

    Powell believes the demonisation of Miliband was largely ineffectual. It was only when Crosby and the Tories found their dead cat that anything began to stick. After Miliband’s popular promise to crack down on tax dodgers and non-doms, Conservative defence secretary Michael Fallon “revealed” that the Labour leader would strike a power-sharing deal with the SNP, and was willing to sacrifice Trident to do so. Trident was the dead cat: the story came out of nowhere, says Powell, was wholly unfounded – and it worked. “They were on the back foot about tax evasion and sent Michael Fallon out there with a baseless story,” Powell says. “But with highly emotive language and a couple of splashes in their friendly press, the strategy worked, knocking the other story off the agenda.”

    http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/30/battle-london-mayor-dirtiest-fight-zac-goldsmith-sadiq-khan

     

  • Mark 12:39 pm on April 30, 2016 Permalink
    Tags:   

    The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture 

    fassin

    The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture 

    Friday May 20th 2016, 17.45-21.00

    SOAS, University of London

    This event is free but it is essential to register. To reserve a place, please email Jenny Thatcher [events@thesociologicalreview.com].

    Keynote: Professor Éric Fassin (Université Paris-8) 

    Discussants: Professor Gurminder K Bhambra (University of Warwick, UK and Linnaeus University, Sweden) and Dr Imogen Tyler (Lancaster University) 

    Professor Éric Fassin will bring together the disciplines of anthropology and sociology to demonstrate how the boundaries that were drawn around them were part of an academic struggle for power in which the term ‘race’ and the politics of decolonization were central to the war of disciplinary position.

    The Great Divide:

    Sociology, Anthropology, and Race in France since Lévi-Strauss

    Claude Lévi-Strauss published the Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949 as a sociologist. Only in 1950 was he to appropriate the term “anthropology” in his introduction to the posthumous edited volume of essays by Marcel Mauss, entitled Sociologie et anthropologie. The French sociological tradition did not distinguish between the two disciplines; on the contrary, Émile Durkheim and his heirs distanced themselves from an “anthropology” that was associated with race during the first half of the century. In order to reclaim this label, and thus institute himself as the founding father of French anthropology, Lévi-Strauss could not merely rely on American cultural anthropology; he had to erase the racial legacy of the French tradition. This was accomplished in his 1952 UNESCO pamphlet “Race and History”. It was a powerful move in the wake of World War Two, especially from one who had to flee Nazi persecutions against Jews. But this was also the eve of decolonization – at a time when Georges Balandier analyzed the “colonial situation” as a sociologist, while Michel Leiris and Aimé Césaire denounced the politics of race in the French empire. Today’s French work on race has to revisit this great divide of the 1950s, not only between anthropology and sociology, but also between the social sciences and race.

    About Éric Fassin

    After teaching in the United States from 1987 to 1994 (at Brandeis University and New York University), and at the École normale supérieure in Paris from 1994 to 2012, Éric Fassin is now a professor of sociology in the Political Science Department and co-chair of the Gender Studies Department at Paris 8 University. He is a founding member of the new Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité – Research Center on Gender and Sexuality Studies (LEGS, CNRS / Paris 8 / Paris 10). His work focuses on contemporary sexual and racial politics, including immigration issues, in France, in Europe, and in the United States – often in a comparative perspective. He is frequently involved in the French public debates on issues his work addresses – from samesex marriage and gender parity to the politics and policies of immigration and race, but also on the evolution of the left.

    Recent books: Gauche: l’avenir d’une désillusion, Textuel (2014). Roms & riverains. Une politique municipal de la race (with Carine Fouteau, Serge Guichard, and Aurélie Windels), La Fabrique (2014). Herculine Barbin, dite Alexina B., by Michel Foucault, new edition, with an afterword by Éric Fassin, Gallimard (2014). Discutir Houellebecq. Cinco ensayos críticos entre Buenos Aires y París, Éric Fassin et al., Capital Intelectual, Buenos Aires, 2015. 

    Please note that tickets are strictly limited. Please give sufficient notice of cancellation.

     

  • Mark 12:10 pm on April 30, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , ,   

    The Social Life of Theory: Partiality, Conflict and Innovation 

    Clearing out my stock of library books, some of which I’ve had for a number of years, I’ve inevitably been drawn into looking through books I was once excited about before subsequently forgetting. Jeff Alexander’s Twenty Lecture in Social Theory is foremost among these, as a book I’d skim read but on second reading is even better than I remembered. This is his account of how theoretical disagreement can be read in terms of a multifaceted grappling with the various contours of social reality, taking place over time. From pg 283:

    Reality is multivalent. At first glance it might seem to be composed of objects which differ widely from one another and are, therefore, in great disarray. It is for this reason that ‘partial theories’ always arise. On the other hand, if we put these partial theories side by side we can see not only that each contributes to our understanding of reality in a different way, but that, taken together, they provide an outline of the larger whole itself. Reality, it seems, is multidimensional. If one theory becomes influential by taking up one part of reality, a succeeding theory will have to move towards an emphasise on another. Yet, judging from this postwar period, the possibilities for emphasis are far from infinite; indeed, they are relatively simple and few. When Parsons set out to investigate reality, he pointed to certain elements. His critics, when they set out to challenge his theory, ended up by pointing to the same things in different ways. This convergence helps convince us that effort, means, ends and conditions really are ‘there’. If they are not conceptualized from the outset by an act of ecumenical synthesis, they will all be brought back in the end through theoretical critique.

    I couldn’t agree more with this, at least until the last sentence. The apparent faith in the integrative capacity of critique over time is not just wrong, but fascinatingly wrong. One way to explore this is to ask what conditions need to be in place to ensure such an outcome:

    1. Theoretical work needs to be facilitated by an underlying conceptual literacy which facilitates meaningful conversation in the face of apparent incommensurability i.e. even if people talk about things in different ways, they still talk.
    2. Intellectual imperatives need to predominate over institutional ones. Inevitably, both will always be active factors shaping theoretical work, but unless intellectual motivations reliably win out over the imperatives of institutional advancement, self-promotion and school-building then convergence won’t happen.
    3. Both 1 and 2 necessitate a degree of systematicity to the canon and a level of acquaintance with it that makes it possible to sustain theoretical debates over time and place them in meta-theoretical context.

    From my point of view, none of these conditions currently hold. What I was trying to argue here, in a chapter expunged from my thesis because it had nothing whatsoever to do with it and was also the most absurdly dense piece of writing I’d ever produced, was that the socio-cultural dynamics of theoretical disagreement within the academy militate against the cultural systemic possibility of theoretical resolution. Or, in other words, there are all sorts of meso-social factors which mean that theorists argue in a way that foregrounds disagreement and backgrounds agreement: 

    These trends have contributed to the state of affairs which Scott (2005a) describes: the nature of the ‘social’ rarely being defined with any precision, despite its centrality to sociology as a discipline. When agreements at this level do exist, they tend to emerge as conflictual consensuses (the obvious example being the structure/agency debate) such that their holistic reconstruction qua agreement tends to be restricted to theorists elaborating accounts within them (driving their spiralling complexity and, over time, eroding the practical utility of the emergent consensus) or their simplified reconstruction for pedagogical purposes. What gets systematically squeezed out is dialogue about the explanatory implications of the broader agreement (rather than just a particular party to it) and, with it, the development of explanatory tools which can help bridge the gap between social ontology and practical research. This is something which has consequences beyond sociology in and of itself, as disciplines like criminology and other, more or less integrated, areas of inquiry that sociology has fed take concepts and problematics from the ‘parent’ discipline (Rosenfeld 2010). This disciplinary dynamic tends towards the further detachment of ontological debate from empirical research. Yet, as Reed and Alexander (2009: 22) observe of the renewed vigour of empirical research which has emerged in this context, “the return to the empirical in our sociological practice has also had the effect of obscuring our understanding of just what the empirical is”.

    The point being made is not that explanatory tools, when they are elaborated, must somehow transcend second level disagreement in order to consolidate first level agreement but simply that the ontological basis upon which they are forged at level 2should be translatable into shared terms of reference at level 1. Unlike the concepts we draw upon in everyday life, examined knowledge seeks to maximise practical adequacy (Sayer 1992: 151). Yet it is only with shared terms of reference that this maximisation can progress in a theoretical register. Cruickshank (2010) is correct in his observation that Archer’s (2000b) invocation of the causal criterion (i.e. establishing reality through its causal efficacy) to ground the reality of social structure does not in itself justify her substantive ontological claims because there are other ways in which the recognition (individuals confront social circumstances which exercise causal powers even if they fail to recognise these, mischaracterise them or wish them away) could be characterised ontologically. But the causal criterion can establish the dimensionalityof the social world and, if the underlying principle is accepted, constitutes an explanatory gain over an ontology which fails to recognise this dualism. Similarly, contra Kemp (2012), theoretical knowledge can (and sometimes does) progress through practical reason i.e. by seeking to establish some claim X on the basis of logical argument preceding from shared premises rather than on some evidence Y which incontrovertibility establishes its truth (MacIntyre 1981, Taylor 1995). Al-Amoudi and Willmott (2011) suggest that ontological reasoning in this mode, arguing from shared assumptions rather than foundational claims, has been an important trend within critical realist thought, albeit an under recognised and under theorised one. Unlike the moral issues which have been the primary focus of neo-Aristotelian account, ontological disagreements within a context of broader consensus will tend to generate empirical questions which cannot be settled in theoretical terms. If and when research addresses such issues which have emerged theoretically these then become directly pertinent for the theoretical programme from which they ensued.

    https://markcarrigan.net/2013/08/25/whats-the-point-of-ontology-outline-of-an-approach-to-the-sociology-of-social-theory/

     

  • Mark 11:59 am on April 30, 2016 Permalink
    Tags:   

    Symposium: Reorientating Sociological Thought 

    unnamed (1)

    Re-orienting Sociological Thought?                               

    Glamorgan Council Chamber, Glamorgan Building,

    Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences

    Cardiff University
    2pm to 4pm, Wednesday, May 11th 2016

    In recent years, we’ve seen the proliferation of calls to reorientate sociological thought around new concerns, methodologies and approaches that can ground the discipline in changing times. This symposium brings together advocates of prominent approaches with the hope of a dialogue concerning these calls. What do they have in common? How do they differ? Are their proliferation a sign of the discipline’s weakness or of its vitality? Do we need to throw our energies into one, embrace the multitude or somehow synthesise them into a broader project of disciplinary renewal? 

    Mark Carrigan – Why Public Sociology is Becoming Digital Sociology (and vice versa)

    Des Fitzgerald – Lively sociology and the sociology of life

    William Housley – Disruptive Technologies and Socio-Digital Transformation

    Emilie Whitaker – Between Thanatos and Natality: considering sociological reorientations through trans/post humanist understandings of death

    Pre-booking is required by May 4th. Reserve a place via http://www.eventbrite.com/e/re orienting-sociological-thought-tickets-24594058491

     

  • Mark 7:34 am on April 30, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: ,   

    Breathe for me: interesting performance event in collaboration with @sociowarwick 

    Breathe For Meby Martin O’Brien

    Thu 5 May 2016 – 7.45pm

    Martin O’Brien’s practice focuses on physical endurance and disgust in relation to the fact he suffers from cystic fibrosis.

    Breathe for Me considers the nature of the regulated chronically ill body. Martin O’Brien re-embodies and takes pleasure in the excessive performance of an already embodied lived experience. Illness is revealed through the body in extremis. This body which is turning against itself relentlessly endures as a form of resistance to illness. Martin is beaten, bruised, cut, and penetrated, exhausted, suffocated, examined and treated in a regime of sufferance in order to survive.

    Warwick Arts Centre – Studio

    Tickets: £13 (£11), Under 26s £10

    See: http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/whats-on/2016/breathe-for-me/

     

  • Mark 7:59 pm on April 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    Obama’s Best Comebacks and Rebuttals 

    And on a similar(ish) note:

     

  • Mark 6:58 pm on April 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,   

    The Entlastung of the Quantified Self 

    I’m very interested in this concept, which I was introduced to through the work of Pierpaolo Donati and Andrea Maccarini earlier this year. It emerged from the work of Arnold Gehlen and refers to the role of human institutions in unburdening us from existential demands. This is quoted from his Human Beings and Institutions on pg 257 of Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures by Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knobl. He writes that institutions

    are those entities which enable a being, a being at risk, unstable and affectively overburdened by nature, to put up with his fellows and wit himself, something on the basis of which one can count on and rely on oneself and others. On the one hand, human objectives are jointly tackled and pursued within these institutions; on the other, people gear themselves toward definitive certainties of doing and to doing with in them, with the extraordinary benefit that their inner life is stabilized, so that they do not have to deal with profound emotional issues or make fundamental decisions at every turn.

    In an interesting essay last year, Will Davies reflected on the ‘pleasure of dependence’ in a way which captures my understanding of entlastung. It can be a relief to trust in something outside of ourselves, settling into dependence on the understanding that our context is defined by a degree of reliability due to an agency other than our own:

    I have a memory from childhood, a happy memory — one of complete trust and comfort. It’s dark, and I’m kneeling in the tiny floor area of the back seat of a car, resting my head on the seat. I’m perhaps six years old. I look upward to the window, through which I can see streetlights and buildings rushing by in a foreign town whose name and location I’m completely unaware of. In the front seats sit my parents, and in front of them, the warm yellow and red glow of the dashboard, with my dad at the steering wheel.

    Contrary to the sentiment of so many ads and products, this memory reminds me that dependence can be a source of deep, almost visceral pleasure: to know nothing of where one is going, to have no responsibility for how one gets there or the risks involved. I must have knelt on the floor of the car backward to further increase that feeling of powerlessness as I stared up at the passing lights.

    http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-data-sublime/

    At a time when entlastung is failing, when institutions are coming to lose this capacity to unburden us, could faith in self-tracking, big data and digital technology fill the gap? The technological system as a whole comes to constitute the remaining possibility of entlastung and we enthusiastically throw ourselves into its embrace, as the only way left to feel some relief from the creeping anxiety that characterises daily life.

    The essay by Will Davies is really worth reading: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-data-sublime/

     

  • Mark 5:04 pm on April 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , data ownership, john locke, , ,   

    A Lockean case for the ownership of personal data  

    An interesting idea from Craig Lambert’s Shadow Work loc 3116 which deserves to be explored in greater depth:

    As noted earlier, philosopher John Locke argued that labor creates property; taking his view, if your shadow work made some information, it is your possession. In fact, who owns your data—your informational body—may some day be as contentious an issue as the ownership of petroleum, water, or any other natural resource.

     

  • Mark 4:39 pm on April 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , multiplication of communication channels   

    The multiplication of communication channels 

    This is a really nice description from Craig Lambert’s Shadow Work of a problem I describe in a forthcoming paper as the multiplication of communication channels. From loc 3038-3054:

    The mushrooming number of communication channels spins off another type of shadow work. At one time, to reach a friend, you could send a letter or postcard or phone him at home. Period. Then, as work and personal lives began to overlap more, it became OK to call him at the office, if only for brief chats. Next, email arrived, opening up another means of contact. Then mobile phones, then texting. I won’t even bring up Instagram. With this plethora of channels available, consider what happens if you need to reach your mate, say, on some urgent matter. Perhaps you want to take her to a play, and on the theater’s website, you see two choice tickets available. 

    [….]

    But many others are angling, which means someone else could snap up those two choice tickets any time. If you want to spend that night in the orchestra section with Larissa, you had better reach her, pronto. What happens next is a fascinating new species of shadow work: the all-media parlay. You phone Larissa’s mobile, home, and work numbers, leaving voicemail messages at each. You send emails to her home and work mailboxes. You top it off with a text. You have just composed and sent six communications through different channels to get one message to one person. The good news is that two decades ago, such a multichannel assault was impossible. The bad news is that this electronic D-day landing just gifted you with several minutes of shadow work. And a few more on the other end for Larissa, as she opens, hears, deletes, and, with luck, responds positively to one of the half dozen redundant invitations awaiting her. With more luck, in time to buy those tickets.

     

  • Mark 8:34 am on April 29, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: consumer support, , ,   

    Crowd sourcing technical support: why do user helps corporations? 

    From Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, loc 2301. Does anyone know of ethnographies exploring the motivations of those who do this work and the meanings they attach to it? 

    Apple online “communities” at discussions.apple.com, for example, include forums for users of most kinds of Apple software, like iTunes and Apple Pay, as well as Apple hardware like iPhones, iPads, and Macintosh desktop computers. Users may join such forums and pose their questions about Apple products. Fellow users will step up and try to provide an answer online, of course at no charge. Even the forum moderators are often simply advanced users. These users are performing serious shadow work—a bonanza for Apple to have shadow-working customers taking over the job of technical support. The corporation is harvesting a dividend of having built a global community of enthusiastic Apple customers. Similar forums exist for Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Quicken, and other vendors, tapping the expertise of customers who are often highly sophisticated technically. Nor are support forums limited to high-tech products. A year ago, I posed a question on the BMW user forum bimmerfest.com about how disconnecting the battery on my BMW 528 had seemingly disabled the  radio. Responses, some of them very helpful and even including photos of the BMW fuse panels with diagrams, poured in from as far away as New Zealand. This peer support eventually led me to a missing fuse that a mechanic had apparently removed and forgotten to replace, and my radio came on again.

     

  • Mark 6:36 am on April 28, 2016 Permalink
    Tags: , ,   

    A podcast about Social Media for Academics 

    Thanks to Dave O’Brien for recording this podcast with me about my book for New Books In Sociology. 

     

  • Mark 9:59 am on April 27, 2016 Permalink
    Tags: , , , ,   

    the challenge of cultural abundance 

    This passage from Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, conveys what I’ve written about in two recent papers as the challenge of cultural abundance. From loc 1395:

    To be sure, posting creations does not guarantee them an audience. Far from it. Take the songs that anyone can now publish online and sell as downloads. In 2011, eight million different songs sold at least one copy. “But people don’t realize that about one-third of these songs sold exactly one copy,” says Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse, author of the 2013 book Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. “There is an enormous amount of content that gets no demand at all.” With some noteworthy exceptions, the global audience is just not queuing up for homemade movies, self-published e-books, and garage recordings. 

    Nonetheless, the fading power of professional gatekeepers leaves Internet users unprotected by their screening. If you read The New Yorker or watch CBS, you have their editors and producers working as your filtering agents, separating wheat from chaff. But on Google outlets like YouTube or Blogger.com, you’re on your own. Sifting through the haystacks of web material for silver needles worthy of attention creates more shadow work in the barn lofts of the Internet.

    I’m interested in the cognitive and temporal costs of the labour this entails, described provocatively by Lamert as a form of ‘shadow work’. But I’m also interest in the second-order consequences as people develop and habitualise strategies for dealing with it: this in turn shapes how they orientate themselves towards abundance and contribute to its growth or diminuation.

     

  • Mark 9:59 am on April 27, 2016 Permalink
    Tags: , commute, commuting, , , time shortage   

    The Temporal Cost of the Commute 

    From Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, loc 198:

    Commuting—the job of getting to the job—is an unpaid task done to serve the employer. It has become so woven into American life that we scarcely recognize it for what it is. Yet commuting is very expensive, time-consuming shadow work. The commuter must either brave crowded public transportation, or own, insure, maintain, and fuel a car—and drive it—just to make the round-trip from home to workplace. In 2005, ABC News reported that the average American commuter travels sixteen miles, one-way, to work. At current federal auto mileage reimbursement rates of 55 cents per mile, that thirty-two-mile round-trip costs $ 17.60 daily, or $ 88 per week and $ 4,400 per year. The average daily commute takes fifty-two minutes both ways, or about 217 hours per year—more than five forty-hour weeks of unpaid travel time. Jobs that allow employees to work from home save them thousands of dollars annually and also free up untold hours now spent on the road—time you might devote to, well, productive work.

     

  • Mark 9:02 am on April 26, 2016 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , ,   

    40 reasons why you should blog about your research 

    1. It helps you become more clear about your ideas.
    2. It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience.
    3. It increases your visibility within academia.
    4. It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you.
    5. It increases your visibility more than a static site and allows people who find you to get an overall sense of your academic interests.
    6. It’s a great way of making connections & finding potential collaborators.
    7. It can provide an archive of your thoughts, ideas and reactions which can later be incorporated into more formal work.
    8. It makes it easier for people to find your published work and increases the likelihood they will read and cite it.
    9. Its informality and immediate accessibility can help make writing part of your everyday life rather than being a source of stress and anxiety.
    10. Its a great way to promote events and call for papers. Particularly if you blog regularly and your blog is connected to Twitter.
    11. It helps ensure you can continue to develop strands of thought which, for now, don’t have any practical implications but might at some point in the future.
    12. It encourages you to reflexively interrogate and organise your work, drawing out emergent themes and placing isolated snippets of commentary into shared categories.
    13. It allows you to procrastinate for a further 10 to 20 minutes before going back to NVivo in a useful(ish) way.
    14. It helps you build a community around your ideas and interests – Kath McNiff
    15. It allows you to start a conversation that other researchers can join using comments – Kath McNiff
    16. It’s a tremendous way to access additional relevant information/sources through the connections you make – @drdjwalker
    17. It can also be a great way to increase your sample size by crowd sourcing contributions and through public scrutiny help prepare you for the peer review process when the time comes to publish your work – @drdjwalker
    18. It’s a great way to get international and cross-disciplinary input and reflections on your research – @jess1ecat
    19. It’s a fabulous way to give back to the research community by providing links and resources for other researchers, give and you shall receive – @jess1ecat
    20. Reciprocity through blogging and Twitter shares builds your profile but importantly forges lasting connections to fellow researchers – @jess1ecat
    21. It allows you to publish ideas immediately without waiting two years while things go through peer review and more peer review and wait in a publishing queue – @CelebYouthUK
    22. It’s fun – @CelebYouthUK
    23. It’s a faster way to get your research findings out. Journal/book publishing and the peer-review/editing process can take FOREVER – @ajlusc
    24. Because C Wright Mills would have probably been a blogger. If not, he would at the very least have been a fan – @ajlusc
    25. It is an exercise in disciplined writing. Stuff that doesn’t get used in the bigger thesis project, published papers, and the like, can be glossed for a blog and thrown out for ‘collision’ with others’ ideas. That’s how better ideas get formulated – Ibrar
    26. It makes you a better writer – @drfigtree
    27. It allows raw uncensored ideas to be creatively expressed before stymied by a prolonged peer review process – @DrBenKoh
    28. It allows research findings to be put out there in a format that participants can access, and are actually likely to read – Matthew Hanchard
    29. You have control of the publishing process – @DrHelenKara
    30. It’s a way to publish information about all aspects of research which formal publishing methods won’t accept, whether because it’s too short, too partial, too controversial, or for some other reason – @DrHelenKara
    31. Keeping your own blog can be a daunting prospect, but that’s not the only way: many bloggers are more than happy to accept a ‘guest’ blog on a subject which would be of interest to their readers – @DrHelenKara
    32. It helps to be up-to-date with new findings in your discipline, and often with findings in other fields – @udadisisuperior
    33. It’s a means to be FOUND. People google those words and ta-da! – @everythingabili
    34. It forces you to think of your ideas in simple language that can be easily articulated. It’s communication practice. – @everythingabili
    35. You will have MORE IDEAS – GUARANTEED. The process of blogging almost always sparks off more ideas. How could it not? – @everythingabili
    36. No need to study in isolation if you are a distance learning student, blogging is one way to network, share ideas and your studies with fellow students around the world – Lucy Bodenham
    37. Over time, a blog has helped me to develop more jargon-free and even poetic writing. I have returned to academic publication with a better language with which to express myself – Kip jones
    38. Blogging helps keep your profile out there if you are experiencing a gap between publications – Jeff Craig
    39. Help students know what their (prospective) adviser work on – @dimitridf
    40. It is free global advertisement for your programme/university – @dimitridf

    Any suggestions for more reasons? Put them in the comments box and I’ll add them to the list & note who they came from. If you’re on Twitter please include your twitter handle.

     

    • Dr Mohamed Saeudy 1:25 pm on February 27, 2019 Permalink

      I am really like these thoughts. I think this will be a great opportunity for academics to show the wider impact of their work outside academia

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