• 📣 Launching the Archer PhD & ECR Network

• 📚Assessment, Learning and Institutional Capacity: an evidence resource to accompany The AI Crisis in Higher Education

• 📣 My new book The AI Crisis in Higher Education: A Strategic Proposal is now out open access

• 📖 Things I’ve read in 2026

• The danger GAI poses to the public sphere is not false belief, it’s the (further) collapse of trust in truth

• GK Chesterton’s Fence and the Problem of Automation

• The terrifying future of AI-driven news

• How to enjoy writing #5: keep trying to say what you’re trying to say

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #82

• Crowds on Demand: “out-of-the-box campaigns, audiences and events”

• How to enjoy writing #4: embracing creative non-linearity

• How to enjoy writing #3: being realistic about how long you can spend writing

• The almost infinite range of cases to which shallow fakes can be applied

• Race to the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Sociological Imagination

• If I had a dollar for every time I couldn’t sleep, I could buy a million locks and finally read a book in peace

• How to enjoy writing #2: placing limits on your writing

• How to enjoy writing #1: capturing your fringe thoughts

• And I’m never real, it’s just a sketch of me

• Margaret Archer’s last paper: Can Complexity add anything to Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach?

• The coming crisis in education research … and what we might do about it

• ✍️ How to enjoy writing

• Capaciousness as a sociological category

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #81

• Pioneering Sustainable EdTech Design: Insights from the MA DTCE

• 💻 Advance Your Career in Digital Education with the MA Digital Technologies Communication and Education

• The Nietzschean Midday: Lacanian thoughts on the continual moment of possibility

• A growing number of 5 to 7 year olds in the UK are using social media

• Celebrity Tory MP Alan Clark on his enthusiasm for sexual predation

• CfP: Post-Pandemic Imaginaries Space, Culture and Memory after Lockdown

• Molecules of fascism”: the ‘Red Pill’ as Antidepressant

• Turns out I have a similar approach to writing to Slavoj Žižek. Unsure how I feel about this.

• Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating

• Imagine being in lockdown and your country suffering a massive cyberattack

• To love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #80

• One monograph on GenAI later and Claude now figures prominently in my intellectual lifeworld. I’m realising how much that unsettles some people

• Too focused on the content and not enough on context

• How many politicians see being an MP as membership of the best private club in London?

• The casual antisemitism of leading Conservative politicians in the 1980s

• Is this the first example of a university doing an online pivot in response to political protest?

• Current mood in AI generated images #79

• 90% of books sell less than 2000 copies and 50% sell less than 12 companies

• The UK government wants to use AI to cut 66,000 jobs in the civil service

• Did ‘unconnected content’ ruin social media? The TikTokification of every social platform

• Current mood in AI generated images #78

• How Roy Bhaskar talked about the spiritual turn before it was released

• Freud did not consistently use topological metaphors to describe psychic structure

• I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them

• Will the ubiquity of GAI-driven bots lead people to retreat ever further into private social media?

• I was interviewed about the sociology of awkwardness for a French futures magazine

• Current mood in AI generated images #77

• The urgent need to understand scholarship as a process, prioritising ideas over outputs

• The problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective: conversational agents as variety machines

• Who will pay for your digital butler? Why the utopia of the digital daemon would inevitably become a dystopia

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #76

• Use Claude to put radically different theoretical approaches into dialogue with each other