• 📣 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

• Nick Cave on the world, in its complexity, rearranging itself toward meaning

• What are the analytical payoffs of Margaret Archer’s realist social theory?

• Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

• Accelerating (social) science with human-aware artificial intelligence

• What are your strengths?

• 📍Digital Sociology Wikipedia Editathon/Meetup – Feb 1st in Edinburgh

• What you’re doing to me now, ouch

• Computational sociology of knowledge as a tool for redesigning the knowledge system

• Why did Giddens largely ignore Bourdieu?

• We need jungle, I’m afraid (I can’t accept drum and bass)

• Epistemic relativism and the escape from the real

• How much are academics paid in different national systems?

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #46

• 📖 Books I’ve read in 2024

• The myth of the ‘perfectly analysed’ person

• “I feel like I’m gaining some kind of power by expelling all of my inner thoughts and secrets to people in rooms”

• The Lacan gang

• Mobile generative AI as the next stage of surveillance capitalism

• The Gish Gallop as an academic technique

• CfP: Symbolic Interactionism and AI

• Procrastination

• “You must have been subjected to another AI generated audiotrack, I never said any such thing”

• The existentialist Lacan

• Current mood in AI generated images #45

• See he saw me as a human, this one thinks I’m a slaughterhouse

• I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing

• Attention digital sociologists – HELP NEEDED with the Wikipedia page!

• The book scene from The Remains of the Day

• Why does The National’s Matt Berninger write so many beautiful songs about divorce despite being (seemingly) happily married?

• To what extent is ketamine shaping the culture of Silicon Valley?

• Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

• Will ChatGPT eventually be unmasked to its users?

• A Tour of Lacan’s Graph of Desire

• Are the economic shocks of 2021-2023 a temporary phenomenon?

• Current mood in AI generated images #44

• Lacan vs the situationist heckler (1972)

• When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

• Platform capitalism, historciality and Andrew Abbott’s sense of modernist temporal ontology

• A pop-punk cover of U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

• Total existence needs meaning and myth, many misjudged the way and got lost in the mist

• 10 highs and 10 lows of 2023

• Alex Garland’s Civil War film looks superb

• Andrew Abbott on the practice of theorising

• What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do

• The sensory pleasure of ideas and the displaced joys of academic life

• CFP: Generative AI Governance – Special Issues in Information, Communication & Society

• Lacan on the biographical momentum of partial objects

• Current mood in AI generated images #43

• How do we visualise an assemblage?

• Hannah Arendt on machinic rhythms and their power to consume our autonomy

• If Blink 182 Wrote ‘Wonderwall’

• Current mood in AI generated images #42