• I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me

• A psychoanalytical theory of thirdness

• Do large language models have a psychology?

• Concepts which mediate between form and content: bringing psychoanalysis and sociology together in a realist way

• Why do we want what we want?

• The realist concept of concern and the Lacanian concept of desire

• The objects which haunt us

• What do you need to become who you are?

• Internal conversation as a form of object relating

• Margaret Archer as heterodox post-Bourdeusian

• The late 2020s as the final act of modernity

• 📚Reading the Archers: an intensive summer 2026 reading group

• The jouissance of spleen, or, bitter cold wind whispers my name

• At some point you had to pick a direction and start swimming: the philosophical anthropology of commitment

• Chapters abstracts for my new book

• The short moment of relative austerity which preceded the GenAI bubble

• Artificial Intelligence and Social Theory in Education, Jan 24th in Bath/online

• Every time you make a decision you confront your symbolic castration

• Eudaimonic Bubbles as a normative rather than analytical concept

• How to enjoy writing #17: creative confidence means accepting the tensions in how you think

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

• Capaciousness as a sociological category

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

• On temporising

• Articulating what is latent is easier then articulating what is repressed

• A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric

• Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

• We are what we care about, we are what we lack

• What’s the difference between a cult and a community?

• The socialising role of community

• How would John Dewey have understood the socialising influence of digital platforms?

• What is participation?

• Reconciling the psychoanalytical and the reflexive 

• Pierre Bourdieu, post-war Algeria and the existential conditions for collective action

• An Archerian reading of Bourdieu: the reflexive imperative as the normalisation of hysteresis

• the sociology of ‘blotting out’ experience 

• structure, culture and agency: selected papers of margaret archer

• dear academic hive mind: help me produce a comprehensive list of critiques of margaret archer’s work

• Notes for a Sociology of Thinking 1.4

• What would happen if an evil scientist wiped the memories of everyone within a workplace?

• Harmut Rosa engages with the work of Margaret Archer

• “Do you know what I mean?”: Internal Conversation, Human Relationships and External Speech

• The Reflexive Imperative and Shaping a Life

• The Reflexive Imperative and Internal Conversation

• Spatio-temporality and Social Structure: Or, what Realists can learn from Goffman

• Moving beyond abstracted dichotomies in sociological treatments of decision making

• Subjects vs subjectification – getting beyond an unhelpful dichotomy (without irritating the Foucauldians too much)

• The Caterpillar’s Question: Cultural Resources and Identity