The Return of the Privatdozent in the Platform University
By Privatdozent I mean unsalaried or precariously employed scholars with doctorates who are entering into direct financial relationships with students.
An introduction to community informatics
The Side Effects of Vaccines – How High is the Risk?
The Quest for Normativity: Challenges and New Directions in Social Research
Civic Sociology aims to be a forum for the cultivation of normative inquiry within the discipline, and to offer a space for the many conversations that different ethical turns have spurred. In order to contribute to this vision, this call for papers invites contributions from across the social sciences and humanities that address questions related to the challenges and opportunities derived from these different normative turns. It also welcomes papers that reflect on the history of ethical reflection within social research, and on the possible futures opened by different forms of ethical engagement in the social sciences.
So no more talk about the backfires, this time we fire back
So no more talk about the backfiresThis time we fire backLight a match and light the past up before it catches upWe’ll raise a mast and cast offYeah, we’ll break some legs we’ll mend em and then we’ll take the casts offNow, we’ve had our lossesWe’ve had our victoriesWe’ve sat […]
Music is the weapon
Why academics need to organise, collectivise, and ‘socialise’ social media
A significant perception shift about how academics and universities share their research on social media is urgently needed according to new analysis which calls for a more ‘subversive’ approach to engaging audiences online.
Being a digital scholar in the post-pandemic university
A video of the keynote I did at the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities. I did a workshop at the same conference a few years ago and it was fascinating to contrast the f2f and digital experiences of these two sessions.
The idiots are taking over
Tilting within myself
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it I know it is—and that if once it hailed me it ever does— And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction not as towards a place, but it was a tilting within myself, as one turns […]
The epidemiological unsustainability of pre-Covid ways of living
This is the fault line of post-pandemic politics: two very different models of governance to respond to a transformed bio-environment, as well as how they will interact with the climate crisis.
Higher education and the individualization of COVID-19
What’s going to happen in UK universities in September? This piece from Jim Dickinson seems plausible about the possible intersection between ‘learning to live with the virus’ (in other words the individualization of the problem once the vaccine programme is mostly or entirely complete) and the ‘migration event’ which takes place at the start of each academic year.
The sociology of networked harassment
This fascinating and important paper by Alice Marwick develops a theory of morally motivated network harassment to explain the pervasive dynamics of online abuse we can see on social platforms, beyond what she terms the dyadic harassment which can equally be seen in face-to-face settings and the normalised harassment in which certain forms of behaviour become common in particular online spaces. Her proposal is that we understand these distributed forms of harassment in terms of:
Why the R number can be extremely misleading when it comes to the transmissibility of new variants
Indigenous Data Sovereignty
The reification of social change
There’s a lovely expression in this newsletter describing how pop-futurist Alvin Toffler reifies ‘change’ “into an autonomous abstraction, something that appears to cause itself, with consequences society must then adjust to”. It’s worth reflecting on quite how mainstream this move has become, particularly with regards to a centrism which sees […]
The enforced digitalisation of the pandemic
Less than half the UK population was using video call platforms by March 2021 (after three lockdowns) despite the widespread sense in the media these were a ubiquitous feature of life:
Beneath the waves an ocean
The data have landed, by Michael Rosen
What a brilliant poem, shared on his blog here: First they said they needed data about the children to find out what they’re learning. Then they said they needed data about the children to make sure they are learning. Then the children only learnt what could be turned into data. […]
The political economy of Bidenism
There’s an excellent piece in the NLR by Cedric Durand putting Biden’s apparent left turn into historical context. My initial assumption was that Biden was doing what Starmer promised to do i.e. rebuilding his party by brokering a coalition between the left and the centre, built around the most popular […]
