What does it mean to claim a historical figure as a (proto)sociologist? What does it mean to claim people were ‘doing sociology’ under any rubric? Keneth MacDonald began this conference on the history of sociology in Britain by directing these questions towards Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, kicking off with […]
Notes for an upcoming talk: not yet proof read! By the time I sat down to write this talk, I began to regret the title which I’d given it. To speak of an ‘academic identity’ makes it sounds as if this is a singular thing undergoing change in a unified […]
At various points in the last few months, I’ve seen the claim made that the senior management of universities hold their staff in contempt. A claim like this can’t help but be polemic and I’m not sure how helpful it would be to examine the particular cases if we’re interested […]
In recent discussions of capitalist transformation, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are many criticisms which can be raised of the platform metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which […]
For the last few years, I’ve taken to talking about digital social science. I mean this partly as a short-hand to refer to a whole range of (sub)disciplines and (sub)fields which have emerged in response to the challenge of ‘the digital’: data science, computational social science, web science, internet studies, digital […]
In TroubleMakers, Leslie Berlin offers a gripping account of the formation of Xerox PARC. This famous lab was responsible for a dizzying array of innovations, listed on Wikipedia as including “laser printing, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, graphical user interface (GUI) and desktop paradigm, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, electronic paper, amorphous silicon […]
I’m (re)reading this important paper by Tressie McMillan Cottom in advance of a talk which Karen Lumsden and I are doing tomorrow on the dark side of (digital) public engagement. We were asked to suggest a reading for the session and this immediately occurred as the most suitable. It’s a insightful, careful […]
Digital Infrastructures: Poetics, Politics and Personhood – AAA San Jose 14-18 November 2018 Lorraine Weekes (Stanford University) Gertjan Plets (Utrecht University) Government databases, digital archives, online voting systems, and e-portals enabling the submission of everything from insurance claims to income tax returns increasingly define mundane engagements between citizen-users and a […]
Minitrack: Collective Intelligence and Crowds HICSS 52 http://hicss.hawaii.edu/ Track: Digital and Social Media January 8-11, 2019, Maui, Hawaii, USA This minitrack is open to analysis of collective intelligence, knowledge creation, and crowdsourcing. We think that assemblages of people and machines are making new forms of organization possible, and we are interested in […]
CALL FOR PAPERS: 52nd HICSS 2019, Maui, Hawaii January 8-11, 2019 – Maui, Hawaii SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, COLLECTIVE ACTION AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES MINITRACK in the Digital and Social Media Track URL: http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-52/digital-and-social-media/ Submission Deadline: June 15, 2018 | 11:59 pm HST Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: August 17, 2018 ****************************************************** CfP HICSS-52 (2019) minitrack: […]
Towards the end of his life, Pierre Bourdieu underwent an activist turn and offered a public sociology which I’ve long thought we can learn much from. In his Firing Back, he offers important ideas about how academics and social movements can work together. He maintains that “the work of academic […]
What is a ‘student’? To many outside higher education, such a question would seem absurd. A student is “a person who is studying at a university or other place of higher education”. But what this means has undergone profound change in recent years, such that ‘the student’ as a category, as […]
It was perhaps inevitable that I would find myself obsessing over the role of social media in the current strikes. In my academic life, I’m a sociologist studying how social media is used within universities and how this is changing the academy. In my non-academic life, I’m a digital engagement […]
Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon Kill It To Save It by Corey Dolgon Envisioning Sociology by John Scott and Ray Bromley Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari Factories For Learning by Christy Kulz Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggars The AirBnB Story by Leigh Gallagher The Know-It-Alls by Noam […]
After nine days of strike action, I’ve begun to realise how formative I have found this experience and how frequently I will think back to it in coming months and years. In part, this is a reflection of the novelty of the action itself for me but also the novelty […]
Social media reassures me I’m not alone in my fascination with Sussex VC Adam Tickell’s role in the current university crisis. As Tom Slater put it, it’s disturbing to realise that “someone who is capable of such excellent critical analysis, expressed with such elegance, has now become an appalling neoliberal […]
What is a troll? The term is encountered with ever greater frequency yet its meaning has changed with the years, moving from a definition in terms of motivation (deliberately producing discord for amusement) to a definition in terms of behaviour (the fact of having produced discord in an online community). […]
In the last week, I’ve found myself obsessing about the use of social media in #USSStrikes. This was probably inevitable, helping with two social media campaigns related to the strike while also being someone who studies social media. In preparation for a teach out later today and to feed into […]
