This is how it works You’re young until you’re not You love until you don’t You try until you can’t You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath No, this is how it works You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And […]
To speak of the acceleration of social theory can sound counter intuitive, as we often regard theory as a quintessentially slow pursuit in which careful reflection leads to a gradual accumulation of insight. But there are a number of mundane senses in which theory is getting faster: There is likely to be more being published […]
Call for Papers for the Second Annual Conference: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University 28 – 29 November 2019 at Lancaster University Higher education is increasingly ‘platformised’. Indeed, digital platforms have become ubiquitous. They are dominant intermediaries not only in our social, economic and political life, but have become central forms of capitalist accumulation. While […]
The tendency for critical realists to get irritated when people talk about political/empirical ontology gets in the way of what has the potential to be a fascinating dialogue if constructed in an open and engaging manner. In my experience, critical realists treat this tradition as self-evidently absurd or simply insist “that’s epistemology, not ontology” without being […]
This section from Material Participation by Noortje Marres brought home the sociological significance of lifestyle experiments to me. I’d been prone to framing things like lifestyle minimalism as a form of neo-asceticism and I can easily see a more charitable framing along the lines of pg 91 here: They can be likened to the experimental […]
Saved here because I’m deleting the tweet:
It’s difficult to be precise about how many academics use social media, as it depends on what is meant by ‘use’ and ‘social media’. For example how do we draw a consistent boundary between personal and professional use when social media tends to complicate this distinction in all manner of ways? Furthermore what counts as […]
“Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows – images in black and grey of what had […]
I’m a little wary of the causation here but it’s a provocative claim. Perhaps it does constitute an INUS condition, as J.L. Mackie put it, with the oil price spike igniting a precarious system which could have gone up in flames for other reasons. From Societies beyond Oil, by John Urry, pg 34-35: But this […]
From Material Participation by Noortje Marres pg 57-58: By defining the public in terms of a problem of relevance, pragmatism undid two persistent attempts to solve the problem of material publics by conceptual means: the tendency to either internalize or to externalize the problems of the public. They warned against the attempt to externalize public […]
Sleep on pillows made in Singapore. Wrapped in comforters, sweating through sheets. Drink your coffee in the morning, flown in on airplanes across vast seas. And your house is made of wood, central air, central heat. You’ve got your furniture of particle board. Your doors are locked for, for safety. And you walk in leather […]
CFP – Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the Accelerated Academy (Accelerated Academy 7) Nov. 22-23, 2019 Michigan State University Digital Scholarship Lab An interdisciplinary symposium on the future of academic life and labor, organized by Zach Kaiser (MSU) and Erin Glass (UC San Diego) In theory, the academy is an institution of research and […]
This looks really interesting: You are invited to participate in the Neurodiversity Reading Group that will run monthly in London (UK) in the academic year 2019-20. The first meeting will take place on Friday 19 July 2019, 3-5pm, at London South Bank University (Room K503, Keyworth Centre). During the summer (2019), the meetings will take […]
From Material Participation by Noortje Marres, pg 6: This field of work finds its starting point in the rejection of the critique of objects that has been dominant in twentieth-century social science: the idea that things, technology and materiality render engagement impossible. This work suggests that this negative critique has lost its plausibility, and proposes […]
OR what Joan Pedro-Carañana calls discursivism: “the belief in the almighty power of discourse. This is a form of wishful thinking based on what Freud called the infantile belief in the omnipotence of ideas (and communication)” and Jana Bacevic has written a superbly original PhD thesis about.
From John Urry’s Societies beyond Oil pg 9: Leading social analyst Zygmunt Bauman famously described the twentieth-century development of all this movement as a ‘liquid modernity’. But what he did not examine was how there was in fact a literal liquid –oil –that made this modernity, oiling the wheels of a globalizing society. It seemed […]
From Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything pg 203: These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant changes. For a great many groups, the work of environmentalism stopped being about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then […]
My notes on Rainford, J. (2016). Becoming a doctoral researcher in a digital world: Reflections on the role of Twitter for reflexivity and the internal conversation. E-Learning and Digital Media, 13(1-2), 99-105 In this paper Jon Rainford brings together two of my favourite things, the internal conversation and Twitter. He uses the framework of the […]
Completely rewritten with 100 new pages. Full details here
