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  • On becoming mid career and post-disciplinary

    A few months ago my colleague Louis Major suggested that we were both now mid career. I was slightly resistant to this idea but it came back to me recently when I realised that my two main programmes of research (digital scholarship in a changing university and the social ontology of digital agency) are coming…

  • Every single body bleeding on its knees is an abomination

    And that every single body bleeding on its knees is an abomination And every natural being is making communication And we’re just sparks, tiny parts of a bigger constellation We’re miniscule molecules that make up one body You see the tragedy and pain of a person that you’ve never met Is present in your nightmares,…

  • Teaching Associate in Digital Sociology at Cambridge Sociology

    I thought this job might be of interest to some people reading my blog:

  • The wonder of cats

    This time last year I walked into a cat cafe after a soul crushing few days away from home. This glorious creature immediately jumped onto my shoulder – literally the moment I walked through the door – and remained there for the next hour. I love cats ❤️

  • You know those times where everything was golden?

    I do this thing where my mind travels back to the golden age You know those times where you were carefree And everything was Golden? The golden age You know those times where everything was golden? Where you were carefree and everything was golden The hardest thing I ever had to do Was come to…

  • Every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience

    In the last few days I’ve returned to the philosophical pessimist Emil Mihai Cioran, who I initially started reading during the first lockdown only to find his work a bit too cutting for my current situation. This aphorism from The Trouble With Being Born has been reverberating in my psyche since I read it on a train…

  • What it is like to be mistreated as an object, without having the capacity to assume the position of subject

    This remarkable film by Jerzy Skolimowski tells the story of the donkey EO (think ‘Eeyore’) whose harrowing journey across Europe begins when the circus act he is part of in small town Poland is closed down. He’s parted from the performer Magda who is devoted to him, repeatedly putting herself in the way of those…

  • I’ll fight you till I win

    Face like a plate of raw meatScreaming I can’t be beatHalf dead, ready to dropTruth is I just wanted it all to stop No matterHow many times I shatterHow many times I breakIt’s not the end till the end comesAnd when it comes it will be too lateSo MoveI’ll fight you till I winI’ll fight…

  • And if I see you, how it changes me

    And if I see you, how it changes meAnd if you see me, how it changes youChanges youAnd if I see you, how it changes meAnd if you see me, how it changes youChanges you One reveals oneself in the look that receives the other into oneself; in the same act with which the human…

  • There’s poetry inside this city if you listen enough

    I feel a sense of wellbeing this time in the morning Wear my heart out on my hoodie while the city is snoring Drunks falling off the sidewalks, get issued a warning Distant sirens, they crescendo like a symphony calling This it the Britain I know, this is the Britain I love There’s poetry inside…

  • The metaverse and the next pandemic

    In Reality+ David Chalmers suggests we might spend the next pandemic distracting ourselves in immersive virtual worlds which are indistinguishable from the non-virtual worlds. Real worlds with real experiences and real objects which should in principle be seen as in no way inferior to the material world. There’s a degree of equivocation involved in how…

  • The ontological implications of generative AI

    One of the obvious questions raised by the impending ubiquity of large language models concerns the feedback loops likely to ensue. To what extent will future iterations of GPT be trained on outputs from past iterations of GPT? Even if there was an intension to avoid this the diffusion of the consumer-facing technology makes it…

  • Large language models as a corporate pissing contest

    This is an excellent interview with Timnit Gebru about the current hype surrounding generative AI. She describes the rush towards ever increasing large language models as a corporate pissing contest driven by executives scared of being left behind: And then the higher ups be like: Why are we not the biggest? Why don’t we have…

  • The most incredible sky I’ve ever seen in Manchester

  • The tension between attachment and authenticity

    In the Myth of Normal Gabor Maté writes about “an eventual clash, between two essential needs: attachment and authenticity” which generates the most widespread form of trauma in society (pg 144). By the former he refers to the imperative to seek closeness to caregivers from natal dependence through to adulthood and by the latter he…

  • 📍Building the Post-Pandemic University: Imagining, Contesting and Materializing Higher Education Futures

    Out in July 2023 from Edward Elgar. Full information here. I’m excited this project I’ve been working on with Hannah Moscovitz, Michele Martini and Susan Robertson will be released soon. It’s the main outcome of the Post-Pandemic University project which we initiated in June 2020 and ran until late 2022. This is how we describe…

  • Coming soon: Building the Post-Pandemic University

    I’m excited this project I’ve been working on with Hannah Moscovitz, Michele Martini and Susan Robertson will be released soon. It’s the main outcome of the Post-Pandemic University project which we initiated in June 2020 and ran until late 2022. This is how we describe the project in the introduction: This book is the result…

  • Defending the Social

  • Post-horror and the epistemic chaos of platform capitalism

    It occurred to me yesterday that the epistemological chaos of platform capitalism now figures in popular awareness to a sufficient degree (albeit mediated through epistemically lazy liberal tropes) that its outgrowths now figure in horror films. See the Knock at the Cabin which tells the story of an affable family’s idyllic rural retreat being ruined…

  • Universities need to take responsibility for communications infrastructure

    I’ve written a piece for Research Professional. It’s currently behind a paywall but they’ve promised me this will be removed in a few days: While there is a real potential for a more sustainable social infrastructure for scholarship through platforms like Mastodon, it will require a careful approach that looks beyond the existing horizon of research communications. Unfortunately,…

  • You’re young until you’re not

    No, this is how it works You’re young until you’re not And you love until you don’t And you try until you can’t You laugh until you cry And 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…

  • Nick Cave on extending a hand to assist the world

    I thought this was a particularly beautiful installment of the Red Hand Files: Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something, had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that…

  • Neo-structuralism and social media in higher education

    One of my aims for the next year is to familiarise myself with Emmanuel Lazaga’s neo-structural sociology, which combines organisational sociology with multilevel network analysis in a conceptually rich and empirically powerful fusion. My work on social media for academics originally focused on the individual as a locus of reflexive practice, with my initial interest…

  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on creativity and routine

    Most creative individuals find out early what their best rhythms are for sleeping, eating, and working, and abide by them even when it is tempting to do otherwise. They wear clothes that are comfortable, they interact only with people they find congenial, they do only things they think are important. Of course, such idiosyncrasies are not endearing…

  • Here’s Lookin’ at You Kid

  • I’m going to the river where the current rushes by

  • On waiting for something to happen

    As often happens when I’m ill, I’ve found myself musing existentially about how I approach life. I found last year immensely difficult and felt like I’d started 2023 with a running start before I was felled once more by the eternally recurring coronavirus. This meant enforced deceleration (for reasons of quarantine, feeling awful and avoiding…

  • Metaverse-related books and films

    A list of resources I’ll be adding to over the coming months – suggestions welcome! I’ve ticked the ones which I’ve read and watched. Please note most of the books are non-academic and I’ve not checked the quality of the ones I haven’t read. Non-fiction: Fiction: Films:

  • The concept of cathexis

    I’ve long been drawn to psychoanalytical theory but I find it quite difficult. One of the problems is that these theorists rarely give examples beyond their case history, which tend to be opaque if you’re struggling with the underlying conceptual framework. The other is concepts tend to be used in different ways. I nonetheless routinely…

  • How do we stop social media making the academy even more unequal?

  • Generative AI and the future of assessment: an open discussion at the Manchester Institute of Education 

    This is an internal event we’re organising at the University of Manchester but I’m sharing it here to gauge interest in a subsequent public facing event: Since it was launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has enthralled millions around the world with its uncanny ability to respond to queries in a conversational manner. Its apparent capacity…

  • We might be dead by tomorrow

  • LinkedIn as a replacement for academic Twitter: micro-blogs vs Twitter threads

    I always found LinkedIn a sterile place in comparison to the vibrancy of academic Twitter. I’ve deleted numerous accounts over the years; establishing new ones because it feel like a sensible thing to do as a freelancer before once more coming to the conclusion the site was pointless and deleting it. This began to change…

  • Deflating the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’

    I thought this was an interesting critique by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow in their Chokepoint Capitalism, arguing that the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’ suggests a break with (past) capitalism whereas we are instead seeing a familiar modus operandi undertaken by new commercial actors: This is the true heart of “surveillance capitalism”—not the idea that…

  • The false dichotomy of digital hermits and digital champions

    In a memorable turn of phrase Patrick Dunleavy once wrote about academic hermits “sitting alone on top of a pillar somewhere in academia and doing their level best to not communicate in any way with the outside world, or let any information about their work leak out”. It was informed by the findings of the…

  • Gabor Maté on the reality expressed through depression

    I thought this was an immensely powerful image in a remarkable book which is full of them. In The Myth of Normal pg 220 he argues for a view of depression as a defensive responsive to an unliveable tension between our self-expression and attachment needs. He argues for recovering the objective conditions which created emotions…

  • The Use of Digital Artefacts in Teaching and Researching: Guidelines for Practice

    I wrote these best practice guidelines with Haira Gandolfi at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education in 2020. We’re sharing them here in case others find them useful. The use of digital artefacts in teaching and researching presents a number of practical challenges relating to the administration of files which need to be stored,…

  • Some thoughts about generative AI and the future of education

    A few more thoughts which were swirling around in my mind as I’ve been thinking this through: So what do we do in the near term? I’ve not watched these yet but I’ve seen Charles Knight make some interesting comments about this on LinkedIn. The video below is one of a series which I intend…

  • I am older now and we did it when we were young

  • Too much Zoom in the post-pandemic university

    After the longest holiday I’ve had for years, I’ve started to feel seriously depressed about the quantity of Zoom meetings in my calendar over the coming weeks. I’m currently at an intensive workshop with long term collaborators where we’ve spent all day/evening talking to each other. It’s enjoyable to immerse yourself in interaction with others…

  • Irvine Welsh on angst, addiction and writing

    After spending the last couple of months rereading Irvine Welsh novels, as well as reading the few I’d never touched, it struck me that I’d never heard him talk. Nor did I know anything about him. I was unsurprised to find out he was born in Leith and had been addicted to heroin there for…

  • Post-truth as liberal populism: revisiting Cambridge Analytica

    I’ve argued in a few places in recent years (such as this paper) that the notion of ‘post-truth’ has often constituted a form of liberal populism. I mean this in Laclau’s sense of an empty signifier which symbolically structures the social environment. It imagines that a formally harmonious environment was undermined by the intrusion of…

  • The increasingly hierarchical character of academic social media in 2023

    I remember when it was possible to fill an event by just tweeting about it a few times from a highly visible account. It made organising events so easy and so much more fun as a result. Whereas now you need to share across countless social platforms and mailing lists. This is what happens when…

  • Why do computational methods matter for education? Jan 18th at 4pm GMT

    In an infamous article from 2008 the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine argued that ‘big data’ made the scientific method obsolete. While hype about the data deluge has become more nuanced since then, it is undeniable that digital data has led to profound transformations in social scientific methodology. Disciplines and fields such as Data Science, Computational…

  • Blog Maggot

  • ChatGPT’s limerick about Nietzsche’s depressiveness

    There once was a man named Nietzsche Whose thoughts were quite miserable and dreary He believed in no meaning Life was just a sickening So he spent all his time feeling teary Instigated by Steve Watson.

  • Going on Strike from the Internet: A Plea for Disconnection

    I spent the first two days of the recent strike disconnected from the internet. I unplugged my router and let my phone run out of battery before placing them both in a locked filing cabinet. I then put the key in the back of a cupboard for good measure, intending to put as much cognitive…

  • The ladder of abstraction

    Over the last few years I’ve often found myself using the phrase ‘ladder of abstraction’ to describe my own movement from philosophy to social theory to qualitative sociology and on to education. It reflects two bifurcations in my experience which have bothered me intensely at different points in my career: the split between activism and…

  • Ontological questions about the metaverse

    In preparation for the workshop I’m going to next week, I thought it would be useful to map out some of the ontological questions about the metaverse which I’ve been thinking about intermittently over the last year: More thoughts here: https://markcarrigan.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/the-social-ontology-of-the-metaverse/

  • I am large, I contain multitudes

    Walt Whitman – Songs of Myself, 51 The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you,…

  • What is trauma?

    I’m currently reading a remarkable book by the physician Gabor Maté. In the Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing In A Toxic Culture he argues that trauma is ubiquitous within contemporary society; a reality which is obscured by the tendency to exceptionalize trauma as a categorical affliction of a subset of poor souls in…

  • The romance of the ascent of the humanity

    It’s an idea he is being critical of but this is beautifully put by Roberto Unger in The Religion of the Future: Humanity rises. Its rise is not inevitable, not at least in the more guarded and realistic versions of the romance of ascent, but it is possible. (Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, two philosophers…

  • John Stuart Mill on libidinal collapse: some thoughts on socialisation and human purpose

    I’ve intended for years to read the autobiography of the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. As an undergraduate philosophy student being introduced to utilitarianism, the lecturer briefly explained Mill’s peculiar biographical trajectory as an aside to explaining his mature philosophy. He was raised by his father James Mill, close collaborator of Jeremy Bentham, with the…

  • The only thing that’s left to do is live

  • How to enjoy reading social theory

    I wrote recently about my route into theory after reflecting on why some people enjoy reading theory while others don’t. Taking inspiration from The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction I thought it would be worthwhile to share a little about how I navigate theoretical literature, some of which I’ve learned from others…

  • Year’s End

    Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The…

  • The eye-on-the-object look

    I was delighted by this from Auden’s Horae Canonicae series. The ‘eye-on-object look’ in which we ‘ignore the appetitive goddesses’: You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk…

  • Why do some people enjoy social theory while others don’t?

    It occurred to me recently that I’ve been reading theory on a regular basis for over two decades now. I first encountered philosophy as an A Level Student in Religious Studies (post-secondary education aged 16-17) through Buddhist philosophy and Christian arguments for the existence of God. The first full work of philosophy I ever read…

  • The pleasure of returning to novels

    I’ve spent the last month rereading most of Irvine Welsh’s novels. In the late summer I read Jonathan Franzen’s novels again, after his most recent book reminded me of my love for his work. I feel a vague sense of guilt when I read books again. In part it’s awareness that the constraints of the…

  • Why we need a post-digital approach to the platform university

    One of the virtues of a postdigital approach to technology within higher education is that it helps us unpick two seemingly contradictory stances: marginalisation and the shock of the new. There is a tendency to see technology as a contingent part of the research process which is peripheral to its core operations. For example the…

  • Choose life: some notes on Lacan’s death drive

    I found this lecture from the excellent Derek Hook extremely helpful for understanding how Lacan reconceived the classical Freudian sense of the death drive, which it should be noted was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein. I’m interested in this topic for a number of reasons, not least of all the compulsive elements of digital agency…

  • Next year’s going to be better than this

    I’d like to take this opportunity and toast to me For being exactly who I’m supposed to be ‘Cause life is gonna do what life does I don’t wanna look back and regret who I was Let go of the expectations and then fire one Forget the tally sheet before all my time’s up And…

  • I miss my old house

    I’ve written recently about how much of a wrench it was to leave my old life in Cambridge. However as much as I valued that life I never felt entirely uncomfortable with where I was living, much as as my clear sense of what ‘home’ looked like created a problem in the 2010s in a…

  • The time a bus went boom outside a conference I was organising

    I was looking for something else in my e-mail archives and I just came across this blast from the past. During my time at the Warwick Business School’s Data Science Lab I led the organisation of an international conference with 50 speakers and 300 delegates. It was a deeply stressful few days which became much…

  • I’ve been taking some time to be distant

    Hi Ren… I’ve been taking some time to be distant I’ve been taking some time to be still I’ve been taking some time to be by myself and I’ve spent half my life ill But just as sure as the tide starts turning Just as sure as the night has dawn Just as sure as…

  • But then why do you write? Nietzsche on the necessity of getting rid of your thoughts

    I’ve been dipping back into The Gay Science today which alongside Ecce Homo was my gateway into Nietzsche in my mid-20s. Whenever I’ve returned to them I’ve found new passages which resonate, as with this account (pg 90) of why writing for Nietzsche was a necessity: But then why do you write? – A: I…

  • What I’ll be working on over the next five years

    This post is a professional/intellectual counterpart to this reflection. It’s been deeply therapeutic to write these after an exhausting year and it affirms why I’ve kept a personal blog over the last 12 years. Here’s an extract from chapter 7 of Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are In A Digital World which conveys the…

  • If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim

    If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being…

  • How will universities cope with ChatGPT?

    I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT over the last few days and the quality of the responses is really unsettling. I imagine there would be a certain set of skills needed to use this effectively to cheat on assignments, given the truncated character of the answers. But its capacity to offer coherent responses to relatively…

  • I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me

  • Jouissance: Enjoying in the margins

  • I’m a lifeless face that you’ll soon forget

    Well, I’ve lost it all, I’m just a silhouette I’m a lifeless face that you’ll soon forget My eyes are damp from the words you left Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest And if you’re in love, then you are the lucky one…

  • The death drive as a will to create from zero, to begin again

    I found this incredibly thought provoking from Richard Seymour as a reflection on the possibility of hope in a time of crisis. It suggests we need to move through despair because there is no way around it, but that on the other side we can find a hope grounded in a coming to terms with…

  • Why has social media become so grim?

  • The lights are out, the phones are dead

    The lights are out, the phones are dead And I’m the only thing that’s running in this city Except for the clouds and man, they’re coming down If I knew my way around, I wouldn’t feel so dizzy

  • Who should we trust when the apocalypse comes? Some thoughts on post-horror

    I’m currently working on a project with Milan Stürmer exploring how post-horror films both pre-figured pandemic imaginaries (2016-2019) and responded to them (2020-2022). It emerged from conversations in pub beer gardens in Cambridge during the summer of 2021 at a point when some vestiges of normal life had returned but things nonetheless felt extremely strange.…

  • Hope is optimism with a broken heart

    I wrote when leaving Cambridge in August 2021 how “Prior to the pandemic I was rapidly getting institutionalised into the university, pottering around the city over the course of the day between my office, college canteens, green spaces, coffee shops, college gardens and cinemas”. It was the first time in my life I had experienced…

  • What would happen if every human suddenly disappeared?

    Building on this extremely interesting looking book: On a similar theme, though I haven’t watched it yet:

  • There’s no guilty party

    I say your name I say I’m sorry I’m the one doing this, there’s no other way It’s nobody’s fault No guilty party I just got nothing, nothing else to say

  • On metronormativity

    I was introduced to the concept of ‘metronormativity’ (Jack Halberstam) earlier today and I’m rather taken with it. This is the Wikipedia article which summarises it: Jack Halberstam relates queer metronormativity to the dominant “story of migration from ‘country’ to ‘town’… a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring…

  • What would a ‘social crash’ within higher education mean for the discovery function within the knowledge system

    I’ve written recently about the possibility that we may be in the early stages of seeing a ‘social crash’ within higher education, in which the social capital lodged within Twitter dissipates because the service dies (or dwindles into Myspace-esque triviality) without those networks being reproduced in another forum. This might be because they get reproduced…

  • Digital scholarship: from the soft problem of citation to the hard problem of authoriality

    I’ve been convinced that podcasts have enormous pedagogical value for a long time. I’ve produced podcasts with students on a number of occasions, as well as using them in my teaching as a resource. However a concern I have relates to audio more widely and the scholarly habits required to work with it in a…

  • This place was a shelter

  • Peter Sloterdijk on the difficulty of saying what is missing

    In the first volume of his Spheres trilogy Peter Sloterdijk suggests the air constitutes our “first partner in the outside world”. It is a transition from floating in amniotic fluid (freely in our undisturbed balance) to being mediated by the air, offering “the incipient subject a first chance at self-activity in respiratory autonomy” without being…

  • Rise like Lions after slumber

    ‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.’ – Percy Bysshe Shelley

  • Have a vegan Christmas

    While I’m not yet a vegan (occasional eggs and cheese are the remaining obstacle) this wonderful advert at the cinema got me thinking about it again:

  • Habermas on colonisation of the lifeworld

    I am surprised to find myself coming back to this for making sense of the role of social media in the lifeworld, through the gateway drug of thinking about algorithmic isomorphism plays out in everyday life. I must say I wasn’t expecting that my thought might take a Habermasian turn and I feel a bit…

  • You’re doing pretty well given the circumstances

  • I think I thought I saw you try

    I thought that I heard you laughing I thought that I heard you sing I think I thought I saw you try But that was just a dream Try, cry, fly, try That was just a dream Just a dream Just a dream, dream

  • Recovering critique in an age of datafication

    Notes on Couldry, N. (2020). Recovering critique in an age of datafication. New Media & Society, 22(7), 1135-1151 This thought provoking paper reflects on how “the now utterly banal embedding of digital interfaces of many sorts into our working and resting lives, and the emergence across those platforms of new forms of power” has become an object…

  • Music is the weapon

  • Publishing a compendium of chapters or going for the magnum opus

    Over the last couple of months, I’ve suddenly been able to make progress on the book project I’ve been working on in various forms since 2008. From 2008 to 2014 this took the form of my PhD thesis which was embarrassingly riddled with typographical errors which I should have been made to correct, as well…

  • Litany of Blooming, by Nick Cave and Nicholas Lens

    From this wonderful album.

  • Capitalism is tearing us apart

    How have I heard this countless times without listening to the lyrics? I have to work late I’m sorry that the food’s gone cold We’ll fight when I get home (Capitalism’s tearing us apart) Just strangers passing in the dark Dreams sold to stay afloat Pulled by the undertow (Capitalism’s tearing us apart)

  • Rilke on living the questions rather than demanding the answers

    You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do…

  • A theory of learning for the future: the realist concept of reflexivity and the pragmatist concept of experience

    I was interested to discover how pragmatism is being used within education to develop a “theory of learning for the future”. The point of such a theory, argues Bente Elkjaer in this chapter, rests in its “teaching of a preparedness to respond in a creative way to difference and otherness” including how “to act imaginatively…

  • Why was the industrial revolution so slow and the digital revolution so fast?

    I think this is a fascinating question by Margaret Archer, even if it’s important to stress the ‘digital revolution’ is far from over: Why was the first industrial revolution so slow (taking, say, 250 years from its first beginnings) and the digital revolution of the last 25 years so fast? Somehow, the question gets lost by calling…