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  • Nick Cave on creating on the edge of disaster

    I thought this was a powerful statement of faith in the creative process. It followed his description of improvisation earlier in Faith, Hope and Carnage in which he explains how the elements of his work choose their final form. But letting this choice unfold necessitates trusting in the creative process, believing it will come together…

  • Cultivating a relationship of gratitude towards the world

    This short post by the always thought-provoking L. M. Sacasas captured something I’ve tried to articulate a few times recently. How do we approach our existence in a way which is open to it rather than seeking to exercise control over it? The more difficult that control becomes to exercise due to circumstances which precede…

  • The lavender has stained my skin and made me strange

    People ask me how I’ve changed I say it is a singular road And the lavender has stained my skin And made me strange The lavender is tall and reaches Beyond the heavenly cover I plough through this furious world Of which I’m truly over There is in the world only one way, on which…

  • David Hume on escaping an overheated brain

    I’ve mentioned this passage from A Treatise of Human Nature to a couple of people recently. I encountered it as an undergraduate philosophy student and it has always stayed with me, as an insight into Hume the author and as a commendably honest reflection on the strange nature of philosophical reasoning. In it Hume reflects on how…

  • Nick Cave on the terrible devastating opportunities that bring transformation

    I wrote recently about how Nick Cave talks about the relationship between suffering, loss and renewal in Faith, Hope and Carnage. He expands on this later in his conversation with Sean O’Hagan, who I only just discovered is an accomplished musician rather than the high brow music journalist I’d assumed. Reflecting on his last record…

  • Georg Simmel and Critical Realism

    I was struck recently by an unexpected resonance with critical realism when reading Georg Simmel’s The View of Life, a late series of four essays which offer a broad philosophical perspective on the nature of life itself. In fact I should be more specific than critical realism insofar as the parallel is with Margaret Archer’s…

  • Why (material) things matter to people

    I’ve been thinking about this question while clearing out the vast quantity of unused possessions which I’ve accumulated in recent years. The title is a play on Andrew Sayer’s wonderful book Why Things Matter To People in which he explores how we relate to the world through our concerns; his interest is not in the…

  • Requiem for a Tweet – Is there a future for the academic social capital held on the platform?

    Originally posted on the LSE Impact Blog In the early days of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, I imagined the worst-case scenario to be that a platform already rife with troubling behaviour would become something even darker and more problematic. What I didn’t expect was a potentially existential doom loop in which advertisers already spooked by the…

  • My favourite lyrics from Nick Cave’s Ghosteen filtered through an AI art generator

    Well there goes your moony man With his suitcase in his hand Every road is lined with animals That rise from their blood and walk Well the moon won’t get a wink of sleep If I stay all night and talk, if I stay all night and talk The bright horses have broken free from…

  • Inventing our lives

    “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on…

  • Nick Cave on loss and improvisation

    I wrote earlier in the week about my deep fascination with Ghosteen, the album released by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in late 2019. It’s a haunting work which spoke deeply to me during a strange transitional year in my life, filled with drawn out endings and incipient new beginnings. I was fascinated to…

  • Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh

    But now we speak with ruined tongues And the words we say aren’t meant for anyone It’s just a mumbled sentence to a passing acquaintance But there was once you

  • Should I rejoin Twitter?

    In about 4 days my Twitter account will be deleted forever if I don’t login to the system. The widely reported failures afflicting the service as Musk guts the organisation mean I should probably log in before that if I want to ensure I have access. I was pretty sure I wanted to leave the…

  • Nick Cave on suffering, loss and renewal

    I spent much of the summer thinking about the relationship between cruel optimism and renewal; the sense that what makes optimism cruel might be our mode of relating to the object, rather than the object itself, raising the possibility of renewal in which we find a non-cruel way of (re)establishing that relation. I took inspiration…

  • What happens if Twitter fails? A few provisional suggestions

    For the last few days I’ve been preoccupied by the prospect that Twitter will fail and what this means for higher education. There are two forms I could imagine this taking: a hard fail in which the platform does go bankrupt as a consequence of the doom loop it now seems to be stuck within,…

  • What Microsoft Teams is and what it could be

    I’ve spent a great deal of time using Microsoft Teams over the last few years. The University of Cambridge accelerated the rollout of the platform in the early months of the pandemic, reflecting the obvious practical need it served during those difficult times. I was immediately enthralled by it, imagining how it could confirm internal…

  • Dragonfly Eyes (2017)

    The mind-blowing debut feature of renowned Chinese artist Xu Bing is a fictional feature created entirely from surveillance-camera recordings, about a young woman whose life takes a series of unexpected turns after she leaves the Buddhist temple where she has lived most of her adult life.

  • Being open to the world

    There’s a strange passage in Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life which left me ruminating on the expression ‘look before you leap’ which I heard endlessly as a child growing up in north-west England in the 80s and 90s. He talks about “a schizoid scaling of heights that do not stand in any productive…

  • The comfort of ideas

    I’ve spent much of this year thinking about the difference between people who search for meaning in projects and people who seek to escape the search through meaning through projects. The former look for answers to prior questions through the creative work they commit themselves to, whereas the latter seek release from a hyper self-interrogatory…

  • The chasm at the heart of our agency

    In every house, in the heart of each maiden and of each boy, in the soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, between the largest promise of ideal power, and the shabby experience. – Ralph Waldo Emerson In my slightly bleak exploration of finding joy on a dying planet, I’ve thought a lot…

  • Why do we tweet?

    This thoughtful reflection from Rob Horning resonated with me as someone who deactivated Twitter after the Musk takeover, unsure about whether I will return. He describes the strangeness which results from being jolted out of your digital habits, newly aware of what has become second nature and prone to question why we ever did it…

  • Coaxing the sight and sound back to your life

    In the first volume of Life of the Mind Hannah Arendt reflects on the “almost infinite diversity” of the appearances we find in the world, “the sheer entertainment value of its views, sounds, and smells” (pg 20) which philosophers have tended to overlook. This immediately reminded me of a letter C Wright Mills wrote to…

  • New Paper: Is it Paranoia? A Critical Approach to Platform Literacy

    Social media platforms have received increasingly bad press coverage over the course of the last decade for everything from problematic uses of algorithms to the ability of authoritarian regimes to leverage them as a way to impact elections. Unfortunately, this emphasis on critique, though justified, has led to a paranoid form of thinking in which…

  • To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

    There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail: There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me— That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honour…

  • The growing infrastructural dominance of big tech within education. What is to be done?

    Notes on Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perrotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the new global connective architectures of education governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 231-256. This path-breaking paper opens up a new agenda for critical studies of digital education which shakes off the comforting bromides which too often characterise critical approaches in order to…

  • Critical Realism & Technology Reading Group, Friday October 28th 1pm-2pm

    How do critical realists make sense of technology? What are the major themes, challenges and debates concerning technology within critical realist social theory? The purpose of this reading group is to explore these questions through monthly meetings to discuss relevant works on technology and critical realism. We meet from 1pm to 2pm on the final Friday…

  • CfP: Public Knowledge – the Academy and Beyond

    Public Knowledge: the Academy and Beyond A special issue of New Formations: A journal of culture / power / politics  Now in its fifth decade of publication, New Formations maintains an international reputation for publishing rigorous peer-reviewed scholarship in the critical humanities and social sciences. The journal accepts contributions within a wide range of disciplines, while specialising as…

  • What does it mean to live a good life in a broken world? Some post-pandemic thoughts on Charles Taylor’s philosophy

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the existential challenges created by a world which is cascading towards systems failure. My assumption is that, as Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age, “Every person, and ever society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is” involving questions such as what makes…

  • The temporal ontology of modernity

    I’m currently reading Mike Savage’s The Return of Inequality as I belatedly develop my PhD thesis into a book. His concept of epochal theorising shaped how I approach the work of Anthony Giddens on late modernity which I took as the foil for my thesis. It was encountering thinkers like Bauman, Beck and Giddens which…

  • Webinar: is an environmentally sustainable digital education possible?

    October 19th, 7pm GMT Digital technology is often presented as a solution to social and educational problems. It is imagined that if we find the right technology and deploy it in effective ways then previously intractable challenges might soon become a thing of the past. But what if digital education is part of the problem?…

  • The unconscious fluency of writing

    This thoughtful piece from Richard Seymour captures something which fascinates me about the writing process. He describes this as an unconscious fluency which enables writing to work, even if writing is simultaneously a deliberate and purposive activity: I doubt anyone begins a piece of writing with the rules in mind. Writing is a conscious, effortful…

  • I built a room for you in the back of my mind

    I built a room for youIn the back of my mindWhere the ravenous wolvesAnd the ghosts I know reside You were amazingYou were always on my mind We were secrets to keepAnd crows buried side by side But we tasted a kissThat was sent from belowIt was cool in the nightI was old as a…

  • Are you looking for a teaching role in digital education?

    Are you looking for a teaching role in digital education? The Manchester Institute for Education is hiring three Senior Tutors to support a range of programmes, one of which is the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education. This is a rapidly growing area of the department with a recently launched research group and a range…

  • This Place is a Shelter

  • Toni Morrison on fascism

    Fascism only talks ideology but it really is just marketing, marketing for power. It’s recognizable by its need to purge, the strategies it uses to purge and its terror of truly democratic goals. It changes citizens into taxpayers so individuals become rife with anger at the notion of the public good. It changes citizens into…

  • Disrupting the post-pandemic university: an audio experiment

    By Milan Stürmer and Mark Carrigan It has been widely observed that the pandemic led to an enforced digitalisation in higher education. Familiar modes of interaction like meetings, seminars and conferences came to feel strange to most as mediation through video conferencing platforms like Zoom became the norm. Reflection on this phenomenon tends to imply…

  • The meaning of civics as the new world struggles to be born

    I’ve blogged regularly over the last few years about what I’ve termed post-neoliberal civics and post-pandemic civics. These terms are conscious placeholders intended to designate a significant change underway in which, to Gramsci put it, “the new world struggles to be born”. It reflects an interest in the significance of education during the transition as…

  • Finding joy on a dying planet: failing to act as psychic self-defence and how to overcome it

    I’ve been reluctant to write this blog post for some time. This reflects a certain unwillingness on my part to self-disclose past a certain limit; I’m happy to share my thought online but I rarely share my life. There’s also a certain unwillingness to grapple with the underlying question I intend to address here. In…

  • The highly evolved, politicised, social industry-based apparatus of personal destruction

    This is a disturbing and insightful piece from Richard Seymour. Highly recommend you subscribe to his Patreon if you haven’t already. He closes with the warning that it’s only “matter of historical contingency, lets say of the vagaries of uneven and combined development, that we do not yet have such a highly evolved, politicised, social…

  • Clive Lawson’s Technology & Isolation (ch 1-3)

    What is technology? I often use the term overly loosely to refer to devices, as well as the distributed systems in which they are embedded. In Technology & Isolation Clive Lawson observes how the term is “frequently portrayed as knowledge, as artefacts, as ways of doing things, as any means to an end, as a…

  • Podcasting in higher education

    Podcasts have come to feel ubiquitous following the pandemic, with periods of confinement to the home for significant swathes of the population creating a hunger for engaging digital content. Their popularity had been growing for years before this, with many crediting the Serial true crime podcast in 2014 for helping the medium break into the…

  • Should you write every day?

    In recent months I’ve resumed my commitment to writing daily. I have been trying to write 1000 words each workday. These words end up in a variety of places. They cover this blog, short pieces, chapters, papers and book projects. It’s a practical response to suddenly having a lot more professional responsibilities than I’ve had…

  • The privilige of academics during the pandemic

    The organisational theorist Martin Parker (2021) compares the pandemic to “an acid eating away at the flesh” which enabled us “to see the bones of the social structure”. He highlights the “inequalities that mean some have to travel to work in care homes and fruit-picking fields, while others self-isolate and edit books”. The fact that…

  • Some thoughts on technology in the post-pandemic university

     One of the curious spectacles of the pandemic (which at least anecdotally it seems many have observed) is the figure of the gifted speaker who we have seen hold an audience in rapt attention struggle to engage or connect through digital media. The obvious parallel to this is the speaker who thrives through the mediation…

  • This blog is my public notebook. You can find me in lots of other places: LinkedIn | Twitter | Soundcloud  Youtube | Padlet | TinyLetter | LetterBoxd  For a more formal record of what I do, please see my institutional homepage. You can subscribe by e-mail or browse my archives using the button in the top-right corner.

  • Critical Realism & Technology Reading Group

    How do critical realists make sense of technology? What are the major themes, challenges and debates concerning technology within critical realist social theory? The purpose of this reading group is to explore these questions through monthly meetings to discuss relevant works on technology and critical realism. We meet from 1pm to 2pm on the final…

  • Some notes on social generativity

    I recently encountered the concept of ‘social generativity‘ which Eric Lybeck characterises as a post-critical move responding to a dead end in critical social theory during the earliest 21st century. He organised a session at the University of Manchester with Mauro Magatti, Chiara Giaccardi, Paolo Pezzana, Patrizia Cappelletti and Elvira Uyarra. These are some rough…

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

    This might seem like an odd question to ask but it occurred to me when listening to the podcast Sounds Like a Cult. In a fascinating episode on the Landmark Forum (which I hadn’t realised was initially founded by Werner Erhard) they describe how the group provides “a new vocabulary” for people who “arrived broken…

  • The Evisceration of the Human Under Digital Capitalism 

    This is a pre-print of Carrigan, M. (2018). The evisceration of the human under digital capitalism. In Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex Machina (pp. 165-181). Routledge. Please see the final version if you want to cite this. Introduction In the summer of 2008, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and techno-evangelist Chris Anderson wrote a much circulated article…

  • I’m young enough to be all pissed off but I’m old enough to be jaded

  • Digital Scholarship after Covid-19: an overview of my next book

  • We are ugly but we have the music

    I remember you well in the Chelsea HotelYou were famous, your heart was a legendYou told me again you preferred handsome menBut for me you would make an exception And clenching your fist for the ones like usWho are oppressed by the figures of beautyYou fixed yourself, you said: Well, never mindWe are ugly but…

  • Notes on the conceptual grammar of platforms

    To recognise that platforms intervene in this profoundly asymmetric way doesn’t negate the agency of their users, as Burgess and Baym’s (2020) insightful study of Twitter makes clear. They point to the many features of the social platform, such as the retweet and the hashtag, which actually began with user behaviour. As opposed to a…

  • Post-horror and the obscene character of (post-pandemic?) parties

    What better place is there for a party then a stunning mansion in a remote location? Obviously the answer to this question changes if the party is taking place in a horror film. Bodies Bodies Bodies tells the story of one eventful drug fuelled night which begins with a reunion between old friends and ends…

  • André Gorz and the concept of hygiene

    From David Frayne’s The Refusal of Work pg 149-150: As Bruce described his self-care habits, I was reminded of Gorz’s definition of ‘hygiene’, which for Gorz means something much more than the mundane rituals of preening and cleanliness. For Gorz hygiene consists in a more rigorous attempt on the part of individuals to understand their…

  • Reflexivity, contingency and platforms

    I enjoyed this recent paper by David Beer on what he terms ‘the looping of the social‘. This is a useful way of framing the recursive character of social life in which the outcome of a process feeds into the unfolding of a subsequent process. There is nothing inherently technological about this process, in so…

  • The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

  • What do you do, exactly?

    I often suspect that millennial British sociologists are uniquely prone to reflecting on their intellectual and professional trajectory. It’s a habit I picked up long ago, exacerbated by how readily blogging and tweeting lends itself to thinking about these things in public. It’s one I wondered if I might begin to lose now my odd…

  • What are socio-technical transitions?

    The category of ‘socio-technical transition’ is increasingly central to how I define my research agenda. What I used to call digitalisation or platformisation (loosely, the insert of platform intermediaries into existing social interactions) can be better described as a socio-technical transition in which the diffusion of new technologies through the lifeworld are driving a fundamental…

  • Some thoughts on hybrid teaching and student poverty in the 22/23 academic year

    Earlier in the summer David Hitchcock circulated an important guide about student poverty, offering advice about the coming socioeconomic crisis and what it means for students. With the possibility that inflation could hit 20% in Britain by January, it’s likely that poverty will become widespread amongst the student population. Not simply in the relative sense…

  • Flourishing as freedom

  • Does Big Tech have too much power in the post-pandemic university?

  • Cruel optimism and living for the present

    Over the last few days a number of theoretical issues have fallen into place for me as I (belatedly) read Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. The book explores objects of attachments which are self defeating because the nature of the object frustrates the inclination which led us to it in the first place. For example the…

  • Day man, fighter of the night man ☀️

  • Cruel optimism and the possibility of renewal

    I first came across Laurent Berlant’s concept of Cruel Optimism in an LRB essay by Marina Warner about the ‘disfiguring of higher education‘. Warner invoked the concept to explain the self-exploitation she saw in academics around her who “open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in…

  • Trauma as a genre for understanding the present

    When the pandemic began I happened to be reading Zizek’s The Ticklish Subject. There was an aspect of his argument which vividly captured the sense of unravelling I was experiencing, describing the narcissistic subject “who perceives everything as a potential threat to his precarious imaginary balance”. This “narcissistic self-enclosure” made it impossible for him to…

  • Going back to previous moments in your life through films

    I watched Boyhood yesterday for the first time in eight years. For those unfamiliar with Richard Linklater’s astonishing film, it tells the story of Mason Evans Jr growing from the age of six to eighteen in Texas after the divorce of his parents. It was filmed over eleven years and captures the unfolding of his…

  • Stagnation, euthymia and flourishing

    One of the most frequent diagnoses in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is ‘stagnation’. It is a concept which is rendered in the English language literature as ‘stagnation’, ‘depression’, ‘blockage’ or ‘constraint’ but, as Volker Scheid explains, its representation in traditional Chinese through the character 鬱 has meanings which “allude not only to dense luxuriant foliage,…

  • Do you work with social media in universities?

    Do you work with social media in universities? We’re launching monthly online seminar @DTCEManchester for researchers, practitioners and trainers to discuss emerging developments, share best practice and shape sector trends. Get in touch here for more info: https://atomic-temporary-16563158.wpcomstaging.com/get-in-touch/

  • Academic developers as choreographers of professional reflexivity

    Many of the discussions I’ve read about the ‘online pivot’ tend to centre the perspective of academics who were forced to adapt their existing materials at short notice for online delivery. In this interesting paper Stanton and Young describe what this shift meant for academic developers (pg 1) working within Centres for Teaching and Learning…

  • The difference between being post-pandemic and post-covid

    This was a distinction which Liz Morrish used in a recent e-mail conversation and it captured something which I’ve been keen to articulate for some time. The risk of talking about post-pandemic is that it is taken to apply we are post-covid, in the sense of SARS-CoV-2 no longer posing a threat. The fact it…

  • We’ll go someplace, we’ll get a new start 

    We’ll go someplace, we’ll get a new startYou gotta move on when things fall apartWe’ll go someplace, we’ll get a new startYou gotta move on when things fall apart We’re all around, you see me yet?But I can’t hear any word you saidWe don’t fit in anywhereLet’s grab our things and goLet’s grab our things…

  • An introvert’s guide to post-pandemic networking

    This is my first crack at something I’ll be talking about a lot over the next year. I think the networking environment (eugh) has been changed dramatically by Covid-19 and how we think about the process of building/expanding professional networks has to changed as a result. A few key thoughts I want to explore in…

  • How do you have rewarding conversations about social theory?

    I was struck by how well this passage from Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads describes my experience of the best theoretical conversations. There’s a way of joining in depth conversations about abstract issues which goes with the rhythm in order to elaborate upon it, listening in order to build upon what has been heard, rather than barging…

  • Why do we read philosophy?

    This is a question which Milan Stürmer and I keep coming back to as we work our way through Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy. The straight forward character of the question can be complicated by pointing to who ‘we’ are as people who aren’t professional philosophers (I escaped that fate after a political philosophy MA I…

  • I choose this

    Now I don’t lightly use words like foreverBut I will love you ’til the end of todayAnd in the morning when I remember everything that you areWell, I know I’ll fall for you over againNow I know someday this all will be overAnd it’s hard to say what most will I missJust give me one…

  • What is it that’s special about face to face events? Perspectives from Peter Sloterdijk and Randall Collins

    This question has preoccupied me throughout the pandemic as someone who missed organising face-to-face events but also hoped the crisis would lead to a shift towards online meetings becoming the norm, unless there was some pressing purpose served by meeting in person. There are two obvious theoretical perspectives to bring to such a question. For…

  • What does sustainable (digital) scholarship look like for individual scholars?

    I listened to a thought-provoking lecture by Neil Selwyn this morning (Studying digital education in times of climate crisis) which offered a detailed and hopeful account of the situation in which we find ourselves with the post-pandemic ubiquity of digital education against a background of climate crisis. I was particularly interested in his discussion of…

  • Why is learning theory important?

    I had a conversation earlier today which clarified why I see learning theory as inherently useful, even if this promise is rarely realised in practice. There’s an indispensability to theoretical reasoning which I see as an obvious feature of social inquiry in the sense that describing or explaining anything involves the use of concepts which…

  • How many times must we be shown the outcome of the pattern?

  • How can we ensure consistency in digital education while leaving room for experimentation?

    There was a conversation with senior leadership at my departmental away day which made me think back to this interesting conversation myself and JJ Sylvia had earlier on this year. I heard a clear explanation of the weight which my university places on consistency in the student experience, driven in part by an entirely understandable…

  • Who maintains the social infrastructure we need for scholarship?

    The announcement of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has sparked considerable anxiety amongst those in the academy who have fallen into the habit of using the platform as a conduit for the exchange of announcements, ideas and recommendations. While the mainstream status Twitter now enjoys within higher education might once have seemed unlikely, it can…

  • Could we have a university without e-mail?

    I’ve been thinking about this question since reading productivity guru Cal Newport’s provocatively titled book A World Without E-mail. Even asking the question can feel absurd given the centrality which e-mail enjoys in the university. This was clear to me from early in my time as a postgraduate student, even if email was a relatively…

  • Human augmentation and the future of warfare

    I’ve been reading a fascinating (though unsettling) report from a military futures exercise on human enhancement. It argues for a view of human beings as platforms, rather than as the “interchangeable components of military units or the material with which to operate the platforms – vehicles, aircrafts and ships”. It suggests that human augmentation will…

  • George Simmel on Eye Contact

    One reveals oneself in the look that receives the other into oneself; in the same act with which the human subject seeks to recognize its object, it surrenders itself to the object. One cannot take through the eye without at the same time giving. The eye reveals to the other the soul that he or…

  • Dream, dream, for this is also sooth

    After a deeply unpleasant week (fine now though, thankfully) I find myself obsessing over The Song of the Happy Shepherd By Yeats. Particularly the final lines about the necessity of dreaming in the face of all which has been lost. Read by Grian Chatten of Fontaines D.C. whose voice I find hypnotic: I must be gone:…

  • How do you use social media for PGT programmes?

    I’ve been thinking about this question a lot since starting as programme director for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester. We have a Twitter account and a LinkedIn page though neither has been used consistently since they were setup. I suspect this is typical of social media accounts for…

  • What am I trying to do with my research?

    I recently had someone suggest to me that I was no longer an early career researcher. I was immediately resistant to the proposal in a way which suggested I’m quite attached to the category. I’m 9 months into my first lectureship which certainly looks like an ECR position but I’m 9 years since my PhD…

  • On Rain

    Via Milan Stürmer

  • What is an intellectual community?

    I’ve been throwing around the term ‘intellectual community’ a lot recently without offering a definition. It is something which most, if not all, academics have had some experience of. In fact it often figures amongst the motivations for an academic career, even if the reality of the contemporary university fails to live up to the…

  • Some thoughts on intellectual community

    Building intellectual community isn’t just an optional luxury within higher education. It’s a necessary (but insufficient) condition for academics to act together in meaningful and effective ways. Collective action has to be constituted in who we are and what we do. This applies just as much to knowledge production as it does to union mobilisation.…

  • What does it mean to be an academic leader?

    I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the last few days. I returned to Cambridge at the weekend to attend farewell events for Susan Robertson who is stepping down as Head of Faculty in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge to take on a new role at Monash University. It…

  • And I can feel things changing

    None of this was written in stoneThere is nothing we’re forbidden to knowAnd I can feel things changing Even when I’m weak and I’m breakingI’ll stand weeping at the train station‘Cause I can see your faces There is so much peace to be found in people’s faces I saw it roaringI felt it clawing at…

  • An ecological approach to information overload

    I spent a lot of time during lockdown thinking about digital hoarding. I’ve always had a tendency towards hoarding, with material things as well as digital artefacts, in the sense that I have the impulse to collect things I find interesting in the expectation I will enjoy them later. The problem which emerges when we…

  • Some critical thoughts on the crisis of student engagement

    Over recent months a conversation has begun to take place about a crisis in student engagement within universities. From twitter conversations, through to conversations between colleagues and thought pieces in professional magazines there’s a growing sense that something has shifted in how many students are relating to university education. In a recent article this was…

  • A cybernetic black pill

    Almost a decade ago I was sitting eating a sandwich in the strange little cafe in the foyer of the Social Science Building at the University of Warwick. For no discernible reason I was suddenly hit with the realisation that I’d always assumed the world would trend towards stability and that there was absolutely no…

  • How we survive is what makes us who we are

  • 14 tips for academics who are worried about Musk’s Twitter but don’t want to leave entirely

    There’s been a lot of anxiety in Academic Twitter over the last few days about Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform and what this means for our use of it. It’s important to recognise that changes will take months to happen so this isn’t an immediate crisis but it’s likely that things will change for…

  • The grim reality of ‘living with Covid’

    I’m old enough to remember when people talked about ‘herd immunity’. The idea was that eventually enough people would either catch Covid or get vaccinated that the virus would no longer pose a meaningful threat. The problem, if I understand correctly, stems from the continual evolution of the virus and the related possibility for immune…