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  • What is my research about?

    Developing a new conceptual model for understanding the socialisation process when social platforms are ubiquitous, as well as the forms of literacy which are necessitated by this process Analysing policy and practice with regards to professional use of social media by academics Developing ‘bootcamp’ formats for professional learning within higher education, particularly with regards to…

  • How do you listen to audiobooks in a scholarly way?

    I wrote a few months ago about what the LSE Impact Blog catchily termed ‘the audible university‘ which is to say the growing role of listening within a post-pandemic university where screen fatigue is rife. This has become an increasingly central part of my own research practice as I use audiobooks in a number of…

  • Peter Sloterdijk and the concept of the sphere

    I recently finished the first volume of Peter Sloterdijk’s enormous Spheres trilogy. It’s difficult to briefly summarise such a strange and eclectic work but I think it can ultimately be read as an extended conversation with Heidegger’s Being and Time. Sloterdijk sees this foundational work as fundamentally incomplete in its prioritisation of time over space,…

  • A Book Discussion on The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media 

  • A first attempt to theorise socialisation in a way which is adequate to the challenges of platform society

    This was originally published in Carrigan, M. (2021). Growing up in a world of platforms: What changes and what doesn’t?. In What is Essential to Being Human? (pp. 103-131). Routledge. Please use this reference if you’re citing this article. The ubiquity of personal computing, as well as the smart phones and tablets which followed from it, make it…

  • A critical realist critique of Rosi Braidotti’s Posthumanism

    This was originally published in Carrigan, M., & Porpora, D. V. (2021). Introduction: Conceptualizing post-human futures. In Post-Human Futures (pp. 1-22). Routledge. Please use this reference if you’re citing this article. Introduction: Conceptualizing Posthuman Futures  Mark Carrigan & Douglas Porpora It is widely held that emerging technologies call into question common assumptions about human beings…

  • Long Covid in the post-pandemic university

    Over the last ten days I’ve been slowly recovering from my first encounter with Covid. I’ve started writing this post on the tenth day since my symptoms emerged, though it’s only been five days since my first positive test. Apart from 24 hours when I was worried by increasingly bronchial coughing, it’s been a relatively…

  • Psychoanalysis, Capitalism and Resistance

    “I often find that it’s going through the pessimism, the darkness, the struggle, that you wind up creating a pocket where there is no other option but joy. The way it comes up with many clients is getting to a place of, ‘well, given that we’re screwed in all of these conceivable ways, what would…

  • Critical realism needs to be a living tradition

    I couldn’t agree more with these remarks from Dave Elder-Vass in a thought-provoking interview. We should be uncomfortable with the idea that the under-labouring has been done: I’ve never been comfortable with the belief that early critical realism in general, or Bhaskar’s work in particular, is a fully coherent and consistent set of ideas that…

  • An interview with Margaret Archer about her life and work

    This was originally published in Brock, T., Carrigan, M., & Scambler, G. (2016). Structure, culture and agency: Selected papers of Margaret Archer. Routledge. Please use this reference if you’re citing this interview. Part 1: The London School of Economics Mark Carrigan: What was the experience of graduate school like? How did it shape you intellectually?   Maggie…

  • Will you forgive my soul when you’re too wise to trust me and too old to care?

  • The drama of seeing real thinking

    I’ve often felt there can be a drama to seeing people think. In the sense of watching someone think deeply about what they’re saying, struggling with the content of it in the process of sharing it. This is how Rudolf Carnap describes watching Wittgenstein speak during his brief participation in the Vienna Circle: When he…

  • We are already living in the collapse

    I thought this was a really important point by James Meadway which captures something I’ve been trying to articulate across a series of gloomy blogposts: There is a difficulty for left political strategy here. It is the same one as presented by the ongoing presence of covid: that there is an urgent need to rethink what…

  • These poor people live in these tiny apartments: Zoom as a window into the lifeworld in an unequal society

    Until working on a paper about Zoom culture this afternoon, I’d completely forgotten this incredible interaction which was shared by Lukas Gage after a director forgot to mute himself during an audition:

  • Philosophers as situated in space and time, trying to muddle their way through

    I’m currently reading Metaphysical Animals which is an energetic and profound portrait of how Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley came together as friends and the enormous contribution they made to philosophy. As a long time enthusiast for philosophical biography, I’m fascinated to understand how philosophy emerges from the life world of philosophers and expresses…

  • On not swimming in circles

    I had a strange interaction at the swimming pool yesterday. I approached my usual lane which had three people swimming in it. I could feel the discomfort as I came towards the pool, in spite of the fact I can barely make out people’s faces without my glasses these days. There were three swimmers in…

  • The tragedy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

    I wrote earlier this week about Wittgenstein’s loneliness. I realise I didn’t explicitly acknowledge his own struggle against this, expressed not least of all in the shift from his earlier to later work. I watched Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein earlier today and I was struck by how beautifully the script interpreted this transition in existential terms,…

  • Hold your own

    When time pulls lives apartHold your ownWhen everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certaintyHold your ownHold it ’til you feel it thereAs dark, and dense, and wet as earthAs vast, and bright, and sweet as airWhen all there isIs knowing that you feel what you are feelingHold your own

  • Why education matters

    I’m interested in how significant shifts in social life take place, often expressed through theoretical terms such as individualisation, acceleration and digitalisation. These concepts often have limitations but, in so far as they participate in what Wolfram Eilenberger describes as “the adventure of providing a relevant contribution to the understanding of its own age”, I…

  • No guilty party

    I say your nameI say I’m sorryI know it’s not workingI’m no holidayIt’s nobody’s faultNo guilty partyWe just got nothingNothing left to say Another year gets awayAnother summer of loveI don’t know why I careWe miss it every summer I say your nameI say I’m sorryI’m the one doing thisThere’s no other wayIt’s nobody’s faultNo…

  • The loneliness of Ludwig Wittgenstein

    The decision Wittgenstein made to give away his family fortune and take up primary school teaching mystified his siblings, leading his eldest sister Hermine to express dismay at his philosophically trained mind being put to such a purpose. His response illustrates something important about the character of Wittgenstein’s loneliness, described by Wolfram Eilenberger as “an…

  • Does Big Tech have too much power in the Post-Pandemic University?

    During the pandemic platforms like Zoom and Teams became central to the core operations of the university, enabling teaching and research to continue in the absence of face-to-face interaction. The radical change involved in what has been called the online pivot built upon a much longer term process of growing reliance upon digital infrastructure across…

  • Can we reclaim our agency by putting the internet in its place?

    I found this Raptitude piece powerful enough to plan an internet sabbatical. This is how he describes his reclaimed agency, leaving beside a chronic state of ‘semi-doing’, once disconnected from the internet: This simplicity was disorienting in a way. Many times a day I would finish whatever activity I was doing, and realize there was…

  • The shifting landscape of misinformation: from macro-conspiracies to micro-conspiracies

    This was a fascinating comment by YouTube’s Chief Product Officer about how the misinformation landscape is shifting. We’re seeing a transition from stable narratives with broad support to rapidly evolving narratives with niche interest reflecting the compulsive search for signs which increasingly characterises social platforms: hundreds of millions desperately searching for order amidst the chaos,…

  • And come morning, I am disappeared

    And on the worst days, when it feels like life weighs ten thousand tons,I sleep with my passport, one eye on the backdoor, so I can always runI could get up, shower and in half an hour I’d be goneAnd come morning, I am disappeared, just an imprint on the bed sheets.

  • The ontology of virtual worlds

    Virtual world: an interactive computer-generated world Virtual reality: an immersive, interactive computer-generated world This is how David Chalmers (he of Zombies fame for undergraduate philosophers of my generation) defines virtual worlds and virtual reality in a recent Philosopher 1923 discussion. His point is that “virtual reality is genuine reality” in contrast to those who see…

  • When will the Metaverse actually arrive?

  • Why Microsoft will beat Facebook to the Metaverse

  • What’s it like to spend your entire life as a cruise ship guest?

    This thought provoking short film gives some sense of what seasteading would look like in practice, filled with depressed corporate executives loudly proclaiming to each other how happy they are while the staff awkwardly slink past them in the hope of avoiding being pawed by them:

  • Our entire life is only 4000 weeks

    I’ve been obsessing about this fact since reading Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 weeks (his earlier book the Antidote is also worth reading) which is predicated on the observation this is a typical human lifespan. In practice we have far fewer than 4000 weeks, in the dual sense that I’m reflecting on this in my 36th year…

  • Civil inattention on public transport during a pandemic

    After moving to Manchester I now find myself using public transport on a daily basis for the first time in years. It’s felt strange after rarely taking buses in my five years in Cambridge and only occasionally setting foot on trains during the pandemic. I’ve noticed I feel extremely awkward on busy trams and it…

  • What does it feel like to be inspired?

    This is how the twenty-nine year old Martin Heidegger conveyed the feeling to his wife after a summer of intense creativity: The visions, the problem horizons – real steps towards fruitful solutions – new ways of seeing in principle, possibilities of the most surprising formulations an character, simultaneous firing off of genuine combinations – it…

  • Levelling Up Education: New Approaches to Place, Work and Education

    Hybrid conference (Manchester-based, mid-June) and/or Journal special collection (Civic Sociology) For over 40 years, a liberal, individualistic approach to education has dominated policy and pedagogy based on the assumption that more education leads to greater social mobility. While true for select talented (and lucky) individuals, it is becoming increasingly clear that aggregate levels of mobility…

  • The phenomenology of insomnia

    I found this description of insomnia by Emil Mihai Cioran incredibly resonant. Mine has thankfully never been this extended but he captures the ordeal of being expected to be fully functional when you’ve barely slept for days at a time: So, instead of starting a new life, at eight in the morning you’re like you…

  • The social ontology of the Metaverse

    For our next project the Centre for Social Ontology will be exploring the Metaverse. There’s a temptation to treat this concept with the utmost cynicism, seeing it as a reheating of virtual worlds with the intention of moving away from the Facebook brand at the point of ever deepening regulatory threat. The risk in doing…

  • Groping nervously towards the expression of inner life

    This is an expression the critic Joy Grant uses to describe the biography of Harold Monro, founder of the Poetry Bookshop and an influential figure in London’s literary scene in the early modern era. If I understand correctly she’s pointing towards the relationship between his own unhappiness and the ideal which animated him: “poetry at…

  • Three books that shaped my work

    I’ve always been fascinated by the internal conversations we have with ourselves but until I read this book I didn’t realise this was something it was possible to study. I used this approach in my PhD to explore the internal conversations of students as they confronted the opportunities and challenges of undergraduate life. This is…

  • The Enemy Bacteria

  • The bloody scene is bloody sad 

  • To every thing there is a season 

    To every thing there is a season,and a time to every purpose under the heaven:A time to be born, a time to die;a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;A time to kill, and a time to heal;a time to break down, and a time to build up;A time…

  • Keanu Reeves = philosopher of social acceleration

    There’s a lovely extract from this interview with (notoriously immortal) Keanu Reeves about his experience of passing time. He suggests the image of an audio tape early in the conversation: Each year, he says, seems to slip away that little bit faster than the last, something that always puts him in mind of the turning…

  • What does it mean to be human after Covid-19?

    In After Lockdown Bruno Latour suggests a shift in the register of our agency, a metamorphosis, revolving around a twitchy hyper-awareness of the consequences of our action. Driven by the awareness of our environmental impact and the strange experience of reorienting ourselves to the world after lockdown, we feel less like an “old-fashioned human being”…

  • Music for thinking

  • Music is the basis of all life

    What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

  • What do you do? Intellectual biography as self-constitution

    I’ve often found the act of academic autobiography fraught with anxiety. The occasions on which we’re asked to define what we do invite an account which goes beyond the sterile quasi-autobiography of CVs and publications lists. In conversations with those outside higher education, ‘what do you do?’ is a question which asks for a social…

  • Cambridge: the most unequal city in the UK

  • The suprisingly familiar character of the TikTok algorithm

    After a few weeks of using TikTok I was convinced the platform was radically different from services like Facebook and Twitter. The speed with which the stream was (successfully) personalised stunned me and the relatively peripheral character of follower counts left me convinced this didn’t involve what Jose Van Dijck calls the popularity principle. However…

  • Why capitalism made it impossible to eradicate Covid

    I thought this was an important argument by James Meadway about how international competition in a global capitalist economy made Zero Covid strategies untenable for individual states. In the link he talks about China’s sustained commitment to this strategy in spite of this competitive dynamic is likely to have significant longer-term consequences for the global…

  • So you don’t want to be a normal journal any more?

    I’ve noticed a pattern in which editorial terms become frustrated with being a normal journal. It might be the glacial pace of academic publishing, the sterile uniformity of journal formats or the mounting evidence that peer review often fails in the accelerated academy. It leads the editors to aspire to become something else… what concerns…

  • When will we know how dangerous Omicron is?

    This is very helpful from Zeynep Tufekci in her most recent newsletter: It takes about two-three weeks from exposure and infection to hospitalization, and about four-six weeks to death, sadly. Plus, all early data is subject to selection effects: if the first superspreader events are in, say, college campuses, we get a young cohort who…

  • I keep having dreams of things I need to do, of waking up and of following through

  • Towards a sociology of splintered minds

    It occurred to me recently that my bleak view of the long term future, shared by my partner and some (far from all) of my friends, could be seen as a secular millenarianism to which leftist millennials are increasingly prone. It could even be seen as a leftist black pill, a fatalistic sense of a…

  • A beginner’s guide to Omicron 

  • What will post-neoliberalism look like?

    I increasingly find James Meadway the most insightful analyst of the political economy of Covid-19. He explores the epochal transformation which this crisis has the potential to bring about but does so in a way which is grounded in the identification of existing socio-economic mechanisms, in many cases ones which preceded the current crisis. In…

  • Social media for academics and the circulation of expert concepts

    There’s a fascinating extract in the Real Life newsletter about the contemporary manifestation of what Giddens called the double hermeneutic: the two way relationship between expert concepts and lay concepts which means (amongst other things) that the former often drift into being the latter. ‘Algorithm’ is an excellent example of this, as David Beer pointed…

  • We need a military history of the culture wars

    This is a wonderful phrase Finn Mackay uses in their book Feminine Masculinities and the Gender Wars (pg 3). It’s used in a slightly off-hand way but I think has a clear analytical meaning in terms of the historical unfolding of the disputes which get subsumed under the category of ‘culture wars’. Interestingly MacKay is…

  • The things which bring us together

    I’m fascinated by how we assemble around things and how events of particular types ensue from the nature of these things. As Dreyfus and Spinosa (pg 274) describe in Philosophical Romanticism this is something which was a significant theme in the work of the later Heidegger: For Heidegger, the gathering of people around things like…

  • A Heideggerian reading of Margaret Archer

    There are many reasons I drifted away from social theory. One of the most irritating was how pervasively people would misread Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity (the biggest inspiration for my theoretical project) and how fruitless conversations which attempted to correct these misunderstandings would often be. Its not that I thought the work was faultless,…

  • I’ve been slowly developing a philosophy of academic development without realising this is what I was doing

    One of the multiple hats I wear is academic developer as much as I tend not to use the term. I’ve been training academics in the use of social media for over a decade through workshops, seminars, books, articles, blog posts, podcasts and videocasts. As much as I’m pleased that people often seem to find…

  • Will QAnon go mainstream through evangelical christianity?

  • So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten

  • Resources for organising online conferences

    I’m trying to compile a list of resources for organising online conferences: Here are resources which are relevant without being related to online conferences: If you have suggestions could you share them in a comment and I’ll add them to the list? I’ll eventually make this into a padlet unless someone has a better idea…

  • The inner life of behaviourists

    I’ve often wondered about the inner life of those who deny the inner life of others. This extract from Ian McEwan’s Atonement (pg 36) captures my own experience in childhood of realising others must experience inwardness as well, even if not everyone experiences this in the same way: [W]as everyone else really as alive as…

  • The existential challenge of the post-capitalist condition

    I thought this was a beautiful observation by Hugh Lemmy in his strange but thought-provoking newsletter about Frasier: It’s a state usually attributed to teenagers. This weekend my boyfriend and I took the dog for a long walk in the mountains that surround the city we live in. Realising, at one point, that we had…

  • Sing, Sing, Sing

  • How Covid-19 accelerated the transition into post-capitalism

    Varoufakis argues there has been a decoupling of money markets from real capitalism. Speculators see that Covid-19 has put capitalism in suspended animation and that it is damaging our economies in a way that is at least medium to long term. It is causing a new tsunami of poverty which deepens and entrenches existing inequalities…

  • We’re leaving neoliberalism and entering something worse

    For much of this crisis there has been a dominant sense that we will eventually return to pre-pandemic normality. There are many reasons why this hope is misplaced, with the pandemic likely to accelerate existing tendencies towards digitalisation, automation, occupational polarisation and political turbulence. If we have been in a Gramscian interregnum since 2007/08 then…

  • I don’t rate you 👊

  • The emptiness that comes with online performance

    I found this interlude by Brian Fallon at the start of his first live performance since the pandemic began incredibly resonant. I think he’s in a socially distanced venue while also live streaming but it’s possible the venue is completely empty: I’m going to trust that you’re there. I can’t see you or feel you…

  • Social media is reshaping universities’ value systems in a scramble for likes and shares

    Universities’ value judgements about research are becoming ‘coupled’ to social media platforms as they compete for funding by demonstrating their influence beyond academia, an analysis suggests. The study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge, focused on how universities use social media in ‘impact’ case studies, which are a requirement of the Research Excellence Framework…

  • New Paper: Platforms and Institutions in the Post-Pandemic University

    Universities’ value judgements about research are becoming ‘coupled’ to social media platforms as they compete for funding by demonstrating their influence beyond academia. Find out more in the new paper by myself and Katy Jordan. Here’s an interview about the paper in the Times Higher Education. The cartoon by the brilliant Tom Gould captures the…

  • Yanis Varoufakis on Post-Pandemic Technofeudalism

  • CfP: Digital Academia

    Special Issue of the Swiss Journal of Sociology https://szs.sgs-sss.ch/en/home/ Deadline for Abstracts: November 15th, 2021 Guest-Editors: Luca Tratschin (Center for Higher Education and Science Studies, University of Zurich)Christian Leder (Center for Higher Education and Science Studies, University of Zurich)Philippe Saner (Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training, Zollikofen; Department of Sociology, University of Lucerne)Katja Rost…

  • The Rise of Educational Audio

  • Winter is coming 🎶😷🌨☃️

  • The flow of writing

    I thought this was beautiful from Richard Seymour on thinking-through-writing. I’ve always been fascinated by the non-linear and apophatic creativity involved in writing (the fact I’m linking back to blog posts which are many years old suggests the role which blogging can play in this). However I find these non-linear states more difficult to access…

  • A few thoughts on Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres

    I’m reading Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres trilogy with Milan Sturmer at the moment. It’s proving an interesting read and I wanted to record some initial thoughts: There’s an intoxicating vastness to the account Sloterdijk is developing here. It encompasses the ontogenesis of the organism and the historical unfolding of the species through the lens of the…

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self-reliance amidst the epistemic chaos of platform capitalism

    I’m currently reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self-reliance essay having intended to for years. His poetic affirmation of the capacity to form one’s own opinions resonates with me, reminding me of my favourite part of Nietzsche in his reflections on the internal experience of creativity.

  • Walter Lippmann on the sociological imagination

    I found this passage from Lippmann’s Public Opinion reminiscent of what C Wright Mills later described as the sociological imagination. This meant for Mills a sensitivity towards the interconnection between private troubles and public issues, enabling someone to see how the seemingly idiosyncratic facts of their lived experience are shaped by wider social and historical…

  • What is practical reasoning?

    I find myself using the phrase ‘practical reasoning’ with ever greater frequency. This is a curious outcome of a meandering trajectory in which I deliberately avoided the concept as a philosophy student and fifteen years after I ceased to be one it appears regularly in my speech and writing as a sociologist/educationalist. I realise I’ve…

  • Building and unveiling worlds in science fiction

    Ever since I was a child I’ve been gripped by world-building in science fiction, whether it’s in film, tv, fiction, comics or videogames. These vast alternative worlds, with their own histories and cosmologies, swirl inside my mind and furnish my imagination. I’m particularly prone to getting sucked in by stories told within these worlds that…

  • Why do we spend so little time analysing the socio-economic catastrophes which almost happened?

    I like Peter Fleming’s idea of speculative negativity: haunting of present by those “dystopic and grisly futures that have not yet materialised … only faintly detectible in the signs which drift by on the daily commute”. However it makes me wonder about the socio-economic apocalyptic near misses which have been averted in the last two…

  • Some rambling reflections on being a millennial leftist during this crisis, post-pandemic inequalities and the union sacrée of Covid-19

    Only 31.6% of the Italian population were working from home by April 2021, almost half of whom were in hybrid working patterns. However for university graduates this was 52.2%. Even allowing for these numbers being much higher during initial lockdowns, it’s likely a minority experience to be staying at home for a year with nothing…

  • I choose this, I choose this, 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 again Now I know someday this all will be overAnd it’s hard to say what most will I missJust give me…

  • Why isn’t the cost of living crisis the defining issue of UK politics?

    I increasingly wonder why the cost of living crisis isn’t the defining issue of UK politics. We have seen the longest period of wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars which means a real terms cut for most when inflation is factored in. Furthermore as Anna Minton points out on loc 592 of Big Capital the…

  • The Beautiful Soul of the Critical Academic

    world, uncontaminated by the ambiguous and difficult decisions which are an inevitable part of life within it. As Zizek once described it, “The ‘beautiful soul’ is a tender, aesethicized soul, too refined for the banality of the social world”. It positions what’s bad and unholy within the world as ‘out there’, at a distance which…

  • Who do we imagine ourselves to be tweeting on behalf of? Norm circles, networked harassment and the politics of social media

    I’m interested in the role which imagined agreement has in motivating online action. For example in what Alice Marwick calls networked harassment there’s a loose coordination between individual users, fuelled by high-visibility amplifier accounts and motivated by a sense that a norm has been violated

  • Epistemic positioning and epistemic injustice 

  • Succession and the hidden injuries of the neoliberal subject

    At no point does Succession suggest these characters are sociopathic, as unlikable as they are. What makes it so powerful is how vividly we see the emotional damage which this over-saturation of strategic conduct does to them. The points at which they want to reach out, to find comfort through closeness, only to realise they’re…

  • If you want to provide your writing with a sense of occasion, listen to this in the background

  • Platform capitalism’s ideology of human frailty

    I like this framing by Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism as a way of talking about what Bacevic has described as independent irrational animals. It fits interestingly with what Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel describe as ‘tech humanism’: the belief that “unhealthy and inhumane” business models can be fixed through better design which rests on an ironically dehumanising…

  • What can we do about the post pandemic university?

    This talk will discuss how the university has changed over the last 18 months, as well as which of these changes are likely to remain. We can’t expect that the university will snap back to pre-pandemic normality, particularly with regards to the central role that digital platforms now play in academic life. If we’re entering…

  • The limits of online learning

    I increasingly think of this in terms of the symmetry principle in which we cultivate an understanding of the constraints and enablements of both modalities, as well as the technological reflexivity necessary to think about how they might be best suited to certain kinds of encounters.

  • What the intersection of Covid and climate crisis means for capitalism

    I can’t stop thinking about this James Meadway piece reflecting on what he terms our new age of scarcity. The fundamental point he is making is a simple one, concerning the environmental shocks which are increasingly ubiquitous. There is a tendency to see each of these as exceptional but the routine occurrence of once exceptional…

  • You can tell a man’s demeanour from his facial hair

  • E-mail mistakes as a window onto digital literacy in higher education

    I don’t mean this post as an attack on people who’ve done this. However it does leave me worrying that the level of digital literacy remains relatively low even with regards to a technology like e-mail that’s been around for decades.

  • George Monbiot on the tsunami of post-virus illness which is long Covid

  • Do you use Margaret Archer’s approach to reflexivity in your work?

    It will soon have been twenty years since Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation was published. This groundbreaking book was the starting point for Archer’s reflexivity trilogy, published over the next nine years and building on her previous trilogy which ended with Being Human.

  • Audiobook listening as scholarship

    Over the last year I find myself listening to academic works in audiobook with ever greater frequency. In part this reflects the screen fatigue which the pandemic has provoked.

  • Cambridge as the cutting edge of British capitalism

    It’s rate of growth has vastly outpaced the rest of the UK for years while housing and infrastructure have failed to keep up. The result is a city which is as dysfunctional as it is beautiful, as cacophonous as it is twee and one which I no longer want to live in.