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  • 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.

  • The muppets explain phenomenology

  • How bad will things get? The role of social theory when civilisation is collapsing

    In the early pages of Surveillance Capitalism there is an evocative description of personal loss. Shoshana Zuboff recounts the experience of watching her house burn down, struggling to recognise the reality of what she was saying. The point she is making is that the unprecedented character of this event left her unable to fully comprehend…

  • I hate what you do and I don’t like you

  • A comprehensive introduction to Social Media for Academics

    I just noticed this webinar I did a few years ago has been uploaded to YouTube. The sound quality is really poor but it’s the most comprehensive introduction I’ve recorded online:

  • You either die a hero or you live long enough to see Batman’s words misattributed to you

    wrote a little essay around ten years ago about The Dark Knight film and the broader cynical turn in cinema, riffing on the line “you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. It was originally spoken by Harvey Dent early in the film before being repeated by…

  • Platform capitalism and the compulsive search for signs

    This captures something of the phenomenology of the conspiracy theorist but also, I think, the stalker: the compulsive search for signs. A sense that it it all connected and that we can trace out those connections, if only we exhibit enough independence of thought and reject those agencies which kept us unknowingly under their tutelage…

  • How can I ensure I use social media in a careful and strategic way?

  • Love and hugs and songs and rage 

  • Against the individualisation of COVID

    A number of recent conversations have left me with the impression of an emerging common sense regarding the status of the pandemic in the United Kingdom. What these arguments shared was a suggestion that the progress of the vaccination program means that the risks of the pandemic are now a trivial matter for most people.…

  • Four alternatives to Evernote

  • Where will all the anger go after the pandemic?

    This piece asks a very important question about how the emotional impact of the pandemic will play out politically: The main question occupying my mind is: __Where does all that rage go?__Eventually, the pandemic will subside. Health care workers will have a slight reprieve from this hell. But the immense grief and PTSD will stick around.…

  • User interface design and the LMS

    ‘s inherently slightly frustrating to use platforms which have instead been designed around logistical considerations. There’s so much redundancy in LMS interfaces which could be filtered so easily if people working on them were concerned to do so. It leaves administering a LMS feeling like wading through treacle.

  • On being reflexive about how you e-mail

    Over the years Gmail’s autosuggest has learned how I write with terrifying accuracy, creating a situation in which significant chunk of my routine e-mails are algorithmically generated. I suspect this exaggerates my written quirks, ticks & deficiencies by feeding them back to me.

  • “I’m sorry i just like myself more than I like you” 

  • Why I’m extremely worried about this winter

    I’ve tended to think of myself as a fundamentally optimistic person. This has been tested a lot over the last 18 months but I still don’t think I’m someone prone to seeing catastrophe around every corner. I’m nonetheless extremely worried about what this winter will bring in the UK and I’ve felt increasingly isolated in…

  • The failures of educational technologists to recognise the social context of educational technology

    This is an interesting example of what it means to think sociologically about educational technology in the sense of recognising how entrepreneurs, technologists and advocates are themselves parts of educational systems. Their pronouncements originate from within systems which have already been shaped by their activity, in spite of their rhetorical tendency to externalise those systems…

  • RIP Mill Road Fox, a fleeting public mourns your death

    A fox who had been visiting houses on our street was hit by a car early this morning, presumably by someone speeding over a bridge that had only recently been reopened to traffic. I was walking past this evening and found the fox’s death had been commemorated in a way I found really touching.

  • A provocative film: Zoom Education Has Failed An Entire Generation

  • What does it mean to think sociologically about educational technology?

    I keep coming back to this question as I begin my new job at the University of Manchester’s Institute of Education. One answer would be to invoke the sociological imagination in the sense of drawing out the connections between what C Wright Mills called ‘private troubles’ and ‘public issues’. To bring the sociological imagination to…

  • Is anyone else’s WordPress doing this?

    I find it incredibly annoying that the text is suddenly squeezed up against the title in this way: I already didn’t like the new WordPress as a writing environment but this risks tipping me over the edge. I might start writing elsewhere and copying & pasting. I feel sad about this because for fifteen years…

  • The possible forms which post-capitalism could take

    This interview with Nancy Fraser about Covid-19 and the future of capitalism is an illuminating read, particularly this discussion of what could come after capitalism. The question she raises is whether Covid-19 represents a developmental crisis (leading to a new mode of capital accumulation) or an epochal crisis (leading to end of capitalism as a…

  • I can be found in the garden, singing this song, when the last rose of summer is gone

    I can be found in the garden, singing this song, when the last rose of summer is gone

  • What is it like to be a New York City delivery driver?

  • Education, Conflict & Crisis: From Critique to Transformation 

    Whilst the current COVID19 pandemic has brought home to many citizens in the Global North the fragility of their existence, including a lack of resilience in education systems and exacerbation of widespread learning inequalities, in the Global South this is but one more crisis in a long list that has punctuated daily lives and educational journeys.  This seminar seeks to go…

  • CfP: Digital Transformation as a major issue in science and higher education 

    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…

  • Under Northern Skies

  • Decelerated Academy? Enclosures, Enthusiasms, and Epidemics

    As an institution, the University faces the challenge of its own survival in the 21st century. The educational ecosystem that integrates it is under pressure and some hard conditions that restrict the work of teachers and researchers. The ‘Accelerated Academy’ project is promoted by an international group of academics willing to problematize the university institution. The…

  • Why I deleted my personal Twitter account

    I wrote in late 2019 about why I was deleting my personal Twitter account. This extract from Casey Newton’s newsletter perfectly captures my experience without the academic jargon I was leaning on to articulate it. My experience was that you either bleed time and energy into this dynamic or you feel like an asshole for…

  • The Collective on Education, Decoloniality and Emergencies is looking for a paid conference coordinator

    Primary Role The Conference Coordinator will support CEDE! before, during and after our 2021 conference “Shifting power in aid: knowledges, violence, and justice”.  Overview The Collective on Education, Decoloniality and Emergencies (CEDE!) is comprised of individuals and organisations seeking just practices for trans/national aid to learners, educators and education systems experiencing crisis. We are led…

  • Do your research!

    One of the more depressing features of our information environment is the growing tendency to combine absolute scepticism of the ‘mainstream media’ with absolute credulity in relation to anonymous people stumbled across on social media.

  • The song which defined my experience of the pandemic

    I’ve struggled to articulate why I found this music so inspiring over the last 18 months. The melody is so simple yet is built through repetition into something that is striving, urgent and hopeful. It makes me feel there’s always the possibility for creation amidst destruction, as long as we retain the capacity to look…

  • A Memorandum of Understanding Between Pre-92 and Post-92 Universities

    While clearing out my office I encountered this memorandum of understanding signed by representatives of the University of Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin University during the #USSStrikes in March 2018.

  • David Hume on the existential limitations of philosophical reasoning

    I’ve always loved this section from Treatise Book 1 Section 7 in which Hume describes how his philosophical musings seem so ‘strained and ridiculous’ after time with his friends.

  • Do we romanticise pre-digital life?

    I thought this was a lovely point by Zoe Williams about the tendency to romanticise pre-digital life, imagining infinite reserves of attention existing in the absence of contemporary digital technologies: Item three: some people – on this occasion, definitely not my kids – seem to think that we were all much more profound when we…

  • What percentage of your life have you spent in a pandemic?

    As someone who just turned 36, the pandemic has occupied around 4.5% of my life.

  • Why herd immunity through vaccination isn’t possible

    “As Independent Sage’s most recent report suggests, given the real effectiveness of vaccines, to reach ‘herd immunity’ with the original variant of Covid-19 one would need 78.4 per cent of people to be vaccinated. With Alpha variant, the figure would have to be 91.5 per cent. With Delta variant, it would be 98 per cent”

  • Crises precipitate change

  • The sociology of pandemic education

  • Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?

  • The platform ecosystem as a field of temptation and the virtues required to negotiate it

    This is a lovely piece from L. M. Sacasas on the limitations of digital literacy initiatives, tending as they do to abstract the intellectual problem of reliable truth-seeking practices from the moral problem of being committed to seeking that truth under conditions which make it difficult. In this sense, he’s arguing that virtue is something…

  • What I will miss about Cambridge, what I won’t miss about Cambridge

    In 10 days I leave the University of Cambridge to start as Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester, which means I’ll be leaving the city of Cambridge in a few months to move back to the city of my birth. The Faculty of Education here has been a wonderful home which has deeply…

  • The Buddhist principle of skill in means and theorising communication

    s it, this refers to “the ability to bring out the spiritual potentialities of different people by statements or actions which are adjusted to their needs and adapted to their capacity for comprehension”.

  • The sociological overlaps with incel culture

    thought this was a very important, if challenging, observation by Richard Seymour about the elements of incel culture which can be found in (somewhat) mainstream sociological thought.

  • Are you a non-player character in your own life?

    I found it impossible to resist the premise of Free Guy. A non player character (NPC) in an open world multiplayer game becomes aware of the limits of his own existence, breaking out of the loop in which he is stuck and beginning to exercise agency over his own life.

  • CfP: Living with Extinction

    I thought this CfP looked brilliant, even if so far away from what I do these days that I can’t see a feasible contribution I could make myself.

  • Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt)

    Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt). Green ink, a 26 oz., a bad case of big-mouth. A sum of our parts and I’ve never laughed harder. A song in our hearts and I’ve never laughed harder. It don’t really matter ’cause nothing’s ever felt as right as this.

  • How does sociological thought contribute to human freedom?

    I’ve been skimming through Thinking Sociologically by Zygmunt Bauman and Tim May. One of the things I like about this is the clear sense in which they’re arguing that sociological thought contributes to human freedom.

  • Platform capitalism and the recovery of educational technics

    The defining thread of my work over the last decade has been the recovery of technical systems and devices as salient factors in educational practice. This means a refusal to treat these items as tools which can be picked up and put down, defined by nothing other than the uses to which they’re put, but…

  • The Death of Yugoslavia

    I’m saving this here because I want to watch the full series in the playlist below:

  • It’s the final countdown…

  • Are you a finisher or an abandoner? On the existential anxieties of the bibliophile

    someone who finishes books and being someone prone to abandoning them. Around a decade ago I committed to becoming the former after discovering that a year largely spent reading had only led me to finish 20 or so books. Disturbed by the realisation that I was likely to read only a few thousand books in…

  • Songs for teenagers

  • The Return of the Privatdozent in the Platform University

    By Privatdozent I mean unsalaried or precariously employed scholars with doctorates who are entering into direct financial relationships with students.

  • An introduction to community informatics

  • The Side Effects of Vaccines – How High is the Risk?

  • The Quest for Normativity: Challenges and New Directions in Social Research

    Civic Sociology aims to be a forum for the cultivation of normative inquiry within the discipline, and to offer a space for the many conversations that different ethical turns have spurred. In order to contribute to this vision, this call for papers invites contributions from across the social sciences and humanities that address questions related to…

  • So no more talk about the backfires, this time we fire back

    So no more talk about the backfiresThis time we fire backLight a match and light the past up before it catches upWe’ll raise a mast and cast offYeah, we’ll break some legs we’ll mend em and then we’ll take the casts offNow, we’ve had our lossesWe’ve had our victoriesWe’ve sat across from every victim of…

  • Music is the weapon

  • Being a digital scholar in the post-pandemic university

    A video of the keynote I did at the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities. I did a workshop at the same conference a few years ago and it was fascinating to contrast the f2f and digital experiences of these two sessions.

  • The idiots are taking over

  • Tilting within myself

    Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it I know it is—and that if once it hailed me it ever does— And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction not as towards a place, but it was a tilting within myself, as one turns a mirror to flash the…

  • The epidemiological unsustainability of pre-Covid ways of living

    This is the fault line of post-pandemic politics: two very different models of governance to respond to a transformed bio-environment, as well as how they will interact with the climate crisis.

  • Higher education and the individualization of COVID-19

    What’s going to happen in UK universities in September? This piece from Jim Dickinson seems plausible about the possible intersection between ‘learning to live with the virus’ (in other words the individualization of the problem once the vaccine programme is mostly or entirely complete) and the ‘migration event’ which takes place at the start of…

  • The sociology of networked harassment

    This fascinating and important paper by Alice Marwick develops a theory of morally motivated network harassment to explain the pervasive dynamics of online abuse we can see on social platforms, beyond what she terms the dyadic harassment which can equally be seen in face-to-face settings and the normalised harassment in which certain forms of behaviour…

  • Why the R number can be extremely misleading when it comes to the transmissibility of new variants

  • Indigenous Data Sovereignty

  • The reification of social change

    There’s a lovely expression in this newsletter describing how pop-futurist Alvin Toffler reifies ‘change’ “into an autonomous abstraction, something that appears to cause itself, with consequences society must then adjust to”. It’s worth reflecting on quite how mainstream this move has become, particularly with regards to a centrism which sees politics as a matter of…

  • The enforced digitalisation of the pandemic

    Less than half the UK population was using video call platforms by March 2021 (after three lockdowns) despite the widespread sense in the media these were a ubiquitous feature of life:

  • Beneath the waves an ocean

  • The data have landed, by Michael Rosen

    What a brilliant poem, shared on his blog here: First they said they needed data about the children to find out what they’re learning. Then they said they needed data about the children to make sure they are learning. Then the children only learnt what could be turned into data. Then the children became data

  • The political economy of Bidenism

    There’s an excellent piece in the NLR by Cedric Durand putting Biden’s apparent left turn into historical context. My initial assumption was that Biden was doing what Starmer promised to do i.e. rebuilding his party by brokering a coalition between the left and the centre, built around the most popular policies of the left and…

  • The ontological preconditions for radical digital citizenship

    The thrust of the argument was that if social science exists within the horizons of platform firms (i.e. it restricts itself to asking empirical questions which can be answered by platform generated data) then it can’t take platform capitalism as an object, instead leading it to fade into the background as a precondition for analysis.…

  • A video introduction to The Public and Their Platforms

    This short introduction (starting around 7 mins 40 secs) to The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media by myself and Lambros was part of a panel launching the new Public Sociology series by Bristol University Press.

  • Heidegger on the End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking

  • Conspiracy theories as assembly devices

    In our forthcoming book The Public and their Platforms, myself and Lambros Fatsis write about assembly devices. When watching the superb HBO documentary Into The Storm about QAnon (trailer below) I was struck by Cullen Hoback’s description of Cicada 3301 in terms of “collecting like minded others through an internet game”.

  • On waiting for life to start

    I’ve had this passage from The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks (pg 302-203) stuck in my head all day so i thought I’d share it: I think I am like a lot of people, you know: I’ve spent my life waiting for my life to start. It’s as thought one needs permission from…

  • The compulsive search for signs

    I’ve just finished reading Robert Fine’s Being Stalked: A Memoir. It’s a thoughtful and self-therapeutic reflection by the late political theorist on his experience of being stalked by a former student in the 1990s. Throughout the book, I’ve felt an eery sense there are aspects of his diagnosis which touch upon the psychodynamics of platform…

  • The district sleeps alone tonight

  • The malaise of modernity

    I was delighted to discover that one of my all time favourite lectures has been uploaded to YouTube in its original form. The 1991 Tanner Lectures by Charles Taylor were the basis for his Ethics of Authenticity, in which he investigates those “features of our contemporary culture which people feel very very worried about even…

  • Black out on white night

  • This is a test post from a WordPress session

    This is a test post from a Wordpress session. I’m demonstrating how to use the Wordpress editor and how simple it can be.

  • The pedagogical principles of the Python bootcamp

    Phil Brooker and I recently completed our second NCRM funded Python for Social Scientists bootcamp. For obvious reasons we switched from a four day intensive face-to-face bootcamp to a five week cross-platform (Slack, Wordpress, YouTube and e-mail) model for the second bootcamp. We reflected on this in a session for the Faculty of Education’s Ideas…

  • New Chapter: Growing Up in a World of Platforms

    I’ve been writing a lot recently about platform socialisation. I’m interested in how the proliferation of platforms brings about fundamental changes in the process of socialisation, as well as how we respond to these normatively and educationally.

  • The voyages of concepts: some critical thoughts on sociotechnical imaginaries and its application in education

    I’ve always been a little bit uncertain about the concept of ‘socio-technical imaginaries’.

  • What critical realism can learn from ANT and speculative realism

    It struck me when reading this passage from Sheila Jasanoff’s introduction to Dreamscapes of Modernity how much critical realism can learn from ANT and Speculative Realism with regards to the reality of social construction.

  • I ain’t waiting for nothing, I just show up to shine

  • Participants needed for two projects about technology, inequality, and the future of Higher Education

    The Post-Pandemic University has issued two new call-outs for participants.

  • A Song of Goodbye, by Ian McMillan

    Farewell, Hand on Bollocks, Farewell, Basil Brush, Farewell, Seaside Drunk and Sea Cow You’re silent and weeping under history’s crush Your name’s your memorial now See you, German Helmet, So long, Tanked Up Ted, Goodbye, Sausage Stuffer and God Your names resonate through the roads of my head The names of the daft and the…

  • In a world that has decided that it’s going to lose its mind, be more kind my friends

    History’s been leaning on me lately;I can feel the future breathing down my neckAnd all the things I thought were trueWhen I was young, and you were tooTurned out to be brokenAnd I don’t know what comes nextIn a world that has decidedThat it’s going to lose its mindBe more kind, my friendsTry to be…

  • The Somatechnics of Research

    I thought this was an intriguing call for papers: Guest edited by Dennis Bruining, Holly Randell-Moon, and Saartje TackThis special issue /Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies –Power /invites contributions that critically examine how researchmethods, methodologies, theories, practices and institutions constitutesomatechnics. Somatechnics here is understood broadly as an approach thebody/ technology nexus that displaces the…

  • Nietzsche’s theory of dialogue and its implications for educational podcasting

    The light we find in these dialogues, the illumination of what was previously in the dark, reflects the refraction of thought which is possible in dyadic interaction. The mutual recognition of the partners in conversation leaves the thought they brought to their interaction turning into something else by virtue of that interaction

  • Social media exposes the gap between the real company culture and the management fantasy

    The ambient visibility which social platforms create within and between organisations will tend to amplify the experience of the gap, as reflections on it (complaints, jokes, rants etc) will circulate more broadly than would otherwise be the case.

  • How has the pandemic changed internet use in the UK?

    There’s lots of insights in this Ofcom study of media use in the UK over the last year. It suggests the pandemic has catalysed a number of changes in how people relate to the internet: There’s a possibility that non-access has shrunk significantly (from 11% to 6% from March 2020 to March 2021) but they…

  • Call for participants: a global dialogue about the digital divide

    We’re excited to announce a collaboration with the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) to launch a global dialogue about the digital divide in higher education. The ACU’s new podcast series will explore how the work of universities is changed by the digital revolution and how they can use their position to confront the challenges posed by digital…

  • I seem to chill the objects that I meant so much to love