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  • 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.

  • 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…