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  • 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

  • The loneliness of knowledge production during a pandemic

    We need to recognise the pandemic doesn’t have an ‘off’ switch, but rather will fade through a gradual process of normalising for increasingly large swathes of people alongside an ever present background of resurgent threat. This means that we won’t have a return to ‘normality’, but rather a slow, precarious and contested transition into a…

  • The civic challenges which come after the pandemic

    In the last year we have been forced to disengage from the larger society, with so much of our emotional energy turning towards sustaining close relationships at a distance through the affordances of social platforms. Even when we’re ‘opening up’ the folk epidemiological self-consciousness of the last year can’t be wished away, with wider interactions…

  • The rook can look left, right, just turns his head. But the knight might rise up, investigate the grid…

    I didn’t come looking for loveI didn’t come to pick a fightI didn’t come to wave or take picturesPander to some benefactor, ring on every broken fingerWon’t extend my wings to be clippedI know the culture here is to stay humble but shitIf we all go round bowed heads, button-lippedIf none of us go for…

  • The politics of bad sex

    From Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again loc 398: Bad sex emerges from gender norms in which women cannot be equal agents of sexual pursuit, and in which men are entitled to gratification at all costs. It occurs because of inadequacies and inequalities in access to sexual literacy, sex education and sexual health…

  • Teaching as a design science: a few reflections on Diana Laurillard’s approach to digital education

    I’ve found the approach of Diana Laurillard extremely helpful for articulating what I’ve tended to think of as user cultures and public pedagogies for social media within higher education. As she puts it on pg 2 of her book of the same name, “education must now begin to drive its use of technology”. I’ve sometimes…

  • The reservoirs and amplifiers of SARS-CoV-2

    There’s not an ‘off’ switch to a pandemic but rather a tendency for it to fade as a daily concern for ever larger swathes of the population, in a process of normalisation liable to be interrupted by resurgences which can easily be cast as coming from undesirable elements who are outside the mainstream of society.

  • The public discussion of higher education and research

    I thought THE’s Chris Havergal discussion (viz 21-22 mins) about the effects of social media on the coverage of universities was extremely interesting. This is something I wrote about a few years ago as the shift from the ivory tower to the glass tower which is a metaphor which didn’t really have much effect but…

  • Call for Participants – Digital Inequality in Education: Pasts, Presents and Futures

    Digital inequalities have long existed within education, both within traditional educational spaces and practice, and within specifically digital interactions. These inequalities have deep roots in extant socio-cultural and socio-economic inequalities, and yet emerge in unique ways through the macro and micro dynamics of education and digital technologies.

  • The point of life is live, love If you can, then pass it on

    We die so the others can be bornWe age so the others can be youngThe point of life is live, loveIf you can, then pass it on, right?

  • The importance of the library

    From Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People pg 33-34: Libraries are not the kinds of institutions that most social scientists, policy makers, and community leaders usually bring up when they discuss social capital and how to build it. Since Tocqueville, most leading thinkers about social and civic life have extolled the value of voluntary associations…

  • Platform socialisation and the changing character of education

    We can’t find meaning in the world, in the sense of a process of maturing and coming to find a place for ourselves which is satisfying and sustainable, simply through the internalisation of a symbolic order and/or the replication of our natal circumstances.

  • RIP Jim Steinman

    And some nights I lose the feelingAnd some nights I lose controlSome nights I just lose it all when I watch you dance and the thunder rolls And maybe I’m lonelyThat’s all I’m qualified to beThere’s just one and onlyThe one and only promise I can keep As long as the wheels are turningAs long…

  • What is social infrastructure?

    The outdoor spaces which functioned to facilitated interaction have been problematised as spaces of viral contagion, leading our movement through them to be restricted to the functional.

  • How to be a male ally in a culture of sexual violence against women

  • What is asexuality and why is it interesting?

    There’s a video of me from 10 years ago on YouTube and it makes me feel old:

  • Platform socialisation and the possibility of freedom

    I wrote in yesterday’s post about being an ‘efficacious agent‘. Dewey has a much better term for this: freedom. The freedom which comes from the “power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences which will result from acting upon them; power to select and order means to carry chosen ends…

  • I don’t control life, but I can control how I react to it

  • Do you have an idea for a book about public sociology?

    This is a new monograph series on public sociology which will include work that addresses public and community engagement and the relationship between sociologists and their publics.

  • What does it mean to be an efficacious agent? Some sketchy notes on critical realism and educational sociology

    In the last few months, I’ve been trying to define my interest in education and often find myself coming back to the idea of the efficacious agent. This is a placeholder really but it rests on my sense that education (in the broadest sense of the formal or informal) leaves people variably placed in terms…

  • Dewey’s conception of collateral learning and platform socialisation

    I’m unsure whether ‘collateral learning’ is a throwaway phrase used by Dewey in Experience and Education or whether it’s more fully developed elsewhere. However I’ve found it a really useful concept to make sense of informal learning through social platforms and their impact upon the socialisation process.

  • Why do platforms matter for public sociology?

    It can seem obvious that there’s some relationship between social media and public sociology. These are platforms which offer free, instantaneous and immediate access to seemingly vast audiences around the world. They hold out the promise of engaging immediately, outside of traditional structures and without relying on the intermediaries who have tended to be involved when…

  • Recovering the Homeric gods

    I understand the point to be that existence is higher or fuller when things are acting through us rather than action arising from us, reflecting an involvement in our situation rather than a detachment from it. To reclaim the Homeric gods doesn’t necessitate polytheism but it does mean cultivating a sensitivity to the range of…

  • An Archerian reading of John Dewey and its relevance for platform socialisation

    What I find particularly valuable in Dewey is his sense of how as an individual “passes from one situation to another, his world, his environment, expands or contracts” with the “knowledge and skill in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with the situations which follow” (pg 44). The nature of this…

  • The role of involvement in learning how to learn

    I found this reprint from Hubert Dreyfus quite inspiring to engage with again, over a decade since I read the original book. It feels more relevant than ever when considering the constraints of education during the pandemic, with the core challenge posed by Dreyfus of how much involvement can be established remotely being one which…

  • Chomsky: On Being Truly Educated

    The ability to inquire and create constructively and independently without external controls.

  • What sorts of experiences do social platforms generate?

    What sorts of experiences do social platforms generate? What “attitudes and habitual tendencies” (pg 38) are being generated? Which “are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental” (pg 39)?

  • What do you miss? Research-led music on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education

    I love this music by Simone Eringfeld based on her MPhil research on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education:

  • “Everybody’s hurt, mine ain’t the worst but it’s mine and I’m feeling it now”

  • Covid censoriousness

    I wrote last month about the censoriousness which seems to have proliferated during the pandemic. It frustrates me when I see it in others but I then notice it welling up in myself, in ways connected with but irreducible to behaviours which increase transmission risks.

  • The two competing models of education

    From John Dewey’s Experience and Education pg 17: The history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without; that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place…

  • From the Margins to the Centre: Defining New Mission and Vision for HCI Researchers in South Asia

    CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:We aim to build ”HCI4SouthAsia”, a strong community of HCI researchers and practitioners who work/will work in the South Asian region (i.e., in and around the countries Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka). As a first step, we are organizing a half-day virtual workshop over the Zoom platform at CHI 2021,…

  • The true object of democratic education: to stand up within the context and against the context

    This is a really powerful account by Roberto Unger about the role of education in producing capable agents, able to act within the present order but also to resist it and see beyond it, opening out possibilities for transformation which are latent within the way the world currently is. He suggests states are concerned with…

  • Whom is education for? What is education for? A lecture by Noam Chomsky

    I’ve spent an enjoyable afternoon listening to Chomsky talk about education. The overarching issue this has raised for me is how education relates to agency. How does education support the capacity to act in the world? How does it redistribute power in Weber’s sense of the probability that someone will be able to exercise their…

  • Noam Chomsky on The Purpose of Education

    An education of the kind that Bertrand Russell or John Dewey talked about. That’s a value in itself, whatever impact it has on society. It’s a value because it helps creates better human beings. After all that’s what an education system should be for.

  • The social ontology of education

    What is education? This perspective from Susan Robertson and Roger Dale, drawing on Connell’s work, resonated with me: Here, ‘learning’ is placed at the centre of anything that we might know as education, but it is seen as a collective property of the social world, and our understanding of the education ensemble represents education as…

  • What is my work about?

    I’m a sociologist of technology exploring the intersection between social platforms, human agency and education in the broadest sense. I’m interested in how these platforms, as socio-technical infrastructures which enable users to interact within parameters defined by their operators, become taken for granted features of everyday life. Far from the virtual world ‘out there’ which…

  • What do you do, exactly?

  • On Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Education Ideal

    It is a time-space granted for self-fulfilment. To become who one is. That’s what the university is. That’s why the university is called the university. Because it fulfils the purpose of the universe. Humbolt’s ideal is that without external pressure or demand, the individual will find within herself or himself, the greatest urge: to fulfil…

  • John Dewey, Habituation and Platform Socialisation

    In his account of socialisation in Democracy and Education, Dewey places a great stress on habit formation. There’s an inevitability to habit as “excessive stimulation and excessive and ill-adapted response” necessitate that “certain stimuli are selected because of their relevancy, and others are degraded”.

  • Dewey on the over-socialised conception of ‘imitation’

    I found this extremely interesting from Dewey’s Democracy and Education loc 562-575. He argues that the concept of ‘imitation’ tends to mistake an outcome for cause, imputing to a generic tendency to copy each other what is better explained by commonly constituted agents finding themselves in similar situations which tend to produce similar responses.

  • What are digital inequalities?

    I’m enjoying Massimo Ragnedda’s The Third Digital Divide because of how lucidly he lays out the theoretical issues raised by the notion of digital inequalities. This is from pg 4 of the book: From his neo-Weberian perspective these questions encompass economic, cultural and political aspects. It’s a matter of status and prestige as much access…

  • Food or data? A few thoughts on digital inequality in the UK

    I wish this research by the telecoms regulator Ofcom had received more widespread attention. They found that 4.7 million UK homes have struggled to afford their telecoms bills this year, with over a million households cutting back on spending on things like food and clothes in order to pay these bills.