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  • Call for solidarity from BEKS Istanbul

    Dear colleagues and friends, BEKS Istanbul was founded in 2010 by a group of scholars and students from the Sociology department at Mimar Sinan University to make independent scientific research and share their results with the democratic public opinion, especially on “difficult” issues in need of public debate and left a trace in the social…

  • New Book: The Public and their Platforms

    I’m so excited the book I’ve been working on with Lambros Fatsis over the last few years is coming out in June. It’s the result of a long conversation we’ve had about our mutual frustrations concerning ‘public sociology’ which led us to rethink what it means to be public scholars once digital platforms are ubiquitous…

  • The agony of the petite bourgeoisie

    I thought this observation from Dylan Riley in the recent New Left Review was crucial for understanding the class politics of the pandemic. Particularly with regards to what I’ve come to think of as the lumpen-libertarian uprising which is unfolding as a reaction against elites, globalism and lockdown in a way which gets past the…

  • Big Tech’s (apparent) crackdown on the far right

    In the last few months we’ve seen the large social platforms take what appears to be a stand against the far-right. This point from Richard Seymour is absolutely crucial in understanding the ideological significance of this move, lest it be seen as a damascene conversion to civic responsibility rather than a business decision: Hitherto, the…

  • The gap between theory and practice in education

    “Why is it, in spite of the fact that teaching by pouring in, learning by a passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of “telling” and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice…

  • The socialising role of community

    Following from this afternoon’s post about John Dewey, I wanted to share this extract from later in Democracy and Education about the socialising role played by communities. He explains how the groups to which an individual belongs inevitably exercises an influence over them, by virtue of that belonging. I understanding him to be saying these…

  • Higher education as self-formation

    I found this really helpful for revisiting my PhD, seven years on, in order to finally publish from it. I’m broadly sympathetic with the project expressed in this lecture but the point of departure is his claim that higher education increases the capacity for reflexivity. This just isn’t true as an empirical generalisation and examining…

  • How would John Dewey have understood the socialising influence of digital platforms?

    How would John Dewey have understood the influence of social platforms on adolescents? I found myself wondering this because of the central role which transmission plays in his understanding of socialisation.

  • CFP: Accelerated Academy #8: Decelerated Academy? Enclosures, Enthusiasms, and Epidemic

    The current health crisis has swept the world, provoking worldwide change at the political, economic, and social levels. Scholars have been caught in two contradicting roles: experts discussing  the causes and consequences of the pandemic and victims of the pandemic workflows’ extensive impact. They have been forced to change their work dynamics and rethink the Academy’s…

  • All hail our new robot overlords

  • This is a test post from a wordpress webinar which I’ll delete

    this is paragraph another paragraph another paragraph This is a paragraph block WordPress can be used in this way Or that way Or another way

  • The Slow Cancellation of the Future

  • My so called life

    In my sixth month of lockdown, I’ve rediscovered my love of breakcore:

  • Us

    They made a statue of us The tourists come and stare at us The sculptor’s marble sends regards

  • A digital citizenship agenda for educators

    “Greater digital literacy is often the recommendation for dealing with the effects of social media within society, but this ignores the fact that educators are actively involved in these conversations not simply aware they exist”

  • Workshop: the Digital Divide in the Post-Pandemic University

    The pandemic has thrown a harsh spotlight on digital inequalities within higher education. The university campus brought staff and students into a shared space, with a degree of infrastructural provision which created at least an appearance of digital equality.

  • Being open to the world

    I wrote this almost 15 years in my first year as a sociology student, having abandoned a planned political philosophy PhD to take a social research MA instead because of a sudden fascination with empirical research.

  • We have to destroy all computers, starting now

    Unfortunately the YouTube embed doesn’t work properly on new WordPress, but please do start this track at 15 minutes 11 seconds:

  • Relying on algorithms for biosecurity

    what extent will we rely on algorithms to sustain social distancing as we move into an intermediate phase of biosecure vigilance rather than biosecurity crisis? What would this reliance exclude? Can we develop collective habits of coordinating ourselves in shared spaces to the same degree if algorithms are orchestrating the underlying dynamics of the process?

  • The return of normality

    One of the key fault lines in post-pandemic politics is likely to be the return of ‘normality’. The pandemic won’t have an off switch, as this useful piece explains. If ‘herd immunity’ is achieved it will likely be a fleeting achievement within national boundaries, leaving countries bound up in a logic of biosecurity which could…

  • Post-pandemic reconstruction

    I’ve been thinking a lot about what reconstruction will look after pandemic, as well as how it will compare to older periods of social reconstruction. There’s something of this captured in Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter last night about the potential significance of online communities after the pandemic. Will the trend of bowling alone be reversed…

  • The creative freedom of post-work

    From Post-Capitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, pg 77: I just think about the Beatles. What does a post-work society look like? It kind of looks like what life was like for them, doesn’t it? They didn’t have to work. They’d made enough money, surely, by the early Sixties to just not work. Then their most…

  • Someone is wrong on the internet: a conversation between web comics

  • Call for papers: Special issue of Journal of Critical Realism on Critical Realism and Pragmatism

    The relationship between pragmatism and critical realism is open to many interpretations

  • Do people annoy you more than they used to?

    Do people annoy you more than they used to? I’ve found my levels of irritation with people in public spaces rising over the last year and I’ve found it interesting to think about why

  • Students Jury on Online/Pandemic Learning: Thoughts To Consider

    I’m taking part in a Students Jury on Online/Pandemic Learning tomorrow. I’ve been asked to prepare some ideas about what students should keep in mind when formulating recommendations for how their department approaches these issues for autumn term in 2021.

  • The sublime high of visibility

    This monologue from speed-fuelled gonzo journalist Cameron Colley in Iain Banks’ 1993 novel Complicity suggested something interesting to me about social media. Have social platforms made this accessible to the masses while simultaneously cheapening it by leading us from who gets to speak to who gets heard?

  • A conversation with Tyler Shores about digital wellbeing

    We recorded this for @CamEdFac’s Digital Learning Working Group. I felt we hit upon some key principles for digital wellbeing during the pandemic

  • Raptor Jesus is Risen

  • Big data, social listening and social futures

  • Who is writing this blog?

    “A theme here is blogging’s tendency to summon a strange double, a second self that seems both alien yet which cannot entirely be disavowed.”

  • Magical voluntarism: I got this

    Even if we didn’t manage to solve it this time, we can defer things forward so that next time we assume it’s going to be possible. Perhaps when I’ve changed in some way? Improved myself? Made myself stronger? Or more resilient?

  • New Book: Post-Human Futures

    This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading…

  • What big tech knows about your children

    The digital platforms you and your family use every day — from online games to education apps and medical portals — may be collecting and selling your children’s data, says anthropologist Veronica Barassi. Sharing her eye-opening research, Barassi urges parents to look twice at digital terms and conditions instead of blindly accepting them — and…

  • Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt)

  • Professor Bernhard Steinerhoff, Lecturer

  • Three thoughts about post-pandemic inequality

    What about the people who can’t afford a smart phone? Or can only afford one to share between a household? Furthermore, should we be concerned about the implications for surveillance capitalism of mandating smart devices as a means of personal identification?

  • Being immersed in work while it rains at night

  • Nick Land’s Poeticisation of Capital’s Obscenity

    It’s a position I’d understood intellectually but reading it left me with a momentary flash of this obscene totality weaving itself materially and immateriality through social reality as it orchestrates its own expansion and continued ascension.

  • Post-Pandemic Hedonism: Thoughts on Mark Fisher’s Final Book

    If our desires are imbricated in the circuits of capital, if we feel and dream in terms of commodities and within the horizon of the existing system, what does this mean for the possibility of moving beyond it?

  • What are the opportunities and challenges for Digital Social Research?

    This is an extract from a conversation with Jana Bacevic recorded for a qualitative research module in the Department of Sociology at Durham University

  • What does it mean to be partners-in-freedom?

    This phrase used by Damon Young has stuck with me in the years since I read the book which contained this acknowledgement in its preface. It immediately resonated yet I’ve only come to understand what it means with time, as well as what it entails for partnership. I thought back to it when reading this…

  • Start the Riot!

  • How disagreements about evidence shaped the UK government’s inaction over face masks

    This is such a useful summary from Trisha Greenhalgh’s excellent Boston Review essay: In relation to face coverings, for example, there was basic scientific evidence on how the virus behaves. There were service-level data from hospital and general practitioner records. There were detailed comparative data on the health system and policy responses of different countries.…

  • What’s been made visible by COVID-19 and what might become invisible once again

    “Like an acid eating away the flesh, COVID-19 has allowed us to see the bones of the social structure, to unveil the inequalities that mean some have to travel to work in care homes and fruit-picking fields, while others self-isolate and edit books. Nice work, if you can get it.”

  • The Project Graveyard

    I just went through my old wordpress.com sites and found a fascinating range of projects I’d forgotten about. In some cases, these were barely started or even immediately abandoned, reminding me of fleeting enthusiasms which soon dissipated. In other cases, they were projects that lived out their natural life course, only to eventually be forgotten…

  • What’s gone wrong with social media in higher education and why we urgently need to fix it

    Social media has gone from fringe to mainstream in higher education within the last decade. A culture has developed around it which shapes how it is used by academics and how that use is evaluated. However a range of problems are emerging which that culture is proving unable to address. I explore these problems and…

  • Rap against dictatorship

  • The case against lockdown

    Following my post a couple of months ago about objections to the anti-lockdown case, I thought I would share/save this formulation of the case against lockdown from epidemiologist John Ioannidis published in May last year as part of a superb exchange in the Boston Review.

  • Hannah Arendt on Conspiracies

    “At a time when full political information, necessarily worldwide ins cope, is available only to the professional, and when statesmen have found no other clue to world politics than the blind alley of imperialism, it is almost a matter of course for the others, who vaguely sense our worldwide interdependence but are unable to penetrate…

  • A collection of sea shanties

  • Hope Not Hate’s recommendations for Zoom security

    It distresses me how easily this can be explained in the terms of 00s cyberutopianism. Does Zoom somehow encourage racist attacks? Or does it simply lower the transaction costs sufficiently that scores of racists not quite motivated enough to attack physical events are now willing to do so.

  • The death march into crisis

    This is a typically astute piece from Richard Seymour on the intersection between social failure and environmental change generating the current crisis in Texas. He offers a disturbing analysis of the (attempted) creation of “mobilised political constituency that is ready, even morally energised, for quite a lot of death”

  • Behold him now, in utter solitude

    Behold him now, in utter solitude, Welcomed by naught save fearful, deathlike silence,— A silence which the echo of his steps Alone disturbs, as through the vaults he paces.

  • Who holds back the electric car?

  • Popular Culture and Pandemic Imaginaries

    It was clear that Songbird was a dreadful film, with atrocious script and terrible politics. However it was impossible to resist as a cultural expression of the ideas about society and the pandemic circulating in these febrile times. The story unfolds four years into a lockdown in America, as COVID-23 devastates the planet with a…

  • What’s it like to move from organising face-to-face conferences to organising online conferences?

    What’s it like to move from organising face-to-face events to organising online events? This is a short reflection on my experience after two Post-Pandemic University conferences.

  • Chomsky on Anarchism

    “That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.”

  • Pragmatising Philosophy

    I wrote this on my old blog in 2007 a month after moving into a Sociology department to complete a second masters degree rather than starting my planned Philosophy PhD. It’s strange to realise that my intellectual sensibility was fully formed almost 15 years ago and the progress I’ve made since then has largely been…

  • A moment of violence

  • The psychopolitics of lockdown

    How are individuals coping with these conditions? What are the “small rituals, formulas, quirks” which they are relying upon? How are they making decisions about the future? What about the quarter of people who say their life hasn’t changed very much?

  • Imagining a decentralised social media

    If I understand correctly Twitter’s Project Bluesky investigates the possibility of building a decentralised social media in which protocols (rules facilitating communication) and access (the process of communicating) are separated in order to open up social platforms in a radical way

  • data.index

  • Part of me stays in the room where we met

    I remember the colors In your mysterious eyes Part of me stays In the room where we met

  • What has a year of COVID-19 done to knowledge production?

    In this new series of The Isolation Pod we’ll be discussing knowledge production after a year of COVID-19. We cover a range of topics in this opening episode from the affectivity of online teaching and the physical strains of digital scholarship through to the social infrastructure for scholarship and the opportunity to critically revaluate the…

  • Heterosexuality is a Construct

    Jesus Christ, I’m done with it, you narrow minded piece of shit, I’d sooner cut off my own dick than be like you. Did that make you uncomfortable, is your macho pride in trouble now, when you’ve beaten me up, then what will you do?

  • Never trust a Tory

    “Never trust a tory, they’ll betray you when it matters / They will scramble to the top and then they’ll kick away the ladder, hinny / Never trust a tory, or a tory in disguise, You can see it when you look them in the eye”

  • What do we mean by ‘post-pandemic’?

    What do we mean by ‘post-pandemic’? The term needs to be defined in parallel to established notions such as post-democracy, post-industrial and post-colonial.

  • The poetics of pandemics: why ‘living with covid’ gets squeezed out by ‘life after covid’

    I’m particularly interested in what this means for how we conceive of the ending of pandemics. As Jeremy A. Greene & Dóra Vargha point out in their contribution to Boston Review’s excellent collection Thinking in a Pandemic: “The history of epidemic endings has taken many forms, and only a handful of them have resulted in…

  • The latent utopia of Twitter

    It’s deeply satisfying to take something inchoate within your mind, what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’, giving it form as you throw it out into the world and see what others make of it

  • What have we lost in the accelerated academy?

    A sense of loss pervades critical accounts of the contemporary academy. There’s little uniformity in what these accounts regard as having been lost, or explanations of how this was lost, but mourning nonetheless unites them in a critique of the university system we now work within.

  • What will hybrid offices look like?

    There was a really interesting feature in yesterday’s Protocol Sourcecode newsletter about a ‘flattening’ taking place as home offices become more professionalised while conferences rooms are becoming more virtualised to facilitate hybrid meetings. It makes the important observation that firms like Zoom are starting to pivot into this space in anticipation of hybrid offices becoming…

  • How will vaccine nationalism reshape globalisation?

    Once we dispense with the idea that vaccine rollout will be a deus ex machina which will take us back to normality (end the story so we can begin at the beginning) we’re faced with the question of what the world will look once we move into a situation of mitigated threat and an endemic…

  • Save us, the human existence is failing

    Save usThe human, existenceIs failing, resistanceEssential, the futureWritten off, the odds areAstronomically against usOnly moron and geniusWould fight a losing battleAgainst the super egoWhen giving in is so damn comfortingAnd so we go, on with our livesWe know the truth but prefer liesLies are simple, simple is blissWhy go against tradition when we canAdmit defeat,…

  • Navigating research revolutions: big data, open research and post-truth

    This is a session I’ve been running recently for doctoral researchers on ‘research revolutions’. It’s intended as an accessible overview to three major trends which are reshaping the research landscape. It went down well the first time I ran it but I’m trying to expand its implications for practice, as the idea for the session…

  • They set me on fire and I did a lot of burning

    And now the wind’s getting colder and the night’s getting cruel.But I don’t mind, I don’t mind if I’m with you.I paid for my sins til the blood filled the room.I don’t feel any better now.I don’t mind if I’m with you.Lend me your ear and throw me your rope.I was tangled up like spiderwebs…

  • A quick guide to academic podcasting during a pandemic (part 1)

    These are notes for Knowledge, Power, Politics students which I’m sharing in case they’re useful for other people The easiest starting point when planning a podcast is to identify podcasts which you’ve enjoyed. My favourite non-academic podcasts are QAnon Anonymous (a weird mix of citizen journalism, comedy and real time social theory), Novara media (a…

  • The space for learning design during a pandemic

    This is a great summary by Jonan Donaldson on pg 97 of Critical Digital Pedagogy of a trend we’ve all seen during the pandemic: With the rapid expansion of online learning over the last decade I have witnessed a tendency to translate classes into online modalities with designs closely resembling those of the face-to-face classes.…

  • Concepts for the new normal

  • Sociology On and Beyond the COVID-19 Crisis: An Online Symposium

  • The self under siege: the best introduction to modern continental philosophy I’ve encountered

    I watched this series of lectures by Rick Roderick around a decade ago and it remains the best introduction to modern continental philosophy I’ve ever encountered. I’m sharing it here (and pinning it) as a reminder for myself to rewatch it but also to encourage other people to watch it for the first time.

  • data.matrix

  • Eat the meek

  • The missing skill of technological reflexivity

    In this essay from Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Collection, Howard Rheingold recognises his “complicity in the creation of today’s digital culture” and “outright seduction by high-tech tools” (16-17). He suggests that the orthodox tradition of scientific thought has left us in a pre-scientific predicament when it comes to the application of technology: We lack a…

  • The responsibility of educators in a pandemic

    I thought this was brilliant from Ruha Benjamin, in the forward to Critical Digital Pedagogy, describing the responsibilities of educators. It applies more broadly than our present crisis but it feels even more pertinent against the backdrop of the pandemic: So, what are the responsibilities of educators and educational institutions in a context where this…

  • Craft and exploitation in the digital university

  • The socio-political makeup of the coronaskeptic movement

    This overview of the findings of this German paper is fascinating. It’s part of an insightful essay about the strange coalitions taking shape which transcend the left-right binary in a way I’ve come to think of as lumpen-libertarian. I particularly valued its focus on “the freelance media hustlers, movement messiahs, and entrepreneurial contrarians who have…

  • Preventing pandemics or preparing for them

    This essay from Richard Seymour intersected in a thought provoking way with my recent concerns about the securitisation of pandemic response. He explains how this paradigm involves preparation rather than prevention, in the senes of preparing for the inevitability of a range of disastrous outcomes rather than trying to bring about change which might foreclose…

  • An internet minute in 2020

  • Who’s to hold up the sky if not you and I?

    Who’s to hold up the sky if not you and I?So long, so long, so longWho’s to tame the volcanoes on mountains high?So long, so long, so longJust how long does it take to drink oceans dry?So long, so long, so longAnd someday we’ll say goodbye to goodbyeSo long, so long, so long, sail on

  • I got debts that no honest man can pay

    Well, I got a job and tried to put my money awayBut I got debts that no honest man can paySo I drew what I had from the Central TrustAnd I bought us two tickets on that Coast City bus Now, baby, everything dies, honey, that’s a factBut maybe everything that dies someday comes backPut…

  • What does it look like when a health care system breaks down?

    I found this description by Mike Davis on loc 1073 of The Monster Enters helpful for understanding the particular pressures which a pandemic places on the healthcare system. In spite of the tendency to reduce this to a matter of beds within the system, as can be seen in the current conspiracy theory that the…

  • This new age of plagues is directly the result of economic globalization

    From Mike Davis in The Monster Enters loc 200-215: Since the discovery of the HIV virus in 1983 and the recognition that it had jumped from apes to humans, science has been on high alert against the appearance of deadly new diseases with pandemic potential that have crossed over from wild fauna. This new age of…

  • Post-Pandemic Scholarship: Some Initial Thoughts, April 22nd at 2pm GMT

    Are we all digital scholars now? Social distancing has normalised digital scholarship within higher education to an unprecedented degree, as what was called a decade ago ‘the coming social media revolution in the academy’ has now come to pass due to the disruption brought about by COVID-19 and associated public health responses. However, the radically…

  • The great sickly slums which will soon be screaming

    This is a chilling warning from Mike Davis in The Monster Enters. My understanding is this hasn’t been borne out by events since the time he was writing this (pre-June 2020) however I’d welcome any suggestions of literature on this topic which readers might have. It seems inescapable that the great sickly slums of Africa…

  • State capacity for decisive action in an emergency does not necessitate the suppression of democracy

    This is an important reflection by Mike Davis in The Monster Enters about the connection too often drawn between Chinese authoritarianism and the effectiveness of their anti-Covid action*. It’s one which comes readily because, as Alex de Waal has put it, “The infection-control state is Max Weber’s military–bureaucratic state on steroids, requiring uniform sanitary habits…

  • From the war on terror to the war on pandemics?

    There’s a brief aside towards the end of Apollo’s Arrow which was intended as innocuous but in practice is unsettling. Nicholas Christakis draws a comparison between the potential impact of COVID-19 and other crises which have had a long-lasting influence upon social life. From pg 322: The COVID-19 pandemic awakened Americans to the importance of…