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  • The spectral character of Covid-19, or, will growing deaths undermine denialism

    This was another really interesting discussion in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis. He considers the particular characteristics of Covid-19 which have lent it an almost spectral quality in many people’s experience, lurking on the horizon of their lives as an immaterial threat. It’s easy…

  • A sober discussion of vaccine risks

    I appreciated the sobriety of this discussion in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis. I’m increasingly worried that we’re entering a situation where an understandable desire to avoid fuelling anti-vaccine sentiment (something which has the potential to undermine a vaccine-led resolution of Covid-19) will…

  • Defining a time frame: from the pandemic, to the intermediate pandemic to the post-pandemic

    I thought this was really interesting in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. I’m not sure I completely agree with these categories from Nicholas Christakis but I think it’s a useful undertaking to begin to conceptualise the contours of this transition. From pg 248-249: The pandemic: Let’s…

  • The relevance of Erich Fromm for online learning during a pandemic

    I was struck recently by how much Erich Fromm can offer in understanding online teaching. In his To Have Or To Be? Fromm distinguishes between two orientations to the world, the eponymous having and being, which manifest across the full range of human activity. The former is a matter of possessing, with a substantial subject…

  • Human culture and Covid-19

    From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live pg 226-227: It was this cumulative culture that allowed us to teach each other things about how to cope with the pandemic when it first struck. Even if people had forgotten or did not know what to do, the knowledge…

  • A few thoughts about the anti-lockdown case

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the last few days, as a result of recognising the sense in which the anti-lockdown case is sometimes dismissed as a matter of liberal common sense without a real engagement with the arguments. This is an initial attempt to seriously engage with the anti-lockdown views I’ve encountered…

  • Solutionism and Covid-19

    It’s hardly an original observation that Covid-19 has fuelled what Evgeny Morozov describes as solutionism i.e. the belief that technological solutions can be provided for even the most intractable social problems. However until reading the new book by Nicholas Christakis I hadn’t grasped how the labour involved in an activity like contact tracing would fuel…

  • The variation in the R rate between infected individuals

    From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis, pg 52. I found this really useful for getting my head around how outbreaks are dispersed as a consequence of physiological, behavioural and social differences between people who are infected: This variation in R0 across individuals in a population…

  • The technological strength yet evolutionary weakness of human civilisation vis-a-vis SARS-CoV-2

    From Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis, pg 29-30: The world is quite different now than it was during prior plagues; today we have exceedingly dense cities, electronic technology, modern medicine, better material circumstances, and the ability to know what is happening in real…

  • The institutional health of Sociology in the UK

    I’ve been under the impression that Sociology’s institutional health has been declining in the UK for some time: less A level students and less undergraduates means less capacity for the discipline to reproduce itself institutionally. It turns out this is a great example of the necessity of continuing to check, as I’d assumed the negative…

  • What comes after Trump?

    Much of the commentary on the possibility of post-Trump Trumpism has tended to focus on the possibility of a much more competent populist emerging to lead this movement i.e. one who is disciplined, strategic and serious in contrast to the impulsive and instinctive character of the outgoing president. However this passage from Zizek’s Pandemic 2!…

  • The tremendously efficient writing of Slavoj Žižek

    While I’m on the subject of Slavoj Žižek, I thought it was worth recording how sections of his Pandemic! 2 reproduce his Hegel in a Wired Brain (oddly combining acknowledgments he is ‘drawing’ on that book while straight forwardly copying & pasting at least one paragraph). But most of the book is seemingly reproducing posts…

  • Is Slavoj Žižek slowly becoming Christopher Hitchens?

    I was interested to see that Žižek’s bio statement has changed on his latest book. He’s no longer framed as the ‘Elvis of cultural theory’ (a designation I’m struggling to find a source for) but rather as a contrarian of the sort personified by Christopher Hitchens: Slavoj Žižek is one of the most prolific and…

  • Take only what you need from it

  • The insidious sexism of Modern Family

    There are lots of criticisms which can be made about Modern Family, as a distinctly old fashioned show dressed up in a superficial liberal progressivism. It’s nonetheless been a guilty pleasure of mine and I’ve been rewatching it during this grim coronic winter. There’s one aspect which stood out to me during this time which…

  • Theorising socio-cultural change: a note on the casual contemptuousness of John Milbank and Adrian Pabst

    I just stumbled across this extract I recorded from John Milbank and Adrian Pabst’s The Politics of Virtue. There’s a confident contemptuousness to this passage which unsettled me at the time, expressing a belief that they can read back the spiritual condition of people they encounter through a brief glance at them on the street.…

  • Physical distancing and intensified social connectivity

    From Slavoj Zizek’s PANDEMIC! 2 loc 575: Physical distancing as a defense against the threat of contagion has led to intensified social connectivity—not only within quarantined families but outside of them (mostly through digital media)—and outbursts of physical closeness (raves, partying, etc.) have erupted in reaction to both: the message of the rave is not…

  • A note of caution about posthumanism in education

    One thing I’ve been gradually noticing since I joined an education department a few years ago is how influential posthumanism is within education vis-a-vis other theoretical perspectives. I wouldn’t suggest this is anything other than an impressionistic judgement, based on the journals I choose to look at and the topics which stand out to me,…

  • Some thoughts on the political economy of Covid-19

    “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” ― Antonio Gramsci This quote from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks has been a mainstay of social commentary grappling with the longer term implications of the financial crisis of…

  • I’m in love with the night

    I’m in love with the nightEvery breath of this house creakingI’m familiar with the cold and the windows and the doorsAnd the sound of my heart beatingBeating in and out of time

  • Some critical thoughts about the post-digital

    I’ve always been slightly sceptical of the concept of the post-digital. Firstly, it seems to defeat its own deflationary ambitions by defining itself in epochal terms. I’m not convinced it can help us overcome hyperbole about ‘the digital’ if it’s implied that we’ve entered a new era predicated on this moving into the past. I…

  • I miss Gaslight Anthem so much

  • Why can’t history leave us alone? I want to return to my bubble

    I’ve been preoccupied by a phrase used by Anand Giridharadas in his most recent newsletter. As he puts it, some people are clearly “wanting to be left alone by history for a little while”. It points to the hyper-mobilisation which characterises contemporary society, as well as the exhaustion which can follow from this. As Trotsky…

  • The intoxicating immediacy with which we can now act on the feel of an idea

    This section from pg 2 of Rupert Wegerif’s Dialogic: Education for an Internet Age captures something of my preoccupation with what C Wright Mills called ‘the feel of an idea’. The immediacy with which we can act on this feeling has been vastly increased by the affordances of digital technology: Thinking and writing with the…

  • A rough draft of a new intellectual biography

    I’m digital sociologist based in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, where I lead activities within the Culture, Politics and Global Justice Cluster and work as an embedded researcher within the Digital Learning Working Group. I direct the Post-Pandemic University project which is an international network comprising an online magazine, podcast hub…

  • The Co-Production of Platforms by Users: A Case Study of Higher Education

    I’ve enjoyed reading Twitter: A Biography very much. I came to it after myself and Lambros Fatsis finally submitted The Public and Their Platforms to a publisher, which is a shame because it resonates with and would have helped us further develop the arguments in our book. At the heart of these is the question…

  • A conversation with Phil Brooker about Programming-as-Social Science

    In this podcast, we talk to Phillip Brooker about Programming as Social Science. This approach to social inquiry involves using programming as a toolkit for social research, facilitating a style of inquiry above and beyond particular research methods. At a time when we’re dependent upon digital platforms for the core operations of the university, with…

  • Two approaches to musical performance

    I thought this was a really interesting analysis which captures a split in my own musical tastes, as an interest in provocative music co-exists uneasily with a desire for collective experience through live music: Afro-American music is still cherished for its tragic yet affirmative sense of life. But it got shoved aside in the late…

  • I’ve got two books coming in 2021

    The first is The Public and Their Platforms co-authored with Lambros Fatsis. It’s a rethinking of the public sociology debate from the ground up, built around the critical realist sociology of platforms I’ve been developing over the last few years. This was so hard to finish but I’m really enthusiastic to see what people make…

  • What is a platform?

    I thought this was great from Jean Burgess and Nacy Baym’s new book on Twitter. On pg 15 they take issue with the view of platforms as “a single ‘technology’—a static object that can be cast as a causal agent of societal change” arguing that “A closer look reveals a more emergent, dynamic truth, one…

  • Platform-based elicitation methods in qualitative research

    This section from Jean Burgess and Nacy Baym’s new book on Twitter caught my imagination as a research method. It reminded me of this recent paper in The Sociological Review which used Facebook activity logs as an elicitation method. On pg 26 Burgess and Baym describe how they showed participants their Twitter timelines in order…

  • A Conversation with Neil Selwyn: Do We Need a Digital Sociology of Higher Education?

    What significance has been accorded to digital technology within the sociology of higher education? For a long time it’s seemed the tendency has been to treat this in terms of the application of technology within specific subdomains, in a way that obscures the connections between them and their role in a broader institutional transformation. However…

  • What can social reconstruction teach us about imaging post-pandemic society?

    Early 20th century social science was driven by a vision of social reconstruction, described here by John Scott and Ray Bromley in their Envisioning Sociology, loc 323: What would a 21st century post-pandemic reconstruction look like? What role would social science play?

  • The Digital Condition: an informal discussion group

    The Digital Condition is an open discussion group, organised by myself and Milan Stürmer, building on last year’s experimental project to inquire about the digitalised experience of the pandemic. For each meeting there will be a short article and a series of questions posed in advance, with the session being an open forum for raising…

  • Outflanking Platitudes: Theorising the Pandemic

    I thought you might be interested in this new podcast series I’ve started. It’s the audio diary of a social theorist during the pandemic, with self-consciously rough thoughts, speculations which haven’t quite reached the status of work in progress. Mostly short thoughts from me but I’ll have conversations with other people as well. It will involve meta-reflections…

  • The films I’ve watched in the last 3 years

    With the imminent demise of cinema, it seems like a good time to share this list of the films I’ve seen since July 2018: Hotel Artemis Generation Wealth Annihilation Under the Tree Ant Man and the Wasp The Escape The Heiresses Mad to be Normal Moneyball BlackKklansman Apostasy Cold War Searching American Animals A Simple…

  • Are you reading this blog?

    I turned off comments almost a year ago when I deleted my Twitter account, in pursuit of a less overwhelming digital existence. However I realised recently this has obliterated the sense I had of people actually reading this blog, as opposed to stumbling across it via the google footprint which has accrued over ten years…

  • This machine eats normativity

    In his recent book of essays, Will Davies draws a comparison between securitisation and digital platforms. From pg 15-16 of This Is Not Normal: These are just some of the ways in which the credit derivative and the platform have transformed our political world in the twenty-first century. But there is more to it than…

  • The light we steal when we learn

    This extract from Danielle Allen’s superb Why Plato Wrote brought to life an issue which I’ve found myself returning to endlessly over the years. On pg 26 she talks about the Socratic disdain for writing and the capacity for teaching seen to inhere within them. When Socrates says that a written text can be no…

  • Zygmunt Bauman’s early career as a professional ideologist

    From pg 136 of this new biography from Izabela Wagner: One of his most important tasks, which he performed frequently, was writing political texts with the objective of communist indoctrination. Producing such literature required good historical knowledge and a background in the Marxist literature, with mastery of ‘classics’ such as Lenin’s work. Long office hours…

  • The epochal theorising of Zygmunt Bauman

    I thought this was a great account of Zygmunt Bauman’s style by David Beer in his newsletter. It’s the same quality which can be found in the trilogy of books by Giddens in the early 1990s which, along with Bauman’s oeuvre, facilitated my transition from philosophy to sociology. These works excited me because they provided…

  • The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, Rupert Brooke

    God! I will pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England’s the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of THAT district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile,…

  • The lumpen-libertarian uprising

    From this disturbing piece by Richard Seymour: A glance at the crowd shows it to be younger and more heteroclite than one would expect. The heavily armed protests in the US mostly resembled outings of a Duck Dynasty fan club. Granted, in these English displays, there is the inevitable quorate of Nazis, QAnon supporters, flag…

  • Hold your own

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

  • The Masterplan

    I’m not saying right is wrongIt’s up to us to makeThe best of all the thingsThat come our way 😷 #Covid19 😷

  • Winter is coming

    If the bad times are coming, let ’em comeLet the death drum break the slumpBefore the once young braves succumbThe fickle flicker of desire expiresIf the bad times are coming let ’em come, let ’em come 😷 #Covid19 😷

  • The growing divide in educational technology

    From 25 Years of Ed Tech by Martin Weller pg 169: There is in much of ed tech a growing divide, particularly in evidence at conferences. One camp is largely uncritical, seeing ed tech as a sort of Silicon Valley-inspired, technological utopia that will cure all of education’s problems. This is often a reflection-free zone,…

  • The suspended futures of Covid-19

    I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the temporality of the Covid crisis. There was a suspension of time during lockdown, in which a national unit attempts to stop to the greatest extent possible without self-destructing, constituting a pretty unique act of (partial) demobilisaiton. However this was just the first act, leading to a much more liminal…

  • Post-Pandemic Digital Scholarship

  • Hold your own

    When time pulls lives apart Hold your own When everything is fluid, and when nothing can be known with any certainty Hold your own Hold it ’til you feel it there As dark, and dense, and wet as earth As vast, and bright, and sweet as air When all there is Is knowing that you…

  • Are we seeing a turn back towards the Open Web?

    From today’s Protocol newsletter: There’s a clear trend here. I’ve talked to a lot of folks recently about the return of blogging, the rise of Substack, and what it means that people are branching out on their own again. Medium clearly understands the underlying goal behind that trend, which is that creators want a place…

  • It’s easy to forget the thrill of self-publishing, given the dark banality of social media in 2020

    From Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech pg 16: By 1995, the web browser was becoming reasonably commonplace, with Netscape dominating. With Facebook pages and WordPress sites created at the click of a button now, it is difficult to remember the effort but also the magic in creating your first web page using hand-coded…

  • The strangely coherent eclecticism of our inner experience

    From Timewatch by Barbara Adam pg 15: The multiplicity of awarenesses, choices, memories, considerations as well as the trust in technology and expert systems were all present at the same time. Yet, despite this simultaneity, there was sequential order. Nothing was jumbled. Nothing happened backwards

  • Fragile movements and social media

    This thoughtful essay by Richard Seymour offers a great summary of what I’ve written about as fragile movements, as part of a really interesting reflection on why Black Lives Matter hasn’t exhibited the same fragility: In recent years, political movements and trends have come (and sometimes gone) with unprecedented speed. To name just a few…

  • The infinite lecture hall model

    This is a really helpful account in Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech about the enduring appeal of online education to university managers. The powerful vision of the ‘infinite lecture hall model’, in which provision can be scaled indefinitely to a vast distributed audience, promises a revolution in the economics of education. However it’s…

  • The campus as a learning infrastructure

    This section from Martin Weller’s 25 Years of Ed Tech is interesting to read in light of the last six months. On pg 24 he considers how the physical architecture of the university campus was designed to support certain kinds of interactions: Students were brought together in one physical location, over a tightly constrained time…

  • Best practice for communicating with delegates during online conferences

    I’m taking part in a panel at the European Consortium for Political Research tomorrow and I’ve been really impressed by their e-mail updates to participants. In effect there’s a daily newsletter with the following features: Invitations to share through a hashtag or six themed walls on their website Detailed guidance about how to take part,…

  • Some thoughts on blogging during a pandemic

    We often talk about blogging within higher education as if it’s relatively new, leaving us with the challenge of explaining and making a case for it to colleagues who might be sceptical and unfamiliar. This is a curious state of affairs given that blogs have been around for close to thirty years, even if the…

  • The coming fascism

    The closing passage from Richard Seymour’s latest essay has been reverberating in my mind since I read it: Should we fail to posit the alternative, the constructive reworking of civilisation that is so urgently required, and that accommodates us to inhospitable nature, we do not get the boom years and centrist orthodoxy. We get harder…

  • Social media for academics and Covid-19

    In this fireside chat from the Australian National University’s Get #SoMe course, Mark Carrigan and Inger Mewburn discuss social media for academics, the challenges of digital scholarship and their significance when daily life is being transformed by Covid-19.  

  • Inhabited institutionalism

    I just came across the idea of inhabited institutionalism and I find it extremely compelling. Here’s an overview from a paper by Tim Hallett and Emily Meanwell: Inhabited institutionalism is a nascent approach that creates a conversation between Chicago-style interactionism and the new institutionalism in organizational analysis. (Bechky 2011; Haedicke 2012; Hallett and Ventresca 2006). Inhabited…

  • We won’t have digital scholarship until we rethink outputs, expertise and knowledge

    I’m currently editing The Public and Their Platforms, a book I’ve co-written with Lambros Fatsis about the prospects for public sociology once digital platforms are ubiquitous. At the risk of sounding conceited, it’s a long and multifaceted argument which didn’t become entirely clear to us until we had completed the first draft. I’m trying to…

  • Social media in the Post-Pandemic University: a bootcamp for graduate students

    Online boot camp, with Dr Ana Canhoto (Brunel University London) and Dr Mark Carrigan (University of Cambridge). With social distancing likely to be the ‘new normal’, confidence and competence in using social media tools for professional purposes is more important than it has ever been. In this month-long, online boot camp, we explore what this…

  • Silicon Valley’s cult of work

    One of the clearest themes in Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley is the disturbing embrace of work and her attempts to move beyond it. Much of the book is a memoir of her own experience entering the tech world as co-founder of a startup, what this lifestyle entailed for her and the meanings she has…

  • Trump’s regrets about Twitter

    From today’s Protocol newsletter: President Trump’s (otherwise relatively boring) interview last week with Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy brought a somewhat unprecedented look into how @realdonaldtrump thinks about Twitter. Here are a few excerpts: On what happens to the account when he leaves office: “Well it’s mine, and I don’t know that I’ll ever use it again, but…

  • Time is a cycle, not a line

  • Deadline soon! CfP: the Post-Pandemic University

    Organised by Mark Carrigan and Susan Robertson  In a matter of months, the world has changed beyond recognition. Covid-19 has led to an unprecedented reorganisation of everyday life, with half the world’s population subject to lockdown measures at the peak of governmental response to the pandemic. These measures are being eased across the world, with…

  • Platform Epistemics, Slavoj Žižek and Digital Reflexivity

    It would be hard to imagine two thinkers with seemingly less in common than Margaret Archer and Slavoj Žižek. However one of the reasons I enjoy the latter’s work, in spite of my many reservations about him, relates to the status of reflexivity within their work. In spite of their different terminology, emphasis and interests I believe…

  • What does social media do to the civil sphere?

    I’m reading Jeffrey Alexander’s massive The Civil Sphere in the final stages of my project with Lambros Fatsis on public sociology. The reviewers suggested we need to expand our concept of publicness to take account of the notion of civil sphere, defined by Alexander on pg 3 as “a world of values and institutions that generates the…

  • What is participation?

    I’m greatly enjoying Christopher Kelty’s recent book The Participant which is an enormously creative reflection on participation from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. What endears me to it so much is it clear sense of the ontology of participation which it sustains without remaining stuck at the level of ontology. He treats participation as: A concept A…

  • Covid-19, lockdown and the kinetic utopia of modernity

    As often happens when I read older texts by Peter Sloterdijk, I’m struck by a sense of their enduring relevance compared to other thinkers who write in his register. In this extract from his Infinite Mobilisation (1997) he writes about the significance of those experiences when infrastructure struggles and we grind to a halt. What he…

  • Recognising the need which Jordan Peterson is serving

    There’s a short aside in Against The Web by Michael Brooks which identifies something which I’ve often reflected on. For all their terrible characteristics figures like Jordan Peterson are serving an existential need which the left ought to understand. From pg 50: Like everyone else, young white men are trying to muddle through life in…

  • The possibility of a digital police state: Hegel, Fichte, Mejias, Couldry, Bauman and Sloterdijk

    In a debate about Fichte’s conception of the police state, Hegel took issue with the logistical demands involved in such over-weaning control of a population. However as points out on pg 28 of Žižek’s Hegel In A Wired Brain, Fichte’s vision seems eerily prescient when we consider the possibilities for control inherent in digitalisation: When…

  • The importance of what we don’t (and can’t) say

    I loved this section from Žižek’s Hegel In A Wired Brain pg 43 about the importance of what we don’t (and can’t) say. It can certainly be a negative experience, a claustrophobic imminence in which we struggle to express something which we need to externalise into the world But the reality of the unarticulated/inarticulable is…

  • What will it be like to work on Elon Musk’s Mars colony?

    This short piece by Keith Spencer is absolutely spot on. Exploring the contrasting visions which Bezos and Musk have of our interplanetary near-future would be a wonderful exercise in design fiction for someone who is a more talented writer than me. This is what makes Musk’s Mars vision so different than, say, the Apollo missions…

  • Žižek on asexuality

    It’s been at least seven years since I last worked on asexuality but I inevitably encounter the topic on a regular basis. I was a bit surprised to find it in Slavoj Žižek’s recent book Hegel in a Wired Brain, in spite of his penchant for god awful writing about trans issues in recent years. This…

  • Elon Musk as the intersection between influencer culture and the stock market

    There’s a fascinating point in yesterday’s Protocol (seriously, sign up to this if you haven’t already) about the vested interests which Elon Mask has in building his own profile. With his Tesla compensation pegged to the firm’s stock price, his online contrarianism (and its evident popularity with a committed cohort of fans, increasing numbers of…

  • The terrifying horizon of (digitalised) social order

    This is a powerful statement by Ulises Ali Mejias and Nick Couldry on pg 22 of their data colonialism. I’m not entirely convinced by the book but I think they’re certainly correct to see a radical horizon of (digitalised) social order having opened up in the last decade: Two possibilities result that, before digital connection,…

  • Big Tech and sustainability: the current state of play

    This is such a helpful overview from the consistently excellent Protocol newsletter: As Facebook has gone from “social network for chatty college kids” to effectively powering a version of the internet with data centers and offices all over the world, the company’s begun to think a lot more about sustainability. Good for the world, good…

  • The monthly Digital Sociology discussion group

    We would like to alert subscribers to the roll out of an ongoing series of discussions hosted by the British Sociological Association’s Digital Sociology Study Group.  Starting from July 15th 2020, The Digital Sociology Study Group will be hosting monthly discussions, workshops, and book launches with academics, researchers, authors, practitioners, and activists exploring a range…

  • What is a stereotype?

    I thought this was a fascinating aside in Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology pg 63. It captures something which the contemporary sense of stereotype as reductive/cliche tends to miss: the fact these categories are impervious to countervailing evidence and reproduce the same judgement in different circumstances: It first referred to a practice in the printing…

  • Twitter and the structure of polarisation

    A few days ago, I tweeted* a complaint to a public transport operator in frustration at how few people were wearing masks on their services and the seeming lack of enforcement by the operators. I was visiting my parents, who’ve been shielding since March and I was growing increasingly concerned that I was exposing them…

  • Is capitalism too big to fail?

    I can’t stop thinking about these words from David Harvey, recirculated by Richard Seymour in this excellent post: Capital, right now, is too big to fail. We cannot imagine a situation where we would shut down the flow of capital. Because if we shut down the flow of capital, eighty percent of the world’s population…

  • What is ‘modernising zeal’?

    This description of Tony Blair’s ambitions by Alastair Campbell invites a question I’ve often wondered about. What is ‘modernising zeal’? It’s such a loaded term but clearly so significant to understand centrists dispositions yet it’s rarely, if ever, defined: But he feared that unless the party adapted to the modern post-Cold War, post-Thatcherite world, it…

  • Call for Papers: Digital Technology, Lockdown and the Post-Pandemic University

    Organised by Mark Carrigan, Ibrar Bhatt and Jeremy Knox  In only a few months, the world has been transformed beyond recognition by Covid-19. As we face the prospect of many months, even years, until a vaccine can be produced and distributed, it seems increasingly clear there will be no return to normality. This online conference…

  • Social media governance within higher education

    For a number of years I’ve believed we urgently need a conversation about social media governance within higher education. This is a general term for a range of mundane issues which emerge from the use of social media by those within the university (academics, students, support staff, managers etc) in ways which are likely to…

  • “The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it stares back at you”

    I found this quote from Karl Kraus in a book of Walter Benjamin’s fragments. I’m struggling to find the original source but I can’t stop thinking about the experience it describes: The more closely you look at a word, the more distantly it stares back at you. The uncanny tendency for meaning to recede as…

  • Call for Papers: Building the Post-Pandemic University

    In a matter of months, the world has changed beyond recognition. Covid-19 has led to an unprecedented reorganisation of everyday life, with half the world’s population subject to lockdown measures at the peak of governmental response to the pandemic. These measures are being eased across the world, with uncertain and worrying consequences in the continued…

  • Neoliberalism and its dependence upon oil

    From Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things loc 2651-2699: When the United States abandoned the gold standard in August 1971,80 international capital sought refuge from this “Nixon shock” in commodity purchases. At the same time, the Soviet Union—following poor harvests—traded its oil for wheat, driving up…

  • Why I’m so fascinated by education

    This passage from Keri Facer’s superb Learning Futures (pg 21) captures why I’m so interested in education. I wrote a PhD on what I called personal morphogenesis: how we become who we are and how personal changes are bound up in social changes. The reason I’ve moved into education is because I want to understand how…

  • The potential virtues of online education during Covid-19

    I found this a thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing, account by University of Bristol PVC Tansy Jessop on WonkHE: personalise learning, with students working at their own pace and thoughtfully going back to material in their own time trigger a shift from content-driven curricula (the idea of ‘covering content’) to carefully structured and selective bite-sized…

  • Theoretical interventions as events

    Scott Lash interviewed by Nicholas Gane in the Future of Social Theory pg 105. I found this thought provoking in terms of its linking of the transcendent with the book form (the slow, careful, considered attempt to get outside of the issue) and the imminent with more feral forms of intervention outside the established repertoires…

  • To see the machine we need to dispense with the Weberian legacy on technology

    In The Future of Social Theory Nicholas Gane draws attention to Weber’s remarks about technology and how they shaped the treatment of related questions in the discipline. As Gane puts it on pg 3, “In this perspective (which runs from the nineteenth century through to today), sociology is only to be concerned with objects and…

  • Situating digital education in the longue durée of educational restructuring

    This account of past educational change by Margaret Archer in Social Origins of Educational Systems struck me as an apt characterisation of what many providers of digital education are currently doing. Has any sought to compare current strategies to past strategies rather than treating digital education as something sui generis? As a method of assertion,…

  • A bleakly plausible future for post-pandemic labour

    This piece by James Meadway paints a bleakly plausible future for post-pandemic labour. Firstly, the economic costs of social distancing on businesses with already thin profit margins incentivises a renewed push towards automation, something which has been stalled by the relatively cost of labour heretofore. Why risk the large capital investment in robots when humans…

  • The dark side of social media and what it means for academics

    I was really pleased to discover that Sage have put this chapter from Social Media for Academics online. I’ve felt somewhat self-conscious that I deleted my Twitter account soon after publishing the second edition of a book about social media. But this chapter is what led me to the conclusion that this was the right…

  • In defence of lurid curiosity about the lives of the rich and powerful

    This short piece by Norman Solomon about the wealth of NYT columnist Thomas Friedman captures something I’ve often felt about the sociological value of what might otherwise be framed as lurid curiosity about the lives of the rich and powerful. For example I’ve been interested for a long time in the personal biography of Anthony…