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  • The Elite Roots of the Alt-Right

    A fascinating Jacob article about the roots of contemporary alt-right racism in mainstream elite discourse in Conservative America: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-dallas-texas/

  • Why Academics Must Use Social Media

    An interesting conversation between Eric Stoller and David Webster:  

  • What are ‘recognition triggers’ in scholarly publishing?

    An interesting concept from John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture which I think has important implications for scholarly publishing. From pg 276-277: Oprah and Richard and Judy are prime examples of what I shall call ‘recognition triggers’. I use the term ‘recognition trigger’ to refer to those drivers of sales that have three characteristics. First, they…

  • Was Sloterdijk an early originator of contemporary right populism?

    Reading the excellent Selected Exaggerations, a book of interviews with Peter Sloterdijk, I was struck by his remarks about taxation and the state in an interview from 2001. He bemoans the punitive taxation he claims exists in Germany, arguing that it reflects a broader domination of society by the state. German citizens are “punished for success” and the…

  • On Teaching Theory

    This short exchange with Michael Burawoy offers some thought-provoking reflections on teaching social theory. He identifies the major traditions of teaching theory within American sociology, before outlining his own ethnographic approach: The Survey: surveying extracts from a comprehensive range of social theorists, each one treated as an instance of a broader category. Essentially disconnected and decontextualised. Teaching theory in an…

  • The Happy Unemployment of Horses

    From Peter Sloterdick’s Selected Exaggerations, loc 1411-1416 Incidentally, there are almost as many horses today as there were in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, but they have all been reassigned. They are almost all leisure horses, hardly any workhorses nowadays. Isn’t it an odd comment on today’s society that only horses have achieved emancipation? Humans…

  • The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy, part 3

    At the end of his Learning To Write Badly, Michael Billig offers an evocative analogy to describe the predicament he faces in writing a call to rethink our writing practices. From pg 208: Perhaps a better analogy would be that I am stuck by the side of a large highway, as the trucks go pounding…

  • The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy, part 2

    The upwards trajectory of publication poses an obvious problem for the aspiring academic. It is one familiar from other fields of cultural production. How to be heard above the din? If ever more publications are being produced each year, commanding ever less attention from a peer group increasingly consumed by the imperative to publish, vast rewards…

  • My 20 favourite graphic novels of 2016

    DMZ by Brian Wood Outcast by Robert Kirkman Fatale by Ed Brubaker Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan Roche Limit by Michael Moreci Criminal by Ed Brubaker The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker Super Crooks by Mark Millar The Fuse by Shari Chankhamma They’re Not Like Us by Eric Stephenson Postal by Matt Hawkins Trees by Warren Ellis Injection by Warren Ellis Moon…

  • My 20 favourite books of 2016

    Depth by Lev Ac Rosen Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet by Finn Brunton Rethinking Interdisciplinarity by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald Accelerating Academia by Filip Vostal The Refusal of Work by David Frayne Intern Nation: How To Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy by Ross Perlin Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of…

  • The proliferation of books

    From Merchants of Culture, by John Thompson, pg 238. In the United States: The number of new books published in the US each year prior to 1980 was probably under 50,000. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the number of new books published greatly increased, reaching nearly 200,000 by 1998. By 2004 the number had risen…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #30

    Books I’ve read recently: SS-GB by Len Deighton The Elephant in the Room by Jon Ronson Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance How To Write Badly by Michael Billig Graphic novels I’ve read recently:  Catwoman: When In Rome by Jeff Loeb and Tim Sale Sons of Anarchy: Volume 6 by Ryan Ferrier, Matias Bergara and Paul Little…

  • Academic Celebrities and the Transformation of Publishing

    In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he makes a number of observations about the importance of brand-name writers which could easily be applied to the growth of academic celebrities within scholarly publishing. From pg 212-214 Brand-name authors are important for two reasons: first, their sales are predictable, and second, they are repeaters. Their sales are…

  • Carrying the weight of the world

    I love this expression from Peter Sloterdijk’s Selected Exaggerations loc 944: Carrying the weight of the world is an art that can be practised in many different ways. I think it is right to say that it is fundamentally the same art. It consists of answers to the burdensome nature of life … This is…

  • Metrics and the death of imagination

    In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, there’s an interesting remark about the structural position of first time authors which I think has wider purchase. From pg 200: Ironically, in a world preoccupied by numbers, the author with no track is in some ways in a strong position, considerably stronger than the author who has published…

  • The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy

    In the nine years since I first entered a Sociology department, I’ve had a deep interest in academic writing that has only increased with time. In my past life as a philosophy student, writing had never occurred to me as a topic of intellectual interest. Despite having once aspired to be a writer before concluding…

  • A collection of definitions of ‘Impact’

    A compilation from Colin Chandler on pg 7-8 of Achieving Impact in Research: To have impact is to have a strong effect, to make a difference. By impact we mean the ‘influence’ of research or its ‘effect on’ an individual, a community, the development of policy, or the creation of a new product or service. It…

  • Bounded autonomy in the workplace

    In John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, he describes what might be termed the bounded autonomy enjoyed by some editorial teams within publishing houses. From pg 128: the devolution of editorial decision-making to small editorial teams operating with a high degree of autonomy within certain financial parameters is the best way to maximize your chances of…

  • Next week in Oxford: Digital Sociology v STS

    Wednesday 7th December 2016, 13:00 The Oxford Internet Institute 1st Giles Oxford, OX1 3JS The concept of Digital Sociology has been in circulation for around five years now. But if the British Sociological Association’s annual conference is anything to go by, ‘the digital’ is still on the periphery of British Sociology. Perhaps problematically, Digital Sociology shares…

  • Communism for the few

    From Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, by Peter Frase, loc 1370-1383: Ironically, the life enjoyed within Elysium’s bubble appears not too different from the Communist scenario sketched out several chapters earlier. The difference, of course, is that it is communism for the few. And indeed, we can already see tendencies in this direction in our…

  • Digital Capitalism and Guard Labour

    An interesting thread I’m following up from Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. This is Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev on ‘guard labour‘: Another dubious first for America: We now employ as many private security guards as high school teachers — over one million of them, or nearly double their number in 1980. And that’s just…

  • The Climate Agenda of Elites

    From Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, loc 234-246: the key question surrounding climate change is not whether climate change is occurring, but rather who will survive the change. Even in the worst-case scenarios, scientists are not arguing that the Earth will become totally uninhabitable. What will happen—and is happening—is that struggles over space and resources…

  • Living with theoretical pluralism

    How do we live with theoretical pluralism? It’s too often a matter of ‘peace treaties’, avoiding fights by moving disagreements off-stage. But if we do this then are we really occupying the same argumentative space? I don’t think we are and the intellectual value of theoretical pluralism is lost if we find ourselves in such…

  • The Political Economy of the American South

    From Paul Theroux’s Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads, pg 48: I was to hear this story all over the rural South, in the ruined towns that had been manufacturing centers, sustained by the making of furniture, or appliances, or roofing materials, or plastic products, the labor-intensive jobs that kept a town ticking over.…

  • This week: the second Accelerated Academy

    30 November-2 December 2016, Leiden (Scheltema, Marktsteeg 1) Conference organisers Sarah de Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University Björn Hammarfelt, University of Borås, Sweden | Leiden University Alex Rushforth, Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University Scientific committee Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick Tereza Stöckelová, Czech Academy of Sciences Filip Vostal,…

  • Why are there 3 philosophy magazines but no sociology one?

    I just spotted New Philosopher for the first time, in an airport newsagents. I’ve occasionally bought or subscribed to Philosopher’s Magazine and Philosophy Now in the past. That makes three popular magazines about philosophy aimed at a general audience. Why such an abundance of philosophy magazines and yet no comparable sociology publications? Is it because the…

  • Five propositions about #publicsociology

    Some thoughts after yesterday’s public sociology day in Manchester: The meaning of ‘public sociology’ is not always self-evident and the enthusiasm of the impulse expressed through the term can cloud its meaning yet further. We need to be clear about what we are doing and why. This clarity can help us negotiate the ambivalent spaces…

  • What is ‘the literature’?

    My experience of watching the literature on asexuality spiral from a handful of papers ever through to new ones each month has left me fascinated by how quickly ‘the literature’ can become unmanageable. Within a relatively small and nascent field, it’s possible to grasp ‘the literature’ as a totality. But past a certain point, circumscribing…

  • The lineaments of techno-fascism

    A fascinating essay exploring the possible relationship between Nick Land’s right-accelerationism and possible future techno-reactionary movements: Nick Land, like Moldbug and many other neoreactionaries, typically shuns the term “fascist.” Admittedly, they have some good reasons to do so: despite NRx racism and authoritarianism, its political economy is closer to Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore than Hitler’s Reich.…

  • The substitute socialisation of the marine corp

    From J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, pg 173-174: The Marine Corps assumes maximum ignorance from its enlisted folks. It assumes that no one taught you anything about physical fitness, personal hygiene, or personal finances. I took mandatory classes about balancing a checkbook, saving, and investing. When I came home from boot camp with my fifteen-hundred-dollar earnings…

  • Social Media and Public Sociology

    Notes for The Practice of Public Sociology It can seem obvious that there’s some relationship between social media and public sociology. After all, these are platforms which offer free, instantaneous and immediate access to audiences ranging from the tens of millions to the billions. However unpacking the relationship between social media and public sociology requires we…

  • The Affectivity of the Nascent Tyrant

    By far the best film I’ve seen this year was The Childhood of a Leader. It recounts a number of episodes in the life of a nascent tyrant, exploring the emergence of what is hinted to be a boundless rage that might one day transform the world: I’ve been thinking about this film since encountering Auden’s…

  • Towards a sociology of Pikettyville

    From this fascinating paper by Roger Burrows, Richard Webber and Rowland Atkinson: To talk of ‘Pikettyville’ is then to conjure up an image of an urban system that has become hardwired to adopting, channelling and inviting excesses of social and economic capital in search of a space in which the rich not only find safe haven…

  • No longer praying at the altar of virality

    An important idea offered by Mike Caulfield. The embrace of frictionless sharing and the relentless pursuit of engagement have created the problems which are now being naturalised by the emerging ‘did Facebook lead to Trump’ discourse: We have prayed at the altar of virality a long time, and I’m not sure it’s working out for us…

  • Chronosolidarity

    In Work’s Intimacy, Melissa Gregg pays much attention to the challenge faced by part-time workers in knowledge industries. Many of her participants within this category reported regularly finding themselves checking e-mail outside of their paid hours, something they saw as necessary to ensure they were ‘prepared’. In this way, ‘catch up days’ become an unpaid accompaniment…

  • A vicious circle of reprisals and hostility

    From this week’s Economist leader. I suspect they’re underestimating the extent to which Trump will largely enact the Ryan-ist mainstream in economic policy. However they’re surely correct about the underlying dynamic: Trump’s policies intensifying the conditions which gave rise to him, creating more anger and encouraging the ethno-nationalist channeling of that anger as a political…

  • The Practice of Public Sociology: Sociological Review Early Career Event

    We’ve recently had some cancellations for the forthcoming event, The Practice of Public Sociology: Sociological Review Early Career Event.  If you would like one of these places, please registered here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-practice-of-public-sociology-sociological-review-early-career-event-tickets-28652394082  The Practice of Public Sociology Manchester Digital Laboratory, November 24th, Manchester For over a decade public sociology has been a mainstream topic of discussion…

  • Call for Papers: State Crime and Digital Resistance (Deadline 30 November)

    Special Issue, State Crime Journal (May 2018) STATE CRIME AND DIGITAL RESISTANCE Sign up for 6th January 2017 workshop here: http://statecrime.org/state-crime-research/call-for-papersworkshop-special-issue-of-state-crime-journal/ This special issue of State Crime seeks to investigate how changing patterns of state crime are being shaped by the massive growth of a digital communications infrastructure which permeates everyday life for billions of…

  • Out Now: Selected Papers of Margaret Archer

    I was first taught by Margaret Archer in 2006, as an MA Philosophy student at the University of Warwick. At that point I was a committed Rortian but the discussions and debates we had in seminars over that year laid the groundwork for my later turn towards critical realism. She subsequently supervised my part-time PhD for 6 years and…

  • The affinity between enlightened technocrats and digital elites

  • The bureaucratic origins of algorithmic authoritarianism

    I just came across this remarkable estimate in an Economist feature on surveillance. I knew digitalisation made surveillance cheaper but I didn’t realise quite how much cheaper. How much of the creeping authoritarianism which characterises the contemporary national security apparatus in the UK and US is driven by a familiar impulse towards efficiency? The agencies not only do…

  • The class politics of innovation and the new digital elite

    In his remarkably prescient Listen Liberal, Thomas Frank describes the rapid capture of the Democratic Party by the professional class which took place during those decades when economic transition left them ascendent within the country as a whole. This was originally a predominance of financiers within the party but, with a transition marked by the…

  • Broken Fingers

    How long How long ago 16 years Everyday Of course I know Of course I know Forget his face? Of course I don’t Etched like a crystal vase These broken fingers Some things don’t heal I can’t wake up from a dream When the dream is real These broken fingers Forget his eyes? His silhouette?…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #29

    Work’s Intimacy by Melissa Gregg The Uberfication of the University by Gary Hall Pirate Philosophy by Gary Hall Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened To The Party Of The People? by Thomas Frank Graphic Novels:  Invisible Republic vol 1 by Gabriel Hardman, Corinna Bechko and Jordan Boyd Invisible Republic vol 2 by Gabriel Hardman, Corinna Bechko and Jordan Boyd Kick Ass…

  • Digital Sociology vs STS

    A joint Digital Sociology Study Group and STS Study Group Event at the Oxford Internet Institute Wednesday 13 December 2016, 13:00 The Oxford Internet Institute 1st Giles Oxford, OX1 3JS The concept of Digital Sociology has been in circulation for around five years now. But if the British Sociological Association’s annual conference is anything to…

  • The pace of critique in a world of accelerating upheaval

    There’s a pervasive idea that social critique must be slow, necessitating withdrawl from the world in order to carefully pierce through the veil of appearances. There’s a kernel of truth in this, in so far as that hasty analysis risks both superficiality and the reproduction of dominant frames of reference.  A whole sequence of events…

  • “we need more post-ideological, budget-balancing, technocratic centrism!”

    As Thomas Frank points out in his Listen Liberal, loc 811-828, calls for more centrism have long followed the defeat of Democrat centrists: Democrats would run for the presidency on a professional-friendly platform of high-minded post-partisanship and be rejected by the electorate—and then, in the aftermath, those same Democrats would be ritually denounced by Washington’s…

  • Donald Trump’s Words of Power

    In an old essay about Heidegger’s conception of language, the philosopher Charles Taylor invokes the notion of ‘words of power’ to explain the power of Hitler’s rhetoric. Once we move away from a sense of language as an expression of individual meanings and purposes, we find ourselves somewhere entirely differently: The silence is where there…

  • The Sociology of Trump: An Initial Reading List

    Obviously I’m intellectualising in the hope of avoiding despair. Here’s my first go at a provisional Sociology of Trump reading list, incorporating books I’ve read, books I own and now prioritise reading and those I’ve bought this morning. I’ve deliberately cast the net as widely as possible: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the…

  • The Everyday Life of Incipient Fascism

    I’ve long been fascinated by the question of what the descent into fascism feels like for those living through such a transition, how daily life changes (or fails to do so) as the fabric of the old order begins to unweave. There’s an insightful essay in the LA Review of Books which addresses precisely this question as…

  • Four year post doc in #digitalsociology

    The Technical University Berlin seeks a: Research Associate (Post-Doc) – Salary Grade 13 TV-L Berliner Hochschulen Part-time employment may be possible. The Institute for Sociology is starting a research group on „Entrepreneurial Group Dynamics“, that is funded in the Freigeist-Programme by VolkswagenFoundation (www.entrepreneurialgroups.org). A subproject will build a multi-level dataset through crowdsourcing that allows to…

  • When universities fail to cope with digitalisation

    I just received this spam press release about a new study conducted in a French business school.  As a serious empirical question: what motivates this? My prima facie assumption would be that an institutional imperative to maximise the external impact of internal activity (“we have to get our research out there!) combined with a deep…

  • Perfect Government

    You point your fuckin’ finger You racist, you bigot But that’s not the problem Now is it….?

  • The Relative Autonomy of Symbolic Mediation

    A quick note on the Wacquant workshop. We’ve turned to habitus and he’s offered the unproblematic claim that we always encounter the physical world through the prism of symbols. Social relations generate symbolic relations which are deposited in the body, shaping action in ways which serve to reproduce or transform social relations. It would be impossible to dispute this. However there’s…

  • The Philosophical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

    I’m at an interesting workshop being given by Loic Wacquant on the practical application of Bourdieu’s social theory. An aspect that has really stood out to me so far is Wacquant’s presentation of Bourdieu’s work as a philosophical sociology. The point is partly biographical, with Bourdieu’s transition into social research being a response to his national…

  • Upcoming @BalanceNetwork events

    An update on forthcoming events from this fascinating interdisciplinary research network: THREE CAFÉS: EXPERIENTIAL ARTISTIC RESEARCH EXPLORING INTER-RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND WELLBEING – 23 November & 28 November, Cambridge Anglia Ruskin University’s Marina Velez, Davide Natalini, and Debby Lauder are leading a trio of experimental interventions, designed to open up discursive spaces for interactive…

  • The Place That Sends You Mad

    Thanks to James Duggan for introducing me to this:

  • How the Pentagon imagines the future of cities

    This is absolutely fascinating:  

  • Digitalisation and the elimination of latency 

    From Work’s Intimacy, by Melissa Gregg, loc 3594-3609: Describing the impact of the BlackBerry in 2006 –just before the iPhone changed mobile computing for keeps –Research in Motion’s John Balsillie explained his bestselling devices as “latency eliminators.” According to this logic, Balsillie argued, “successful companies have hearts … and intrinsic force that makes the whole…

  • Social Media and Open Research: What Does ‘Open’ Mean?

    Notes for a talk at this event on Saturday.  In the not too distant past, the use of social media in higher education was seen as a curiosity at best. Perhaps something to be explained or inquired into but certainly not something deemed relevant to scholarship. Yet it’s now increasingly hard to move without encountering the…

  • What would the European Union look like in an American context?

    This is a great analogy offered by Yanis Varoufakis in So The Weak Suffer What They Must? on loc 1016: The equivalent in the United States would have been a Washington bureaucracy, operating without a Senate or a House of Representatives to keep the bureaucrats in check, able to overrule state governments on almost anything…

  • The Consolations of Gaming in Digital Capitalism

    From How The World Changed Social Media, by Danny Miller et al, loc 1203 The stand-out figure here is from industrial China. This is probably the site where people’s working day involves the most unremitting labour in factories. It is therefore not all that surprising to note that they use gaming as a means to…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #28

    Books: Purity by Jonathan Franzen Trump and Me by Mark Singer OccupyMedia! by Christian Fuchs Strangers In Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild And The Weak Suffer What They Must? by Yanis Varoufakis Graphic Novels: Injection vol 1 by Warren Ellis Injection vol 2 by Warren Ellis Moon Knight: From The Dead by Warren Ellis Kick Ass by Mark Millar Black…

  • A Trump Presidency and the Militarisation of America

    There are many reasons not to take Trump seriously. But given the real possibility he might win the election, we need to think through the stated consequence of his policies, particularly given the evident inability of the Republican establishment to restrain him before he holds political office, let alone when he has it. To take one example:…

  • External economic relations and the norm of imbalance

    From And The Weak Suffer What They Must? By Yanis Varoufakis, loc 353-368: What this means is that a closed, autarkic (meaning self-sufficient) economy, like that of Robinson Crusoe in literature or perhaps North Korea today, may be poor, solitary and undemocratic, but at least it is free of problems caused by other economies, by…

  • The concept of ‘social editor’

    I like the concept of ‘social editor’, though think it has to be treated carefully: In an earlier post for this blog, we argued that Facebook has crossed the line from being a mere host of user-created content to functioning as an editor of (professional) media content, at least for certain parts of its website,…

  • 10 facts about the changing digital news landscape

    A really useful starting point for Pew research on this, saved here for future use: Digital news continues to evolve, pushed by a variety of innovations in recent years, from groundbreaking new technologies like virtual reality and automated reporting to experiments on social platforms that have altered campaign coverage. As journalists and media practitioners gather…

  • Call for Abstracts: Minconference on Digital Sociology

    Mini-Conference on Digital Sociology Call for Abstracts Eastern Sociological Society 2017 Annual Meeting, Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown Philadelphia, PA, February 23-26 The Eastern Sociological Society’s theme of “The End of the World as We Know It?,” references the rise of digital sociology in the following: “Technology is revolutionizing everyday life: powerful hand-held computers are ubiquitous, communications are…

  • The political economy of podcasting

    Saving this five part series to come back to properly later: Money is chasing money. Podcast advertising expanded at a 48 percent rate last year, and it’s forecast to grow about 25 percent a year through 2020. By that point, it would be approaching half a billion dollars in annual ad revenue. That growth is…

  • Some thoughts on fast and slow science in the accelerated academy

    Notes for my talk at the Accelerated Academy on Friday  I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how the social sciences are proving too slow in catching up to developments in digital technology. This means that engagements with new possibilities are often piecemeal and ad hoc, pushing the threshold of innovation in methods while methodological and theoretical discussion lags…

  • Cultural scaffolding for greedy social roles

    We all occupy many social roles. All of them are, as Margaret Archer puts it, ‘greedy’: there’s always more things we can do, more time and care we can give to others based on our existing obligations. Many of the reasons we don’t are personal, reflecting our evaluations of what matters to us but also…

  • The monopoly bias in the sharing economy

    This struck me as an interesting case that reveals a broader truth about the sharing economy. A description of the very early merger of two companies offering city wide access to unused capacity in fitness classes, from Sweat Equity, by Jason Kelly, loc 1343: “When you look at quality fitness inventory in each city, there aren’t…

  • Collapsing the parameters of our worlds

    For many years I’ve been interested in the phenomenology of endurance sport. Or rather the phenomenology of the training required by endurance sport. How does this give order to life? What pleasures are derived from the training regime? What’s foreclosed by the strict management of self and how does this add to the appeal? I thought…

  • Algorithmic Guerrilla Warfare

    This documentary is worth watching for many reasons but there’s a particularly fascinating section in which the presenter goes undercover at a digital activism training course. The facilitator describes how he spends half an hour a day finding liberal books on Amazon and giving one star reviews, before explaining how this practice needs to be…

  • Three weeks, four requests and still no ballot paper 

    I just got off the phone to Labour for the third time in three weeks, punctuated by a hopeful online request as well. When I last spoke to them, I was told my ballot paper would arrive by midnight yesterday. Now I’m told it will arrive by midnight on Monday.  Given it’s already too late…

  • The cosmopolitan self vs the endurance self

    I like this contrast drawn by Arlie Hochschild on loc 2780-2795 of Strangers In Their Own Land: Not only her values, but even the kind of self she proudly exhibited—an endurance self—seemed to need defending, because it too seemed to be going out of fashion along with all the blue-collar jobs. “They used to brag…

  • The moralisation of insecurity and exploitation

    From Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Hochschild, loc 2587-2603: Not claiming to be a victim, accommodating the downside of loose regulations out of a loyalty to free enterprise—this was a tacit form of heroism, hidden to incurious liberals. Sometimes you had to endure bad news, Janice felt, for a higher good, such as…

  • What’s the collective noun for a group of social theorists?

    A discourse of theorists. — Plashing Vole (@PlashingVole) September 15, 2016 https://twitter.com/DrCVaccaro/status/776442285152100352 French ones are known as Un Pack — Jacqueline (@jacqc1) September 15, 2016 https://twitter.com/AodhBC/status/776463919330136064 A discourse of theorists. — Plashing Vole (@PlashingVole) September 15, 2016 https://twitter.com/rascality/status/776448957161545728 .@mark_carrigan A Latour. — Dr Tom Hewitt (extremist)🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (@Ethnotweeter) September 15, 2016 A construction? — Candess Kos…

  • music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#24)

  • The poor white American abject 

    From Strangers In Their Own Land, by Arlie Hochschild, loc 2422: “Crazy redneck.” “White trash.” “Ignorant Southern Bible-thumper.” You realize that’s you they’re talking about. You hear these terms on the radio, on television, read them on blogs. The gall. You’re offended. You’re angry. And you really hate the endless parade of complainers encouraged by…

  • The “least resistant personality profile”

    A really disturbing extract from Arlie Hochschild’s new book, Strangers In Their Own Land. On loc 1445 she shares the profile of the “least resistant personality” offered by a consultancy firm in 1984, hired to advise on locating waste-to-energy plants in areas likely to provoke little resistance from the local community: – Longtime residents of small…

  • Ambient intimacy and cultures of overwork

    In a recent book about the neoliberal superstar turned aspiring world saviour Jeffrey Sachs, a quote from his wife caught my attention. On loc 2909, she describes how Sachs only sleeps for four hours a night and works constantly throughout his waking hours. Even on a family holiday, he often gave two or three speeches a day…

  • Liberation and coercion

    There should be a catchy phrase for this phenomenon. It’s important to understand in its own terms but contrasting emphasis on each pole tend to divert scholarly debates into tedious dichotomies that obscure the underlying reality. From loc 3411 of The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin: Often seemingly opposing outcomes are bound together so that…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #28

    My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki Riots and Political Protest by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis The Myth of Meritocracy by James Bloodworth Social Physics by Alex Petland The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin

  • Practical Sociology: Agenda for Action

    BSA Sociologists outside Academia, in collaboration with Sage Publishing Ltd and the Sociological Imagination Practical Sociology: Agenda for Action A half-day workshop British Psychological Society meeting rooms, Tabernacle St London EC2A 4UE Monday 17 October 2016, 12.30 – 4.30pm How come – at least in the UK –you don’t come across people with ‘sociologist’ in…

  • Social Movements and Pseudo-Activity 

    From Riots and Political Protest, by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall, Daniel Briggs and James Treadwell, pg 195: A great deal of contemporary radical politics is dominated by pseudo-activity: activity that covers up a deeper inactivity. Waving placards and moaning about the government are all well and good, but, if no benefit accrues, if policy doesn’t…

  • Varoufakis on the monopoly power of platforms

    An excellent footnote in The Global Minotour. From loc 3865: Once all your music, films, applications, addresses, etc. are on iTunes and readily accessible by any Apple product (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.), the opportunity cost of buying a Nokia or a Sony device is huge (even if these companies bring a better device to market)…

  • Open Research for Academics: A workshop and hackathon

    October 29th, Goldsmiths, University of London Open research is much more than open access. It is about making all aspects of the research process open to all possible interested parties. It involves innovative approaches to communicating results and sharing outputs. It is about accessibility, inclusivity, citizen science, public engagement, radical transparency, reproducibility, data sharing, social media…