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  • Digital capitalism and the imperative to be noticed 

    In Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation, he writes of how interns voluntarily subjugate themselves in order to ‘be noticed’, even if they have little expectation that their internship will lead to a permanent job. From loc 1997: There is rarely much reason to believe that internships in the public sector or at nonprofits will convert directly…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #23

    Trouble in Paradise by Slavoj Zizek Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success by Michael D’Antonio Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson Why I Left Goldman Sachs by Gregg Smith No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald Graphic Novels: Sons of the Devil by Brian Buccellato The Fuse by Shari Chankhamma Captain America: Two…

  • What might Trumpist authoritarianism look like?

    A worryingly plausible set of suggestions in this article: Absolute Loyalty to the Boss Partisan Control of all Three Branches ICE as a Gestapo for the Foreign-Born Politicizing the IRS Prosecutorial Discretion Presidential Regulatory and Executive Power Trump and the Labor MovemenThe Use of Mobs National Security Emergencies and Subversives Playing Favorites and Enemies with…

  • A wonderful analogy by @Elinor_Carmi

    I love the analogy offered by Elinor Carmi at the start of this excellent Open Democracy piece: Yesterday I walked to the supermarket, like I do every Tuesday morning. All of a sudden I started noticing a few people starting to follow me. I try to convince myself that it is probably just my imagination, and…

  • The Celebrity Millionaires of Competitive Gaming

  • Are exploitative professors breaking the law by recruiting student interns?

    Based on the cases I’ve seen in person, I suspect there’s a growing subterranean practice in the UK of exploitative professors recruiting students to work as unpaid research assistants with the promise of a ‘letter of reference’ in lieu of payment. In one case that particularly bothered me, the first year UG student in question…

  • Vintage social media

    A lovely graphic by John Atkinson, via the Visual Social Media Lab:

  • The growth of the Twinterns

    This is apparently growing rapidly: why pay staff to do this when you can get desperate graduates to do it for free? Want to jump start a social media marketing campaign for your business but don’t have the time or social media savvy in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs or similar sites? Try this twist on…

  • Magical thinking as occupational opportunities contract 

    I just came across this sentence by Mark Granovetter on loc 721 of Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation: “There may be just enough cases around that people know about to give people encouragement, but not enough to really make it likely that that’s going to happen for any particular person.” This is another way of talking…

  • A sign of how messed up expectations about taxation have become in the last few decades

    This was Donald Trump’s stance only a couple of decades ago. From pg 222 of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success: Trump attempted a more serious pose, traveling to Capitol Hill to tell a congressional committee that he thought they should raise taxes on the rich. Reagan tax cuts that had reduced…

  • Algorithmic pricing predates online retail

    From Misbehaving, by Richard Thaler, pg 134. Social norms hindered it in this instance. Why could the same not true be true of online retail?  The CEO of Coca-Cola also discovered the hard way that violating the norms of fairness can backfire. Douglas Ivester, aged fifty-two, appeared to be on his way to the job of…

  • A behavioural economic critique of Uber’s surge pricing

    From Misbehaving, by Richard Thaler, pg 136: Uber has defended surge pricing on the basis that a higher price will act as an incentive for more drivers to work during peak periods. It is hard to evaluate this argument without seeing internal data on the supply response by drivers, but on the face of it…

  • Elon Musk responds to the satirisation of #DigitalElites in Silicon Valley

    A wonderful snippet I just came across on Wikipedia: Elon Musk, after viewing the first episode of the show, said: “None of those characters were software engineers. Software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. They’re weird, but not in the same way. I was just having a meeting with my information security team, and…

  • Call for Papers: The Accelerated Academy

    November 30th t0 December 3rd 2016, Leiden University From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual researchers to that of entire universities, serving to make academic activities more visible, accountable and amenable to university…

  • Forces of Victory

  • Laziness as a virtue 

    I’m very interested in the way ‘laziness’ now tends to be used to describe procrastination: it’s often a loaded term to covey that someone is driven by their own interests rather than institutional ones. Here’s an example of what I mean, from Misbehaving, by Richard Thaler, pg xiii: The interview started. Hearing a friend tell an…

  • Work Life Balance + Digital Conference

    A really interesting conference I wish I could make it to: Work Life Balance + Digital Conference We’ve got a few £20/£12 places left for our “BEYOND BALANCE: How digital technologies are affecting our work, our homes, and everything in between” conference in London on Mon 27 June that we wanted to highlight to sociologists…

  • Billionaires are people, too

    There’s another wonderful scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU1vlbsxGGQ

  • 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…

  • What is Digital Hygiene?

    Any suggestions about where I can find syllabi for digital hygiene courses in schools would be much appreciated. I’m also curious about how advocates of ‘digital hygiene’ see its relationship to the notion of a ‘digital footprint’: is the former what we must do in order to mitigate the damage potentially created by the latter?

  • From the mass surveillance state to techno-fascism

    From The Black Box Society, by Frank Pasquale, pg 52: An unaccountable surveillance state may pose a greater threat to liberty than any particular terror threat. It is not a spectacular dangers, but rather an erosion of a range of freedoms. Most insidiously, the “watchers” have the power to classify those who dare to point…

  • What do universities know about our sexual orientations?

  • Using @IFTTT and Twitter to curate material for research projects

    Two new projects I’m in the early stages of working on both necessitate engagement with phenomena that are developing rapidly. This poses an obvious question: how to identify relevant material and then archive it in a useful way? I’ve written a lot about the curation process before and I won’t rehash it here. Instead, I…

  • The Moral Reasoning of Edward Snowden

    I’m reading Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide and thought these statements from Edward Snowden were powerful: https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738405216459063297 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738408900576350209 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738411435265527808 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738420122541510656 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738418061720596480 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738415776818991105 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738415940644286464 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738418061443764224 https://twitter.com/mark_carrigan/status/738418061531844609

  • I lied about being the outdoor type

    I always had a roof above me, I always paid the rent And I’ve never set foot inside a tent I couldn’t build a fire to save my life I lied about being the outdoor type Well, I’ve never slept out underneath the stars The closest that I came to that was one time in…

  • The Invention of Lifestyle

    An interesting snippet from pg 150 of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success: When first used by psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929, lifestyle referred to strategies people used to avoid dealing with problems or uncomfortable situations. The word was repurposed in the 1960s to mean something akin to “way of living.” In…

  • What Donald Trump’s business strategies suggest about his presidency 

    I just came across this snippet on pg 128 of Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success. It’s hard not to wonder if this is what the presidential contest will herald, after the extremism of the primaries. By proposing something that might seem threatening or outrageous, he staked out a position that would…

  • “The second I walk through those doors, all my problems go away. The second I leave them, my problems are back”

    In Grayson Perry’s All Man, the artist interviews an MMA fighter in the north-east of England who describes the joy he takes in fighting: The second I walk through them doors to the second I walk out, it’s heaven in here. It’s heaven. All your problems go away. The second you walk out the door, they’re…

  • Omnifocus for Academics

    I’ve been a devoted user of Omnifocus for going on five years. At this point, I struggle to imagine how I could work without it, as I’m so utterly reliant on it to transform the hyperactive clutter within my mind into an ordered archive outside of it. But it’s hard to use. It took me…

  • A partial defence of Gawker’s prurience: the necessity of scrutinising #DigitalElites

    This is an important though contentious article by Morozov, reflecting on the recent revelation that Peter Thiel was secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. While the much maligned company has regularly descended into prurience, they’ve provided a vital service by critically scrutinising the personal lives of digital elites & we need to resist the mobilisation of…

  • The infrastructural ambitions of technology companies

    Given the cash reserves (see below) and/or capacity to raise investment of each of these companies, as well as the practical challenge they face in expanding their markets, it seems likely these nascent infrastructural ambitions will only grow and grow: Facebook and Microsoft are going underwater. The two technology companies announced on Thursday they are…

  • Strategic distraction as a tool of political control on the Chinese internet

    The paper by Gary King this reports on sounds like a must read: What the research showed was a degree of subtlety and sophistication undreamed of in western coverage of Chinese online censorship. In essence, King et al suggested that almost everything we think we know about the Chinese internet is wrong. For one thing,…

  • Surveillance and the Public Sphere: confronting a democratic dilemma

    A broad and enlightening talk from Oscar Gandy, one of the foundational figures in Surveillance Studies, with a great response by Louise Amoore:

  • How do Americans define the sharing economy?

    Given how much time and energy has gone into constructing the notion of the ‘sharing economy’, these findings are fascinating. I would have assumed awareness of the term to be much higher and for established brands to dominate the explanations offered by respondents, something which was apparently not the case.

  • Fame and the content eco-system

    In Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success, there’s an interesting reflection on pg 46 about Trump’s first experience of being in a newspaper: In his third year at the academy he earned a headline in the local paper—“ Trump Wins Game for NYMA”—and the experience was almost electrifying. “It felt good seeing…

  • The Blizzard of Photography

    I just came across this brief reference in Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success which makes me think it’s important to read Sontag to develop my case about digital distraction. From pg 63: Susan Sontag would observe in On Photography that inexpensive photos, produced by the hundreds, created a record that allowed an…

  • Varoufakis on contemporary capitalism’s preposterous reversal of the truth

    This isn’t a new idea but I’ve rarely encountered it expressed so concisely: The idea that individuals create wealth and that all governments do is come along and tax them is what Varoufakis calls “a preposterous reversal of the truth”. “There is an amazing myth in our enterprise culture that wealth is created individually and…

  • Donald Trump as an Attentional Entrepeneur

    From Donald Trump: The Pursuit of Success, pg 13 – one who constantly seeks out new ways to make claims upon attention and diligently measures and assesses the success of these innovations: For decades, no one has made a more insistent claim on the nation’s attention than this man. Trump begins each day with a…

  • ‘Intelligence’ as an explanatory concept 

    I’m working on a paper with Tom Brock at the moment in which we’re trying to unpack the contemporary meaning that ‘intelligence’ holds in political and economic discourse. ‘Intelligence’ is something invoked in the same way that ‘merit’ and ‘will’ have been previously. For instance, see this extract from Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit…

  • Funding third-party lawsuits as a tool of defensive elites

    This thought-provoking Vox article suggests a disturbing trend: Olson argues that if you went back a century or two and talked to British or American legal scholars, “they’d say of course these things would be used by the rich and powerful if you allowed them.” Under doctrines called champerty and maintenance, the law used to…

  • Against lists of academic publications

    Are these necessary? A conversation I had last week while I was travelling made me think that I should go back to including one on my website, lest someone quickly scanning it (who might, for example, want to hire me to do some consultancy) doesn’t take me seriously as a scholar. But ten minutes of preparing such…

  • The Fragile Movements of Late Modernity

    I’m really pleased this paper has been published. It got to well over 17,000 words at one point, prompting me to realise that I was actually starting a book, which I’m now a good year into planning and writing: Social movements often make an important contribution to the normative order within social life but how…

  • Sociology and Fiction: a @thesocreview Special Feature

    I think this is come out really well. Get in touch if you’d like to contribute something further: Imagining Futures: From Sociology of the Future to Future Fictions The Future Perfect Writing Fiction and Writing Social Science Life Chances: Co-written re-imagined welfare utopias through a fictional novel Patricia Leavy on Social Fictions Showing, not telling:…

  • A special @thesocreview feature on the rise of the Superstar Professor

    I’m really pleased with this special feature I just finished for The Sociological Review’s website: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a SUPER PROFESSOR! Slavo Zizek: Between Public Intellectual and Academic Celebrity How To Shift Sociological Product: Lessons From the Career of Tony Giddens Academic Celebrity and the Publishing Industry On…

  • Deleuzian populism

    From Zizek’s Trouble In Paradise, pg 181: The ongoing popular protests around Europe converge in a series of demands which, in their very spontaneity and directness, form a kind of ‘epistemological obstacle’ to any proper confrontation with the ongoing crisis of our political system. These demands effectively read as a popularized version of Deleuzian politics:…

  • The Electorate as Constitutional Kings

    I really like this framing by Zizek on pg 177 of his Trouble in Paradise. The discourse on ‘populism’ should be read through this lens: the bewilderment and scorn elites feel when this polite agreement breaks down. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen effectively is a king –but a king in a…

  • The threat of pseudo-activity

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 174-175: The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something’, while academics participate in meaningless ‘debates’, and so on, and the truly difficult thing is to step back,…

  • Before Bourdieu, there was Orwell

    I love this little passage, quoted on pg 172 of Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise: We all rail against class-distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed … The…

  • WordPress owns the Internet

  • Why We Post: The Anthropology of Social Media

    Great introductory video to this fascinating project undertaken by digital anthropologists at UCL:

  • Peter Thiel secretly backed Hulk Hogan

    A really unusual addition to my growing catalogue of digital elites flexing their social, cultural and political muscles. Peter Thiel secretly backed Hulk Hogan’s case against Gawker: Peter Thiel, a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, helped fund the case brought by the wrestler, Terry Gene Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, against Gawker, said a person…

  • Zizek on the impossibility of anarchism 

    My commitment to anarchism is something which ended with sociology, more specifically when I realised that I understood anarchism to entail the overcoming of social structure. Seeing that as a conceptual impossibility, I came to see anarchism as untenable. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, not least of all because it’s become clear…

  • How to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe

    A really interesting section from Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, analysing the challenging facing populist movements who have mobilised successfully around an imagined national unity. From pg 144: At a more directly political level, US foreign policy elaborated a detailed strategy of how to exert damage-control by way of re-channelling a popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist…

  • Social Media and Academic Labour, June 27th in Leeds

    Speaker: Dr Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick & The Sociological Review With Response from Dr Darren Nixon, Sociology at Leeds Beckett University In recent years, we’ve begun to see social media move from the periphery to the mainstream of academic practice. But what does this mean for academic labour? While much of the discussion concerns…

  • Sublime imagined unity as a political factor

    I wish I’d read Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise before writing my fragile movement’s paper, because this is exactly what I was trying to explore: how does this ‘imaginary unity at its most sublime’ inform popular perceptions of the mobilising potential of social media? From pg 97: The ongoing events in Egypt provide yet another example…

  • Super-ego individualization

    The ideas are pretty familiar but I nonetheless really like this section from Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 86. I’m trying to use the notion of cognitive triage to explore how obsessive self examination subtracts from time and energy actionable for working with others to address social issues. A series of situations that characterize today’s…

  • Debt as an instrument of post-democratic control

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 46. A mechanism which operates at every level, from the individual to the international: A decade or so ago, Argentina decided to repay its debt to the IMF ahead of time (with financial help from Venezuela). The IMF’s reaction was on the face of it surprising: instead of being…

  • The Psychoanalytics of Temporising

    In my recent work, I’ve been writing a lot about ‘temporising’, a concept I borrowed from Margaret Archer’s work in the hope of developing it further. In the reflexivity sense, temporising involves trying to find a solution to a present dilemma through the exercise of temporal agency. I spoke earlier did this week at a…

  • The paradox of personalisation 

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 57. This isn’t necessarily the case but it’s a claim that holds true in the absence of personal tech skills and a disposition to  exercise then: The paradox is that, the more the small item (smartphone or iPod) I hold in my hand is personalized, easy to use, ‘transparent’…

  • Freeing those who govern from the constraints of democracy

    From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 35. As he goes on to say on pg 107, “the ‘eternal’ marriage between democracy and capitalism is nearing divorce.” These elites, the main culprits for the 2008 financial meltdown, now impose themselves as experts, the only ones who can lead us on the painful path of financial recovery,…

  • Reclaiming ‘aspiration’ for the left 

    This is powerful stuff from Corbyn in his recent LSE lecture: I am not talking here about the aspiration of the delusional Del Boys – “This time next year Rodney, we’ll be millionaires” – not the importation of the individualist American Dream. (As an aside, the US comedian George Carlin once said “They call it…

  • The lonely monads of digital capitalism

    From an essay by Franco Berardi quoted in Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise: These lonely monad walks in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with the pictures, tweets, games coming out of their small screens, perfectly insulated and perfectly wired into the smooth interface of the flow http://th-rough.eu/writers/bifo-eng/journey-seoul-1

  • The EU: a flawed democracy whose failures are fuelling the rise of fascism?

    A powerful polemic by Paul Mason in the Guardian arguing that the post-democratic character of the EU is intimately connection to the reemergence of fascism across Europe: All this suggests that those of us who want Brexit in order to reimpose democracy, promote social justice and subordinate companies to the rule of law should bide…

  • The price fixing conspiracies of the platform economy 

    A great analysis of a hugely important case being heard in the near future: The immediate threat takes the form of an antitrust class action lawsuit against its co-founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, which will be litigated in the Manhattan courtroom of Federal District Judge Jed Rakoff starting on November 1. At issue is Uber’s…

  • Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor

    Very keen to write something for this, perhaps engaging with the slow professor movement: Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor // Organizations, Occupations and Work Below is a call for papers for The Precariat and The Professor. Abstracts/proposals (limited to 200 words) are due 7/1. Submissions, inquiries and questions should be directed to…

  • Call for papers: everyday analysis 

    I’m tempted to try and write something for this, though not sure what yet: Call-for-Papers Deadline: June 20th 2016. This summer Everyday Analysis will publish an online collection of articles on the subject of Politics in attempt to expand the conversations in our forthcoming book Politactics, out later in the year with Zero Books. If…

  • The Scale of Data Brokerage

    I knew data brokerage was big but I didn’t realise it was this big. From The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin, loc 1039: Epsilon is reputed to own data on 300 million company loyalty card members worldwide, with a databank holding data related to 250 million consumers in the United States alone (Edwards 2013). Acxiom…

  • Escaping the digital cage

    A lovely passage from Lisa Gitelman at Loc 78 of her edited collection “Raw Data” Is An Oxymoron about the difficulty of going ‘off grid’ when the utilities of daily life leave us bound into the digital cage: Try to spend a day “off the grid” and you’d better leave your credit and debit cards, transit…

  • Overlapping categories and the problem of abundance

    An interesting snippet from Digital Methods, by Richard Rogers, loc 1883: To an “Internet cataloger” writing a well-known essay in 1998, Yahoo! was making a significant contribution to newfangled online library science, not only by its classification scheme but also by the means of content “navigation” it developed. Yahoo!’s system differed from that of a…

  • Coping with acceleration: triaging strategies and the new empiricism

    Notes for a talk next week My concern in this short talk is not to diagnose the underlying conditions which generate an acceleration of social life, or indeed the various experiences which differently placed actors have of such acceleration. Instead, I’m interested in the novel and deeply reflexive cultural forms arising under these conditions, as what…

  • Workshop: Using the Morphogenetic Approach

    June 21st, 10am to 5pm The University of Warwick This one day workshop is intended for those currently using or planning to use the morphogenetic approach in their research. In the first half of the workshop, Margaret Archer will give an overview of the morphogenetic approach and its development, as well as address conceptual and…

  • The death of cyberspace

    Another really interesting idea from Digital Methods by Richard Rogers. He dates the ‘death of cyberspace’ as symbolically taking place with the first legal assertion of geography over virtuality. From loc 833: The symbolic end of cyberspace may be located in the lawsuit against Yahoo! in May 2000, brought before the Tribunal de Grande Instance…

  • The myth of user generated content

    From Digital Methods, by Richard Rogers, loc 769: research has found that there is only a tiny ratio of editors to users in Web 2.0 platforms, including Wikipedia, illustrating what is known as the myth of user-generated content. Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales has often remarked that the dedicated community is indeed relatively small, at just…

  • The misleading concept of ‘the blogosphere’

    From Digital Methods, by Richard Rogers, loc 671-688: The “sphere” in “blogosphere” refers in spirit to the public sphere; it also may suggest the geometrical form, in which all points on the surface are the same distance from the center or core. One could think of such an equidistance as an egalitarian ideal, in which…

  • Challenging Citizenship: Social Media and Big Data

    A special issue I’m really looking forward to reading: The Journal for Computer Supported Cooperative Work has a special issue on the impact of social media and big data on citizenship.  It appears evident that the emergence of social media platforms and data practices challenges our traditional understanding of citizenship. This special issue investigates telling…

  • 2016 Challenging Media Landscapes conference, November 2016

    This looks like an excellent conference: 2016 Challenging Media Landscapes Conference Access, Participation and the Mediatised World CALL FOR PAPERS AND PANELS: SUBMISSION DEADLINE WED 22 JUNE SUBMIT PROPOSALS TO: artdes-cmlabstracts@salford.ac.uk http://blogs.salford.ac.uk/research/2016/04/19/2016-challenging-media-landscapes-conference/ Conference date: Monday 14 November 2016 Venue:  MediacityUK, Salford, Manchester. This conference is hosted and organized by the University of Salford and is…

  • The Utopian Promise of Cyberspace

    From Code 2.0 by Larry Lessig, loc 159: Born in a research project in the Defense Department, 1cyberspace too arose from the unplanned displacement of a certain architecture of control. The tolled, single-purpose network of telephones was displaced by the untolled and multipurpose network of packet-switched data. And thus the old one-to-many architectures of publishing…

  • Places Still Available: The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture

    There are a few places left for The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture.  The lecture will be followed by a wine reception.  It is free to attend, but places must be reserved in advance by emailing [events@thesociologicalreview.com] The Great Divide: Sociology, Anthropology, and Race in France since Lévi-Strauss Professor Éric Fassin (Université Paris-8) Discussants: Professor…

  • Conceptualising ‘distraction’

    Notes for my talk for the Reflexivity Forum at Warwick on May 24th What does it mean to be distracted? For the last year, I’ve been telling people that I’m working on a new project about digital distraction and everyone seems to immediately grasp what I mean by this. But conceptualising precisely what we should…

  • Interested in the internal conversation? Come to this symposium @SocioWarwick on May 24th

    Following on from a succesful event this time last year, we’re organising another reflexivity forum. We potentially have one more speaking slot available but we’re still keen for others to come along for the discussion. Here’s the programme for the day: E-mail me: mark@markcarrigan.net if you’d like to register – please do so ASAP though as I’ll be…

  • The Great Divide: Sociology, Anthropology, and Race in France since Lévi-Strauss

    The Sociological Review Annual Sociology Lecture  Friday May 20th 2016, 17.45-21.00 SOAS, University of London This event is free but it is essential to register. To reserve a place, please email Jenny Thatcher [events@thesociologicalreview.com]. Keynote: Professor Éric Fassin (Université Paris-8)  Discussants: Professor Gurminder K Bhambra (University of Warwick, UK and Linnaeus University, Sweden) and Dr…

  • 19 interesting ways to communicate knowledge

    hrough Design Fiction (e.g. Zero Hours) Through Social Fiction (e.g. Low Fat Love) Through Visual Journalism (e.g. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt) Through Visual Biography (e.g. Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City) Through Graphic Novels (I lack examples of this – I’m also aware the distinction between ‘graphic novels’ and ‘visual…

  • “They were stalking the corridors, the lecture rooms, the offices…”: open research, ethics and impact

    The Last Seminar by Stan Cohen must surely merit consideration as the strangest paper ever to appear in a Sociology journal. It tells the story of a gradual invasion of the university campus by those who are neither expected nor welcome: research participants. Encountering  strangely familiar figures in their everyday working lives, befuddled sociologists suddenly begin to…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #22

    The Quantified Self by Deborah Lupton Losing The Signal by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff Creepiness by Adam Kotsko The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss Shadow Work by Craig Lambert Graphic Novels: Sex: Broken Toys by Joe Casey Sex: Daisy Chain by Joe Casey Super Crooks by Mark Millar Pride & Joy by Garth Ennis Velvet by…

  • Open research projects

    I’m really interested in this concept of ‘open research projects’ which I just encountered on the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list.  We recently launched our survey <http://digitallyliterate.net/announcement/tltsurvey/&gt; to collect participant data. Click here to go directly to the survey. <https://cofc.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_d08stZ0o2NwWLWd&gt; We will follow-up with interviews of participants using survey data and snowball sampling. This…