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  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! TOMORROW at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the discussion.…

  • an introduction to social acceleration in 18 minutes

  • Michel Foucault – The Culture of the Self

  • Call for papers: digital gaming (cc @TGJBrock)

    e invite you to submit your paper on digital gaming, Game Studies or related disciplines focusing on digital game and gaming in all its theoretical dimensions and emerging applications. Digital technologies promote a transformation in the practice of gaming and the role it plays in contemporary society. From a broader perspective, the monograph aims to…

  • Call for Papers: The contemporary relevance of the work of Pierre Bourdieu

    CALL FOR PAPERS The contemporary relevance of the work of Pierre Bourdieu BSA Bourdieu Study Group’s Inaugural Biennial Conference 2016 Organised in association with the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol 4-6 July, 2016, University of Bristol Pierre Bourdieu has been one of the most influential sociologists of the second half…

  • an introduction to social ontology

    I just came across this superb introduction produced by the Cambridge Social Ontology group: The term ontology3 derives from Greek, with “onto” meaning “being”, and “logos” usually interpreted as “science”; so that ontology, as traditionally understood, is the science or study of being4. The word being has at least two senses: 1)  Something that is,…

  • neil gaiman’s 8 rules of writing

    From the Guardian, via BrainPickings: Write Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the…

  • what makes human beings distinctive amongst animals?

    What makes human beings distinctive amongst animals? This is an argument I found myself having a few times last week. I just came across a great passage by Martha Nussbaum, quoted on Brain Pickings, reflecting my own views on this. When I say ‘reflexivity is a defining characteristic of the human’, it’s a short hand for this…

  • new songs from brian fallon’s impending solo album

    Two new songs that are apparently from Brian Fallon’s impending solo album. I’m not that keen on the first but I can’t get the second out of my head. I still wish Gaslight Anthem hadn’t split up but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked forward to an album release this much.

  • research blogs as monuments to treating ideas seriously

    Another excellent annual reflection from Daniel Little on the eighth birthday of Understanding Society. It’s one of my favourite academic blogs and certainly my favourite theory blog: This week marks the end of the eighth year of Understanding Society. This year passed the 1000 mark — the blog is now up to 1,029 posts, or well…

  • are you conducting research on reflexivity?

    Following from our successful workshop earlier this year, we’re organising the first of what will hopefully become a regular reflexivity forum at the University of Warwick on May 24th. The intention is to provide a space in which people conducting empirical research into human reflexivity will be able to present work in progress, discuss issues they’ve encountered and meet…

  • a question about cultural globalisation

    How did ‘love locks’ spread from the great cities of Europe to a grim motorway junction in suburban north Manchester? There’s about 10-20 on here at present. I’m going to keep checking back to see if they spread.  They can also be found in Manchester city centre:  

  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! december 1st at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the discussion.…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #16

    Social Class in the 21st Century by Mike Savage et al How to Thrive in the Digital Age by Tom Chatfield Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate by Abdel Bari Atwan Untangling the Web by Aleks Krotoski Jony Ive by Leander Kahney The Modi Effect by Lance Price

  • the grateful serfs of the sharing economy

    One of the most interesting developments in the so-called sharing economy is the growing tendency for the largest of these companies to try and mobilise their users as lobbying and protest groups at the municipal level But when Airbnb’s executives look out at the world, they don’t see a fragmented puzzle of local politics and…

  • social psychological approaches to understanding why people are blasé about data security

    I’m reading Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, as an accessible precursor to beginning to engage with the social psychological literature on online behaviour. It’s proving to be an enjoyable read so far, though maybe not quite as much of a pop social psychology book as I had hoped it would be. It’s more of a collection…

  • voluntarily disclosed personal information online and susceptibility to manipulation 

    From Untangling the Web, by Aleks Krotoski, pg 127-128: As I wrote earlier in this book, if you stick “Aleks Krotoski” into an online search engine, you’ll be able to learn a lot about me. Along with basic biographical details such as where I was born and who my parents are, you can find out…

  • the liquid warfare of ISIS

    From Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, by Abdel Bari Atwan, pg 137: Islamic State battalions and units are extremely adaptable to changing situations and new developments on the ground, and field commanders are given total autonomy in implementing the operations they are charged with. This flexibility, and confident delegation, makes IS’s war effort extremely effective…

  • cfp: the dehumanisation of contemporary societies

    International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) 19th Annual Conference Wednesday 20 – Friday 22 July 2016 Pre-conference workshop: Monday 18 – Tuesday 19 July 2016 Postgraduate Teaching Centre, Cardiff Business School Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU De/humanisation The dehumanisation of contemporary societies In many ways, our current epoch witnesses dehumanised social relations. While alienation (Marx)…

  • reflections on six years spent studying asexuality 

    Notes for a talk tomorrow It’s now been quite some time since I undertook my research on asexuality. It was initially motivated by sheer curiosity, as I guess research should be under ideal conditions: I’d met a couple of asexual people socially around the time I was completing a masters degree project on sexual identity.…

  • Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance

    Via Tom Dark: Protests in the Information Age: Social Movements, Digital Practices and Surveillance  Lucas Melgaço (CRiS-VUB) and Jeffrey Monaghan (University of Ottawa) launch the following call for chapters for their book on protests in the information age.  Editors: Lucas Melgaço (Dept. of Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) & Jeffrey Monaghan (Dept. of Criminology, University of…

  • the 2016 international association of critical realism conference 

    The International Conference for Critical Realism will be held in Cardiff on 20-22 July 2016. It will be preceded by an optional pre-conference workshop on 18-19 July.This year’s theme is de/humanisation. We welcome contributions from all areas of the humanities and the social sciences. A number of grants will be available for PhD students. Registration…

  • Crowd Dynamics: Exploring Conflicts and Contradictions in Crowdsourcing 

    Call for papers: Deadline December 21, 2015. Crowd Dynamics: Exploring Conflicts and Contradictions in Crowdsourcing A one-day workshop at CHI 2016, 7 or 8 May 2016, San Jose, CA, USA In this workshop we explore the reasons, processes, power relations, and dynamics of conflicts within crowdsourcing. We invites participants to contribute with insights from different types…

  • why are we not boycotting academia.edu?

    Via Nick Mahoney. How good does this event look? Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu? Coventry University Tuesday 8th December 2015 3:00-6:00pm Ellen Terry Building room ET130  With: Janneke Adema – Chair (Coventry University, UK) Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France) Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US) Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK) David Parry (Saint Joseph’s University, US) …

  • “world of warcraft is the new golf”

    From Untangling The Web, by Aleks Krotoski, pg 53-54: Joi Ito is the head of the Media Lab, a powerful thinktank based at MIT, one of the most respected academic institutions in the US. The Media Lab has been one of the most influential research laboratories for developing cutting edge technology. It’s also been in…

  • what terms would you like to see included in a glossary of social ontology?

    Along with Adam Wood from MMU, I’m planning a glossary of social ontology. What terms would it be useful to see included within it? The idea would be to collect and introduce different uses of terminology, rather than to pronounce on their singular correct use. These are the obvious ideas I’ve had so far: Structure…

  • social media and constraints upon personal morphogensis 

    I’ve been thinking a lot about themes from my PhD recently and how to introduce them into my current work. My overarching focus was on personal morphogenesis: how people change and how we understand this process sociologically. I’m particularly interested in cases where people seek to change, though having such a goal implies neither the…

  • I’m talking about asexuality at this book launch on Friday 

    I’m looking forward to this event on Friday. It’s been ages since I’ve talked about a/sexuality! Sexuality and Gender Conference & Official Launch of the Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender The Open University Camden, 1-11 Hawley Crescent, Camden Town, London NW1 8NP Map here Friday November 27th 2015 9.30am until 7pm…

  • what ‘freedom’ will mean in a gamified world

    From Addiction By Design pg 83-84 Seeking to engender this same compelling sense of efficacy, secondary “bonus games” on video slots invite gamblers to perform actions over which they seem to have control (but do not). Anchor Gaming’s 2000 game Strike It Rich, for instance, presented players with a bonus game in which the object…

  • digital dilemmas: transforming gender identities and power relations in everyday life

    Digital Dilemmas: Transforming Gender Identities and Power Relations in Everyday Life Colloquium, 5-6th August, 2016, University of Waterloo, Canada Due date for abstract submission 31st January, 2016. The proliferation of digital technologies, virtual spaces, and new forms of engagement raise key questions about the changing nature of gender relations and identities within democratic societies. Over two…

  • social media and social science research ethics

    CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS Social Media & Social Science Research Ethics Location: 33 Finsbury Square, London. EC2A 1AG Date: Monday 21st of March, 2016 The Research Ethics Group of the Academy of Social Sciences and the NSMNSS network invite abstracts and poster/video submissions for a one-day conference that aims to further develop and…

  • the right-wing plot to overthrow FDR and install a dictator in the US (and more on the potential for fascism in the united states)

    Saving this for my own reference. I’ve read lots about this case but I’ve never come across a documentary before: A few other videos on similar themes which look good:

  • techno-fascism and six factors which could bring it about

    An interesting article on Truthout which has some degree of cross over with the ideas I’m developing at the moment. I agree with quite a lot of this in its own terms but see it as a tendency, susceptible to being resisted, emerging against a background which makes that resistance decreasingly likely (depoliticisation and the fragility…

  • social media in the accelerated academy: march 2nd @CIMethods

  • got an idea for a monograph? submit to @thesocreview monograph call

    The international refereed journal The Sociological Review is home to the Sociological Review Monograph Series. This series publishes edited collections of outstanding and original scholarly articles on issues of wide sociological interest and is dedicated to promoting emerging as well as established academics. For more information, see www.sociologicalreviewmonographs.com CALL FOR PROPOSALS: We are currently seeking proposals for two…

  • places available: the challenge of sociological writing

    In this event organised by The Sociological Review’s Early Career Forum, a panel of accomplished writers with a long history of supporting younger scholars reflect on the challenges of sociological writing. Each participant will give a short talk, discussing a particular aspect of the challenge of writing, before the panel opens up for a general discussion with the…

  • call for blog posts: #digitalsociology and the future of the discipline

    In recent years Digital Sociology has emerged as an increasingly prominent trend within the discipline at an international level. But it remains unclear precisely what this tendency represents, provoking enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure. In this special section for The Sociological Review’s website, we invite short blog posts (1500 words or less) addressing digital sociology and the questions it…

  • follow @accelerateduni for accelerated academy updates

    We’re planning to keep the project going after the initial conference in a couple of weeks. Stay in touch for updates: @accelerateduni

  • international journal of social research methodology: ask the editors @ijsrm! december 1st at 11am

    In my capacity as social media associate editor of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, I’m arranging an ask the editors session on Twitter. It will take place on Tuesday 1st December, 11.00—12.00. We’ll definitely have Ros Edwards and Christina Hughes. We’ll possibly have Malcolm Williams participating as well. We’ll use the hashtag #IJSRM for the discussion.…

  • CfP: Data Literacy Special Issue

    Special issue – Community Informatics and Data Literacy Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net) Call for Submission v2 – Important: deadline extended to the 18th of December 2015 A special issue of the international Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net) will be devoted to Data Literacy. Community Informatics (CI) is the study and the practice of enabling…

  • Visiting Scholar Program – Ryerson University Social Media Lab

    This looks good. I’ll be tempted to apply for the scheme next year if it runs on the same basis. The lab is run by one of the Big Data & Society editors: The Social Media Lab, part of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada) invites academic researchers at any…

  • call for proposals: @thesocreview seminar competition

    The Board of The Sociological Review are pleased to announce that the journal is sponsoring a single-themed Research Seminar Series (which may consist of three or more research seminars) as well as three One Day Symposia events.  The Board hopes to make this funding available on an annual basis. Guidelines for Applicants The proposed Research Seminar Series…

  • the slippery slope towards techno-fascism

    There’s a great section in this paper by Frank Pasquale, The Algorithmic Self, which relates to my developing and deliberately provocative account of techno-fascism: Stray too far from the binary of Democratic and Republican politics, and you risk being put on a watchlist. Protest shopping on Black Friday, and some facial recognition database may forever…

  • southpark on the vertigo of the filter bubble

  • digital wildfire: project showcase on jan 12th

      

  • call for papers: the rapid spread of provocative content on social media

    Collaborative Work and Social Media:  Responding to the rapid spread of provocative content Special Issue call for the Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work  Deadline for submissions March 7th 2016                                            The rapid spread of…

  • cyber war between non-state actors 

    From Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate, pg 16: To date, the most effective cyber- retaliation on Islamic State for the murderous January 2015 Paris attacks (on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket) has come from an unlikely source – the veteran anarchist hacking collective Anonymous. Anonymous declared war on IS in January 2015…

  • CfP: Political Agency in the Digital Age: Media, Participation and Democracy

    An interesting call for papers emerging from an excellent conference I was at last month: CfP Special Issue of Media and Communication (Guest Editors: Anne Kaun, Julie Uldam, Maria Kyriakidou) Political Agency in the Digital Age: Media, Participation and Democracy Based on the successful conference Political Agency in the Digital Age (9-10 October 2015), we…

  • the future of transparency in the civil service?

    From The Modi Effect, by Lance Price, pg 246: To the horror of some officials, Modi even went so far as to introduce biometric clocking- in devices and a new online portal, attendance.gov.in, through which anybody could check on the timekeeping of civil servants. Some of the abuses exposed by the new regimen were astounding.…

  • CfP: Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens

    Demystifying Blockchain Through an STS Lens: Challenges and Opportunitiesof a New Infrastructure for the Commons.* “The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?” William Morris (1834-1896) In News from Nowhere (Morris 1890/2008), the narrator, William Guest, finds himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of…

  • digital micro-politics and digital macro-politics 

    In a number of books, Nikos Mouzelis offers a really important critique of the tendency to equate ‘micro’ with face-to-face and ‘macro’ with impersonal and international. He cites an international summit, Yalta if I remember correctly, as an example of a face-to-face encounter that is very much macro. I was thinking about this when reading…

  • peter thiel on the first silicon valley gold rush

    From Zero to One, by Peter Thiel, loc 155-171: Dot- com mania was intense but short— 18 months of insanity from September 1998 to March 2000. It was a Silicon Valley gold rush: there was money everywhere, and no shortage of exuberant, often sketchy people to chase it. Every week, dozens of new startups competed…

  • the ascendancy of the quants 

    From Other People’s Money, by John Kay, loc 310: Larry Summers (of ketchup economics) described the transformation in this way: ‘In the last 30 years the field of investment banking had been transformed from a field that was dominated by people who were good at meeting clients at the nineteenth hole, to people who were…

  • it (literally) pays to visit an open day 

    On a cold Sunday morning watching Frasier in bed in my hotel room, I was slightly amazed to see an advert for Staffordshire university on channel 4. What makes it even more surprising is that they’re offering £1000 to people who enroll with them who registered it as their first choice. The advert proclaims that…

  • the politics of stupidity

    From the new Centre for Philosophy of Technology at Birmingham:

  • the next front in the war on ad blocking 

    If a critical mass of the dominant free providers were to do this, would it deter consumers from using ad blocking or merely piss them off and lead them to go elsewhere? From Boing Boing:  The company says it’s not policy to do this — yet — but they’re testing locking Yahoo Mail users out…

  • the old world of banking 

    From Other People’s Money, by John Kay, loc 244: I was a schoolboy in Edinburgh in the 1960s. The capital of Scotland is Britain’s second financial centre and was the headquarters of two major banks, the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Banking was then a career for boys whose grades were…

  • the digital repression that a trump presidency would bring 

    A rather disturbing response to the Paris attacks, building upon his previous advocacy of a mass expulsion program that would necessitate an unprecedented militarisation of US society for logistical reasons, let alone ideological ones: Donald Trump would not rule out tracking Muslim Americans in a database or giving them “a special form of identification that…

  • digital capitalism and the search for work

    A really interesting Pew study on what seems likely to become a growing source of digital inequality. The Internet is becoming more important than ever to much job searching: A majority of U.S. adults (54%) have gone online to look for job information, 45% have applied for a job online, and job-seeking Americans are just…

  • Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science

    I really wish I could go to this: CALL FOR PAPERS/PARTICIPATION: One-day Workshop on *Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science* in conjunction with CSCW 2016 http://cscw.acm.org/2016/ Sunday, February 28th, 2016 San Francisco, CA, USA Workshop Website: https://cscw2016hcds.wordpress.com/ ———————————- Important dates: – 11th December 2015: Submission of Position Papers – 18th January 2016: Notification…

  • CFP: Transhumanist Education, Politics, and Design

    Call for Papers Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics Special issue on “Transhumanist Education, Politics, and Design” For this special issue on ‘Transhumanist Education, Politics, and Design’, we welcome contributions from scholars with various disciplinary backgrounds to debate transhumanistic issues in relation to education, politics, and design. In the soon to come future, technological…

  • BSA Sociology and Feminism Event

    BSA Sociology and Feminism Event Wednesday 16 December 2015 4pm – 6pm Kings Place, 90 York Way London, N1 9AG (near Kings Cross) Gender Struggles? Feminism? Sociology? This event provides a brief introduction and update on how analysing gender inequality in sociology contributes to challenging everyday sexism and gender troubles. It also provides an opportunity for you to raise your own experience and…

  • the origins of apple as a luxury goods company 

    From Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney, pg 104: Jobs aimed at making innovative products again, but he didn’t want to compete in the broader market for personal computers, which was dominated by companies making generic machines for Microsoft’s Windows operating system. These companies competed on price, not features or ease of use. Jobs figured theirs…

  • organisational minimalism

    From Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney, pg 101-102: Much was about to change in how Apple was run, beginning with the product lineup. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had forty products on the market. To appreciate the baffling nature of Apple’s kitchen- sink strategy at the time, consider the company’s computer…

  • cognitive triage and the acceleration of design

    From Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney, pg 72: The production schedules also got shorter and shorter. When Brunner first started at Apple, the product development cycle was eighteen months or more. ‘It was crazy generous,’ Brunner said. ‘You had an amazing amount of time to make something work.’ Within a couple of years, however, the…

  • deadline tomorrow to register for the accelerated academy!

    Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague (Vila Lanna) Organised by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and supported by the Strategy AV21. Register here There is little doubt that science and knowledge production are presently undergoing dramatic and multi-layered transformations accompanied by new imperatives reflecting broader socio-economic and…

  • giddens on digital tech

    As digital sociology, it’s not exactly great. But interesting to listen to for those interested in the work and careers of Giddens:

  • from risk to resilience: responsible citizens for uncertain times

  • call for proposals: @thesocreview monograph series

    The international refereed journal The Sociological Review is home to the Sociological Review Monograph Series. This series publishes edited collections of outstanding and original scholarly articles on issues of wide sociological interest and is dedicated to promoting emerging as well as established academics. For more information, see www.sociologicalreviewmonographs.com CALL FOR PROPOSALS: We are currently seeking proposals for two…

  • funding call: @thesocreview seminar competition 2016/2017

    The Board of The Sociological Review are pleased to announce that the journal is sponsoring a single-themed Research Seminar Series (which may consist of three or more research seminars) as well as three One Day Symposia events.  The Board hopes to make this funding available on an annual basis. Guidelines for Applicants The proposed Research Seminar Series…

  • mike savage on ‘making sense of big data’

    This is an excellent lecture by Mike Savage. It’s particularly interesting to hear him reflect on the ‘coming crisis’ paper almost 10 years on. Would anyone now deny that he and Roger Burrows were correct?

  • large environmental protest in paris banned

    From the Guardian. A foretaste of more to come? The French government has cancelled marches planned for international climate talks in Paris at the end of the month, citing security concerns. All demonstrations organised in closed spaces or in places where security can easily be ensured could go ahead, foreign minister Laurent Fabius said in the statement.…

  • rough sleeper

  • tech giants and the possibility of craft

    There’s an interesting discussion of craft in the book about Apple’s lead designer Jony Ive I’m currently reading. It describes his early consultancy career and his deep discomfort with the self-marketing necessary to thrive in this environment, as well as the design compromises that are often required when the whims of a client are paramount.…

  • Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices

    Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices  http://warwick.ac.uk/streamsofconsciousness  21st and 22nd of April 2016 Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies University of Warwick “What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook status update now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive…

  • imagining the apple ecosystem 

    I found this description of work undertaken in the apple design lab, long before the design of the iPhone, extremely interesting. From Jony Ive, by Leander Kahney, pg 54-56: The idea was to explore a suite of mobile products even further off in the future. Brunner and his team felt confident that the new PowerBook…

  • the joys of being-in-the-zone

    I’ve written in the past about the pleasures of acceleration, how speeding up can prove satisfying because of the opportunities it can present for evading difficult issues that an actor might otherwise find themselves forced to confront. There’s a really interesting section in Addiction By Design pg 54 which speaks to this idea: Speed is…

  • the politics of denying causal power to objects 

    From Addiction By Design, by Natasha Dow Schüll, pg 19: In a strategic response to growing suggestions that gambling machines are to some extent implicated in gambling addiction, the American Gaming Association released a 2010 white paper called “Demystifying Slot Machines.” Echoing the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) famous slogan— “Guns Don’t Kill People, People Kill People”—…

  • a relational theory of addiction 

    From Addiction By Design, by Natasha Dow Schüll, pg 16. I must read Shaffer, as I’ve tried in the past to argue precisely this, using the cumbersome critical realist terminology of ‘two sets of properties and powers’: “The potential for addiction,” writes Howard Shaffer, a prominent academic researcher in the field of gambling addiction, “emerges…

  • manufacturing certainties in response to systemic uncertainties 

    From Addiction By Design, by Natasha Dow Schüll, pg 12: A zone in which time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process may seem an unpromising object for cultural analysis. Yet such a zone, I argue, can offer a window onto the kinds of contingencies and anxieties that…

  • the one where erving goffman works as a pit boss in vegas

    A fascinating little snippet from Addiction By Design, by Natasha Dow Schüll, pg 10: This tension is at the heart of the cultural diagnosis made by the American sociologist Erving Goffman in 1967 based on his ethnographic study of gambling in Las Vegas, where he worked as a blackjack dealer and was eventually promoted to…

  • the sociology of ‘blotting out’ experience 

    One of the most interesting aspects of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity is her interest in how people sometimes seek to ‘blot out’ their experience. Her overarching concern is with the variability of reflexivity, something which I think is hugely important against an intellectual background in which most   thinkers impute a uniform deliberative capacity…

  • price of my asexuality book has dropped to £25

    I was really pleased to discover that the price of the asexuality book I edited with Todd Morrison and Kristina Gupta has dropped to £25 for the Kindle edition. There’s a link here to Amazon. I’m delighted it’s finally affordable and it’s also great to see more reasonably priced Kindle editions of academic books. On the…

  • david willetts rehearsing his speech for an important meeting with google

  • karl marx’s end of year departmental assessment

    I last saw this a couple of years ago but it really struck a nerve given decisions I’ve made over the past year. I want to do everything in my power to avoid being subject to these ridiculous systems:

  • four days left to register for the accelerated academy! deadline nov 20th

    Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague (Vila Lanna) Organised by the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and supported by the Strategy AV21. Register here There is little doubt that science and knowledge production are presently undergoing dramatic and multi-layered transformations accompanied by new imperatives reflecting broader socio-economic and…

  • a sociological podcast about culture

    I’ve just finished the first instalment of what I hope will be a semi-regular podcast about culture for The Sociological Review. For the first one, I spoke to the fabulous Bird la Bird about queer history, invisibility and playing in the archive. I’ll be tweeting from her V&A event this Sunday on the @thesocreview account. See here for…

  • “we know you’re a cheat and you should kill yourself” 2.0

    This great lecture by Frank Pasquale (podcast) references this note, the text of which is the title to this post, sent to Martin Luther King by the FBI. As Pasquale notes, King was under constant surveillance that both facilitated and motivated this horrendous intervention. Can we imagine a data-driven generalisation of this condition and the…

  • it goes boom boom boom

    God, is it on? Is it beyond basic? Does it ice-grill you? Or is every song faceless? Does it have a title? If it didn’t would you name it? Does it babble about nothing like a drunk atheist?

  • the stupidity of auto-correction in the new OS X

    No, Apple, when I’m writing “Filip Vostal” I don’t mean “Flip Postal”. The fact your operating system automatically changes the former to the latter is remarkably stupid. The excellent Rex Troumbley calls this coercive ergonomics and it’s one of those concepts that you see examples of everywhere once you’re acquainted with it.

  • an accelerated academy reading list

    A work in progress. Feel free to make suggestions! The SLOW University – Work, Time and Well-Being by Maggie O’Neill Should academics adopt an ethic of slowness or ninja-like productivity? In search of scholarly time by Filip Vostal Life in the Accelerated Academy by Mark Carrigan Surviving Life in the Accelerated Academy: Problems and Prospects for…

  • academia is killing my friends

    After spending the week thinking about how Filip Vostal and I could incorporate a function to allow people to post anonymous first person essays on the Accelerated Academy website, I just noticed that the depressing and important site Academia is Killing My Friends has started posting new content again. I’d encourage anyone interested in the…

  • the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some…

  • things I’ve been reading recently #15

    Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance InfoGlut by Mark Andrejevic Gates by Stephen Mane and Paul Andrews The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz

  • expedia and communicative escalation 

    Expedia just emailed me for the sixth time this week, with the majority of the emails containing attention grabbing emojis in the subject lines, in a way I had never seen before:  I’m not sure what happened this week. Does Expedia have a new marketing strategy? Have I been algorithmically marked as a customer they’re…