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  • An introduction to Design Fiction for Sociologists, May 13th at Goldsmiths

    Design fiction is a term first coined by Julian Bleecker and popularized by SF author Bruce Sterling, who describes it as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” and that it “attacks the status quo and suggests clear ways in which life might become different.” Design fiction isn’t science fiction, it’s…

  • Help: need to escape from intractably useless web host

    For the last few years, I’ve been renting a virtual server from 5 Quid Hosts. I use this to host two sites with moderate traffic (Discover Society and Sociological Imagination) as well as a series of much smaller sites with negligible traffic. The performance started to diminish around a year ago and it’s been getting…

  • Overcoming your modernist training for constant improvement, advancement, development and accumulation

    Overcoming your modernist training for constant improvement, advancement, development and accumulation. That’s what the social psychologist Kenneth Gergen advocates in the new introduction to his famous work The Saturated Self, as quoted by Harmut Rosa in Social Acceleration: I am also struggling against my modernist training for constant improvement, development, and accumulation. Slowly I am…

  • Brian Fallon covering Oasis

    Unfortunately it’s not Brian Fallon singing Wonderwall (something which would complete my life). But it’s still pretty good: The one thing I’d like to see more than a cover of Wonderwall would be a cover of Masterplan. I think it would be one of those rare covers that could be better than the original, at…

  • The Emperor’s New Clothes

    Because we’re leaving them to their own devices The poorest are making all of the sacrifices – The cost of living crisis, house prices, the cost of a deposit, I don’t give a shit But yes of course we should address it So we will blame the deficit on people claiming benefits And as we…

  • Creativity as Apophatic

    For the last couple of days, I was in Edinburgh taking part in Time Without Time. It was a great event and I’ll probably blog more about it next week. The second day was very different from the usual academic events I go to. This picture probably conveys how this is so: The experience left…

  • What will micro-publishing look like in higher education?

    A few weeks ago I was browsing a photography bookshop in London and came across the term ‘micro-publisher’ for the first time. The friend I was with seemed slightly bemused that I hadn’t encountered the term and explained that it just meant small publishers with tiny print runs. Here’s how Wikipedia defines micro-publishing: The book…

  • Stewart Lee on Twitter

    Thanks to Neil McGuire for including this in his workshop introduction yesterday. It’s excellent:

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #5

    Shutting Out The Sun is a journalistic exploration of Japan’s ‘lost generation’ that gives much social scientific work a run for its money in terms of breadth and insight. I read it because of a long-standing interest in the hikikomori: Japanese youth who isolate themselves, often refusing to leave the bedrooms in their parental homes…

  • The Social Ontology of Digital Data & Digital Technology, July 8th in London

    This innovative conference brings together leading figures from a variety of fields which address issues of digital technology and digital data. We’ve invited speakers with a range of intellectual perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds who engage with questions relating to digital data and digital technology in their work. Our suggestion is that social ontology, however this…

  • Call for Participation: Digital Methods Summer School 2015

    This looks great: Call for Participation: Digital Methods Summer School 2015 Post-Snowden Media Empiricism and Secondary Social Media: Data Studies Beyond Facebook and Twitter University of Amsterdam 29 June – 10 July 2015 Deadline for applications: 23 April 2015 https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSchool2015 This year’s Digital Methods Summer School is devoted to what we call ‘post-Snowden media empiricism’…

  • Call for papers: Doing Justice to Figures

    This looks interesting: Final reminder for ESRC and LSE Gender Institute graduate research symposium Call for Papers – deadline: Monday, 30 March. Keynote speaker: Dr. Imogen Tyler (Co-Director: Centre for Gender & Women’s Studies, Lancaster) Doing Justice to Figures and Figuration A One Day Graduate Research Symposium Friday June 19th, 2015 London School of Economics Doing Justice to…

  • Life in the Accelerated Academy, part 3

    In the previous two posts I’ve painted a rather bleak picture of the accelerated academy as a toxic environment in which an out of control metrics regime incites cognitive triage as a necessity to cope with the ratcheting up of situational demands. As things get faster, the possibility for withdrawl decreases: there’s always something else…

  • Life in the Accelerated Academy, part 2

    The idea that a part 2 to yesterday’s post would be less rushed seems rather naive in retrospect. Feeling rushed in the morning is different to feeling rushed in the evening but it is nonetheless feeling rushed. Much of my motivation for the Accelerated Academy project comes from a desire to understand this aspect of…

  • The Social Ontology of L.S. Lowry

    Series (source) Gathering (source) Aggregate (source) Audience (source) Crowd (source) Group: (source)

  • Life in the Accelerated Academy, part 1

    When questioned by a friend in 1980 as to whether he was happy at Princeton, the philosopher Richard Rorty replied that he was “delighted that I lucked into a university which pays me to make up stories and tell them”. He went on to suggest that “Universities permit one to read books and report what…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#13)

  • A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersection of Culture, Brain, & Behavior

    If I had any more conference funding left then I’d be going to this. The early bird post-doc rate is admirably cheap: A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersection of Culture, Brain, & Behavior October 23-24, 2015  – Early Registration is Now Open UCLA, Los Angeles, California WEBSITES http://www.thefpr.org/conference2015/ http://www.thefprconference2015.org Confirmed Keynote Speaker is Dr. Anne…

  • If this works reliably then I want one now

  • Why I can’t take Osborne or Cameron seriously when they promise to ‘wage war’ on tax evasion & avoidance

    From John Urry’s Offshoring, location 1109: Cameron’s father, Ian Cameron, indeed made his fortune through tax avoidance. He took advantage in the 1980s of the new climate of less-regulated investment after Margaret Thatcher abolished exchange controls in Britain in 1979. This enabled money to be moved in and out of the country without it being…

  • From the quantified self to the quantified dog

  • A case study in the contrivances of marketing: The @NPowerHQ Price Promise

    Watching channel 4 this evening, I encountered the NPower Price Promise which communicates their guarantee to always let consumers know the cheapest tariff available to them: Except this ‘Npower Price Promise’ isn’t a deliberate policy to ‘stand up for customers’. It’s a requirement by the regulator that came into force on 26 August 2013: Give…

  • Heating up the floor to see who can keep hopping the longest

    This expression by Will Davies has stuck with me since I read it a few months ago. Teaching is a disturbing example of the process Will is alluding to: ratcheting up demands on staff to the point where many are unwilling to continue. In fact increasing numbers seem unable to continue: The BBC has also…

  • Call for papers: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life (deadline May 1st! All 5 keynotes now confirmed)

    Call for papers: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life 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 technological developments. The unprecedented proliferation of audit cultures preoccupied with digitally mediated measurement and quantification of scholarship and the consolidation of…

  • Call for papers: Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference

    Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference June 23rd, University of Warwick, 10am – 4pm Social ontology is integral to the study of society. It is impossible to inquire into the social world without some understanding, at least tacitly, concerning the entities which make up that world and their properties and powers. However social ontology remains…

  • An introduction to Design Fiction for Sociologists, May 13th at Goldsmiths

    Design fiction is a term first coined by Julian Bleecker and popularized by SF author Bruce Sterling, who describes it as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” and that it “attacks the status quo and suggests clear ways in which life might become different.” Design fiction isn’t science fiction, it’s…

  • Who is this describing?

    From this article (don’t read it yet though!): “barely capable of distinguishing themselves from the consuming desire to work at all times” “neurotic people who deploy a series of practices that coincide quite neatly with the requirements of the neoliberal, predatory, continually mutating capitalism of the every moment” “people who behave, communicate, and innovate in…

  • Towards a Sociology of the Good Life

    What is the good life? It’s a question which preoccupied me in my past life as a trainee political philosopher and it’s one which still concerns me as a sociologist. It’s rarely addressed within the discipline for reasons that cut through a number of trends within the field: a hostility towards normativity, an admission of…

  • You must change your life!

    I was introduced to this Rilke poem via a book by Peter Sloterdijk: We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast…

  • Call for papers: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life

    Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life, 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague Call for papers: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life 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 technological developments. The unprecedented proliferation of audit cultures preoccupied with…

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #4

    Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a glorious work of journalism which manages to please me in equal parts as sociologist and comics geek. It manages to combine a gossipy attentiveness to the endless internal spats at Marvel with a high minded yet understated concern to explore the intersection between art and commerce. Howe skilfully…

  • Five important works of realist social theory being published in 2015

     To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order (Social Morphogenesis) The Relational Subject Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach A realist philosophy of social science

  • Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference

    Centre for Social Ontology PhD/ECR Conference June 23rd, University of Warwick, 10am – 4pm Social ontology is integral to the study of society. It is impossible to inquire into the social world without some understanding, at least tacitly, concerning the entities which make up that world and their properties and powers. However social ontology remains…

  • Richard Hall – Against Educational Technology in the Neoliberal University

    This looks good: Richard Hall – Against Educational Technology in the Neoliberal University CAMRI Seminar Wed, March 25, 14:00 Univ of Westminster Harrow Campus Room A7.01 Registration: email to christian.fuchs@uti.at http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/richard-hall-against-educational-technology-in-the-neoliberal-university In the Grundrisse, Marx argued that the circulation of productive capital was “a process of transformation, a qualitative process of value”. As capitalists sought…

  • This is how it works

    This is how it works You’re young until you’re not You love until you don’t You try until you can’t You laugh until you cry You cry until you laugh And everyone must breathe Until their dying breath No, this is how it works You peer inside yourself You take the things you like And…

  • Using fiction to write about your research

    I was fortunate to meet Tim Maughan at the Digital Sociology conference in New York last month. Along with Sava Saheli Singh, he’s been exploring how design fiction can be used to communicate sociological ideas. This is how Sava and Tim describe design fiction: Design fiction is a term first coined by Julian Bleecker and…

  • Using social media to improve the student experience: creating a departmental back channel for undergraduates

    A few years ago when I was running the Twitter feed for the Sociology department at Warwick, I noticed how readily first year undergraduates tweeted practical questions to the account during their first few weeks of the first term. Students tweeted questions intermittently throughout the year but it was particularly marked at the start of…

  • An unusual e-mail

    Hello, Receive Calvary greetings from Miss Ashley Gaskin from Missionary Church of Montana. We have learned much more about the work you do through online and we are so much interested with the good work that you are carrying on and we therefore wish to donate some small funding for your project to goes to…

  • Opening up @soc_imagination as a platform for public engagement

    In my talk at the Digital Sociology conference in New York in February 2015 (available online here) I explained my enthusiasm for the new possibilities afforded by social media for doing research in real time with communities. These are the two examples I’m familiar with but I’d like to know about any others that exist.…

  • 16 interesting ways to communicate knowledge

    A note to self as much as a post for other people: Through 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…

  • Cruel optimism in #highered

    This powerful essay by Maria Warner in the LRB echoes what I was trying to say yesterday about the perils of passion: A university is a place where ideas are meant to be freely explored, where independence of thought and the Western ideals of democratic liberty are enshrined. Yet at the same time as we congratulate…

  • From passion to profit: exploitation under neoliberalism, or, how seriously should we take latte art?

    Since I first encountered the notion of a calling, I’ve found it a difficult category to expunge from my thought. It appeals to me greatly on a personal level: it points to the higher dimension to human experience which I believe tends to be ‘flattened out’ in the culture of liberal democracies. It helps us attend to…

  • Are academics very well-educated journalists who write badly but will work for free?

    A few years ago I wrote a short article about the relationship between academic blogging and journalism which received a pretty positive reaction online. My suggestion was that academic blogging increasingly constitutes a ‘third space’ between the academy and journalism which facilitates translation between the two institutional spheres. It becomes easier for journalists to find…

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #3

    Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism is a masterful contribution to the acceleration literature. In fact Judy Wajcman’s new book rivals Harmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration as the best thing I’ve read on the topic. It’s an accessible overview of a multifaceted literature which uses a well thought-out layout to walk the reader…

  • Routines and Reflexivity – TOMORROW @SocioWarwick

    Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th 17.00-18.30, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a…

  • The businessman and the fisherman

    From Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life, though it’s also included in the introduction to the English language version of Harmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a…

  • Routines and Reflexivity – March 10th @SocioWarwick

    Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th 17.00-18.30, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing #12

  • This looks great: ‘Weber/Simmel antagonisms’ conference

    Not great enough to travel 6 hours and pay £75 for but pretty great nonetheless: Weber/ Simmel antagonisms Staged dialogues University of Edinburgh 10/11 December 2015 A conference organized by the Max Weber Group of the British Sociological Association  & Sociology Edinburgh Call for outlines Much has been said about the strong oppositions between Simmel…

  • CfP: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life, 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague

    Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life, 2nd-4th December 2015, Prague Call for papers: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life 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 technological developments. The unprecedented proliferation of audit cultures preoccupied with…

  • Routines and Reflexivity – March 10th @SocioWarwick

    Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th 17.00-18.30, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a…

  • Academia and Identity – When Research meets Activism

    FINAL CALL FOR REGISTRATION – Workshop “Academia and Identity – When Research meets Activism”   Please note that attendance of the workshop is free, but registration is required in order to provide catering. Please register your attendance by sending an e-mail toValerie.Decraene@ees.kuleuven.be or marion.wasserbauer@uantwerpen.be before Friday 6th of March.     We cordially invite to the workshop “Academia and Identity…

  • Call for an Internet Social Forum

    Call for an Internet Social Forum The Internet belongs to all people – Let’s occupy it More and more, the Internet is the place where we meet up with our friends, get information, organise work, store our pictures and texts, do our banking, see videos, buy tickets and get public services. As we use the…

  • Inner resources:  the roles of reflexivity, self-awareness and emotional responses in the work of the academic researcher.

    CONFERENCE AT BIRKBECK COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   Inner resources:  the roles of reflexivity, self-awareness and emotional responses in the work of the academic researcher.   Friday, April 17th, 2015   Conference: 9.30am-5.00pm.  Film Screening: 6.00pm-8.00pm   The Keynes Library, Birkbeck, University of London, 43, Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD.     Can feeling useless open up possibilities?  …

  • Routines and Reflexivity – March 10th @SocioWarwick

    Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th 17.00-18.30, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a…

  • Selling psychopathy in late modernity

    A few weeks ago, I was browsing the bookshop in Kings Cross while waiting for the Eurostar and came across this disturbing book: Given I was on my way to a much needed holiday, I didn’t buy the book at the time, intrigued though I was by it. I just went on Amazon to finally purchase…

  • Routines and Reflexivity – March 10th @SocioWarwick

    Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th 17.00-18.30, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a…

  • How to turn a wallet full of cards into a book

    That’s the challenge I’ve set myself for the next three months. The remaining sections of Social Media for Academics exist in embryonic form within this wallet. Each of the cards has an idea or theme written on it, functioning as a prompt for what I’m guessing will be 300-1000 words of writing. As well as pulling together…

  • The sociological imagination of Ava DuVernay

    The latest issue of the BFI’s Sight & Sound has an illuminating interview with Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, in which she describes her sensibility and approach to directing. The film itself resists a tendency towards hagiography, instead focusing upon Martin Luther King as a ‘leader of leaders’, continually seeking to explore the social and cultural…

  • Can relational reflexivity be fractured? (cc @weaver_beth)

    This is a question I’ve been pondering after an interesting discussion last night. Fractured reflexivity is the tendency of a person’s deliberation to intensify distress rather than leading to a course of action. The process of trying to work out what to do generates anxiety rather than helping them come to a conclusion. Exactly how…

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #2

    Following on from this post: I wasn’t enormously impressed by Malign Velocities. I had assumed it was a book about social acceleration but was surprised to find it’s actually about accelerationism. To be fair, it’s quite clear about this in the blurb, it’s just that I failed to read the blurb properly. Its concern was far…

  • Interesting research project worth supporting: Social Media in the First-Year Experience

    This just got posted on the Social Media Discuss list which I allegedly administer: Dear Colleagues, I am conducting research throughout selected Irish and European colleges on Social Media in the First-Year Student Experience, as part of ITT Dublin’s Teaching and Learning Fellowship. As part of this research, I wish to survey staff (lecturers, academic…

  • How to use @Artefact_Cards for academic writing

    I finally received my Artefact Cards last week and I love them. They were a pain to get hold of due to a spectacularly inept delivery company but Artefact soon rectified this when I e-mailed them to complain. They’re probably only likely to appeal to those with a real stationary problem but if you too…

  • An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving in the UK – TOMORROW @SocioWarwick

    Balihar Sanghera (Kent) Tuesday, February 17th 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper examines how charitable giving is an outcome of different interacting elements of lay morality. Charitable giving reflects people’s capacity for fellow-feeling (or sympathy), moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. An eclectic…

  • The Lure of Minimalism

    What is ‘lifestyle minimalism’? To a certain extent it depends upon whom you ask. It’s often talked about as a ‘tool’ to live a simpler and more meaningful life. It’s often framed in terms of reducing ‘stuff’ through sometimes extremely rigid regimes of limiting ownership to a certain number of objects. It’s correspondingly hostile to ‘clutter’…

  • The Pleasures of Speed

  • The Pleasures of Acceleration

    Acceleration is often framed as a problem. Things are speeding up. We never have enough time. We’re always falling behind. These will be familiar experiences to most. While the problem is more complex than may initially appear to be the case, with little quantitative time squeeze actually registering, it nonetheless leaves us with a sense of late modernity…

  • An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving in the UK – Feb 17th @SocioWarwick

    Balihar Sanghera (Kent) Tuesday, February 17th 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper examines how charitable giving is an outcome of different interacting elements of lay morality. Charitable giving reflects people’s capacity for fellow-feeling (or sympathy), moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. An eclectic…

  • Misdirection as technique of governance, or, “it’s student activists attacking freedom of speech, not the state!”

    Earlier today I read a Guardian article on the ‘crisis around debate’ at UK universities. It was a well written article with a valid argument that made some interesting points and to a certain extent some of these concerns had occurred to me in recent years. I’ve long been a proponent of no platform and it’s an…

  • Productivity

    Coffee Meditate for focus What do I want to achieve today? Do, Delete, Discard Inbox zero! (fleetingly) Remind self of priorities Meeting Get ahead on e-mail (how did people cope without iPhones?) Meeting Insufficient steps walked Resolve to do better tomorrow Reflect on day: what did I learn? Scan horizon Meditate for sleep Adjust sleep…

  • “Excuse me, I’m lost…”

    “Excuse me, I’m lost…” “Who are you? Why would you come to me?” Here we are (“up here at night”) (yeah!) I’m tied down in the dark in my mind baby, come on, come on and i know girl i know you want to trust you and going and going the night you feel alive…

  • What constitutes a civilisational collapse?

    What constitutes collapse? This is the important question which Phil BC asks in response to my post on the sociology of civilisational collapse. If I mean the notion as anything other than a fleeting speculative thought* then conceptual clarification is essential. I said in the original post that I understand collapse to be the loss of an…

  • An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving in the UK – Feb 17th @SocioWarwick

    Balihar Sanghera (Kent) Tuesday, February 17th 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper examines how charitable giving is an outcome of different interacting elements of lay morality. Charitable giving reflects people’s capacity for fellow-feeling (or sympathy), moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. An eclectic…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#11)

  • Ghosts of Sociologists Past in the Accelerated Academy

    I’m currently reading Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher. It’s an interesting book which explores a condition in which “life continues, but time has somehow stopped”. His claim is that this “stasis has been buried, interred behind a superficial frenzy of ‘newness’, of perpetual movement” and he explores it…

  • Coping with Acceleration

    I wrote yesterday about cognitive triage in higher education and its ramifications for personal reflexivity. My claim is that an inflation of situational demands leads subjects to prioritise the urgent, moving immediately from one necessity to another, in a way which crowds out the important. While the urgent/important dichotomy is a feature of the ‘productivity culture’ I’m…

  • Higher Education and The Temporal Conditions for Critique

    I’m aware that I probably come across like I hate Slavoj Zizek but there are many aspects of his work which I really like. My favourite is his account of neoliberal ideology which I understand to be an argument about how subjective disavowal goes hand-in-hand with objective complicity: we maintain a critical distance from a system while…

  • David Cameron as neoliberal prophet

    I just heard these prophetic words from David Cameron on the radio: if you’re not good or outstanding, you have to change. If you can’t do it yourself, you have to let experts come in and help you He was talking about schools. But have you ever encountered a purer statement of neoliberal ideology? In practice…

  • CfP: Thinking Beyond Capitalism, Belgrade, June 24-26, 2015

    A very interesting looking conference being organised by someone I know from asexuality studies: International Conference Thinking Beyond Capitalism, Belgrade, June 24-26, 2015 Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory How is it at all possible to make sound statements about contemporary capitalism? How does one adequately diagnose the current state of the economy? Clearly there…

  • The Relational ‘We’ in Personal Morphogenesis – TOMORROW @SocioWarwick

    Beth Weaver (Strathclyde) Tuesday, February 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper discusses my empirical application of a relational realist analytic framework to illuminate the role of social groups or collectives, as social relations, in shaping and affecting outcomes for individuals and for groups. Using the morphogenetic sequence…

  • The Fetishisation of Intelligence Under Neoliberalism

    An interesting exchange on Twitter last year about how intelligence is represented in film and TV has stayed with me since it occurred. Watching Hannibal with a friend who was a big fan of it, I found myself obsessed by the quasi-supernatural form which Will Graham’s intelligence takes in the show, allowing him to see…

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #1

    At the end of 2014 I tried to choose the favourite books I’d read during the year. I discovered two things. Firstly, it was a real struggle to remember what I had actually read. Secondly, I had started and failed to finish far more books than I had completed. So this year I’m planning to do…

  • The Relational ‘We’ in Personal Morphogenesis – February 3rd @SocioWarwick

    Beth Weaver (Strathclyde) Tuesday, February 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper discusses my empirical application of a relational realist analytic framework to illuminate the role of social groups or collectives, as social relations, in shaping and affecting outcomes for individuals and for groups. Using the morphogenetic sequence…

  • An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving in the UK – Feb 17th @SocioWarwick

    Balihar Sanghera (Kent) Tuesday, February 17th 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper examines how charitable giving is an outcome of different interacting elements of lay morality. Charitable giving reflects people’s capacity for fellow-feeling (or sympathy), moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. An eclectic…

  • Productivity culture, cognitive triage and the pseudo-commensurability of the to-do list

    For a couple of years I’ve been striving to empty my e-mail inbox on a daily basis. It doesn’t particularly bother me if I don’t succeed and I often don’t. I go through phases of doing this daily and then, for whatever reason, fall out of the routine. I’ve rarely had to spend more than a…

  • The Relational ‘We’ in Personal Morphogenesis – February 3rd @SocioWarwick

    Beth Weaver (Strathclyde) Tuesday, February 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper discusses my empirical application of a relational realist analytic framework to illuminate the role of social groups or collectives, as social relations, in shaping and affecting outcomes for individuals and for groups. Using the morphogenetic sequence…

  • CfP ‘Emotional Methodologies’ BSA Postgraduate Conference

    An interesting looking event being organised by Joseph De-Lappe and others: Call for Papers BSA Postgraduate Conference: ‘Emotional Methodologies’ 19 May 2015   University of Leicester  The conference ‘Emotional Methodologies’ will explore methods for researching emotionally-charged data and reflections on researchers’ responses to them, focusing on two themes: • The methodological consequences of the affective turn…

  • Is it weird that I want to go one of these fake conferences to see what happens at them?

    I assume these are the conference equivalents of predatory open access publishers. But what actually happens at them? I have an idea for a piece of exploratory travel writing which was initially a joke but I’m now considering trying to pitch to the Chronicle of Higher Education or Times Higher Education: Social Science and Humenities Research…

  • The Ethical Economy, w/ Adam Arvidsson – Middlesex University, 17 February 2015

    Wish I could make this: Research Seminar – The Ethical Economy Collaborative ethics, promotional cultures and digital media Guest Speaker: Prof. Adam Arvidsson (University of Milan) Tuesday 17th February (h. 17 – Middlesex University, Room C107) The event will explore the different aspects around the new ‘collaborative economy’ that is emerging out of the crisis…

  • Happiness Symposium 4th June 2015 Leicester – Call for Papers

    This looks interesting: Call for Papers Is well-being the most appropriate measure of the state of post-crisis societies in the West? Can different tools that assess it provide useful and meaningful information about societal prosperity which can be used by the policy makers? What sociology can add to the discussion about appropriate indicators of human…

  • Prosumption, appropriation and the ontology of economic form – TOMORROW @SocioWarwick

    Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough) Tuesday, January 27, 2015 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Prosumption – the unpaid performance of productive work by ‘consumers’ who thus help commercial businesses to generate a profit – is perhaps the most studied of the many hybrid forms of economic practice that have proliferated in…

  • Centre for Social Ontology Seminars: Spring Term 2015 (@SocioWarwick)

    ​​Centre for Social Ontology Seminars: Spring Term 2015 January 27th: Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough University) R1.15 Prosumption, appropriation and the ontology of economic form February 3rd: Beth Weaver (University of Strathclyde) R1.15 The Relational ‘We’ in Social Morphogenesis February 17th: Balihar Sanghera (University of Kent) R1.04 Lay ethics, distortions and charitable giving March 10th: Alistair Mutch…

  • Prosumption, appropriation and the ontology of economic form – January 27th @SocioWarwick

    Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough) Tuesday, January 27, 2015 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Prosumption – the unpaid performance of productive work by ‘consumers’ who thus help commercial businesses to generate a profit – is perhaps the most studied of the many hybrid forms of economic practice that have proliferated in…

  • Some things about the acceleration of higher education which I would like to understand more than I do

    Increasingly I think about this issue in terms of a distinction between the rate of publication and the rate of knowledge production. My hunch is that the acceleration of the former goes hand-in-hand with a deceleration of the latter. I have all sorts of speculative ideas about the causality if I’m correct but I’d like to actually try and substantiate…

  • Prosumption, appropriation and the ontology of economic form – January 27th @SocioWarwick

    Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough) Tuesday, January 27, 2015 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Prosumption – the unpaid performance of productive work by ‘consumers’ who thus help commercial businesses to generate a profit – is perhaps the most studied of the many hybrid forms of economic practice that have proliferated in…

  • The Relational ‘We’ in Personal Morphogenesis – February 3rd @SocioWarwick

    Beth Weaver (Strathclyde) Tuesday, February 3rd 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper discusses my empirical application of a relational realist analytic framework to illuminate the role of social groups or collectives, as social relations, in shaping and affecting outcomes for individuals and for groups. Using the morphogenetic sequence…

  • 2015 Call for Papers about Asexuality

    2015 Call for Papers about Asexuality Asexuality Studies Interest Group National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) November 12-15, 2015, Milwaukee, Wisconsin The NWSA Asexuality Studies Interest Group welcomes papers for the 2015 NWSA annual conference. These asexuality-related themes are orientated towards the full NWSA 2015 CFP which can be found here: http://www.nwsa.org/Files/2015/NWSA%202015%20CFP_Final.pdf If you are interested…

  • Howard Becker and Margaret Archer share a critique of Bourdieu

    They just express it in a very different way: “Bourdieu’ s big idea was the champs, field, and mine was monde, world—what’s the difference?” Becker asks rhetorically. “Bourdieu’s idea of field is kind of mystical. It’s a metaphor from physics. I always imagined it as a zero-sum game being played in a box. The box is full…

  • Thanks @OvoEnergy, what a lovely surprise: I’ve used a years worth of gas in 3 months & you want your money

    I was surprised to find that Ovo have had me in ‘billing suspension’ for months without telling me. So even though I was diligently giving them monthly meter readings, these weren’t being processed and my direct debit payment (£92 per month) was beginning to build up into a surplus. When querying this, I discover that…