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  • I like the #CatManifesto

    Produced by Cats Protection in advance of the elections. There’s a summary online here and the full manifesto here.

  • The Drama of Intellectual Life: Performativity in the Study of Idea

    This looks great! Hopefully see some people there: The Drama of Intellectual Life: Performativity in the Study of Ideas http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25666 Please register online for this event. Conference fee: £30 (full), £10 (students) – includes lunch, tea/coffee Deadline: Monday 25 May 2015 Convenors Patrick Baert (University of Cambridge) Marcus Morgan (University of Cambridge) Papers by: Jeffrey…

  • CfP: Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism

    Call for Papers (http://www.maneyonline.com/pb/assets/raw/PRT/REA_special_issue_gender.pdf) Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism Special Issue of the Journal of Critical Realism (15:5, 2016) Edited by Angela Martínez Dy, Lena Gunnarsson and Michiel van Ingen Email: lena.gunnarsson@oru.se<mailto:lena.gunnarsson@oru.se> An increasing number of gender scholars have become familiar with critical realism, finding it a robust alternative to the poststructuralist perspectives that currently dominate…

  • President of Imperial College London: “Professors are really like small business owners”

    There was a fascinating interview with Alice Gast, President of Imperial College London, on radio 4 this morning in which she gave what I thought was a remarkable and revealing non-answer to a question about Stefan Grimm: Professors are under pressures. They have a lot on their plates. Professors are really like small business owners.…

  • The Surprisingly Rapid Destruction of the Professions

    It’s hard not to see a common thread in these reports I’ve encountered in recent weeks: A third of GPs in the UK plan to retire in the next five years because of high stress levels, unmanageable workloads and too little time with patients, in a move that would exacerbate the existing difficulty of getting…

  • Loner

  • The Writing Routine of Richard Sennett

    An amazing introductory talk by Craig Calhoun (7 minutes in) who was rather affably writing the talk right up until the moment when he stood up to speak. Leaving aside the revelation about how egregiously boojie he and Sennett clearly are, I found his account of Sennett’s writing practice incredibly engaging.

  • The overarching questions which interest me

    Following on from this post: How is higher education changing? What are the consequences of these changes for scholarship? How are academics responding to these changes & what contribution are these responses making to the changes themselves? How are particular areas of activity being changed in the ‘accelerated academy’? How do social entities (people, groups,…

  • Constructing a sociological career in the accelerated academy

    In the last year or two, I’ve been increasingly aware of the limitations of life planning. My own tendency towards planning is something I’ve come to experience as largely pathological. It leads me to impose an artificial fixity on open situations in a way that has often led me to make really bad decisions in…

  • “The problem with capitalism is that it’s not capitalist enough”: Neoliberalism 2.0?

    See below for comments by the Whole Foods CEO John Mackey in this article that are by now rather familiar. This notion can be formulated in many different ways but at root it seeks to redeem ‘free-market capitalism’ by agreeing with leftist critics and disowning the excesses of the last few decades, denouncing them as…

  • Kitten Mittens

    I’d forgotten how much I love It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

  • CfP: The Politics of Data (Science)

    The Politics of Data (Science) This special issue of Discover Society will explore the political implications of ‘big data’ and the systems of expertise emerging around it, including though not limited to Data Science. In doing so it will aim to bridge the gap between the methodological discourse surrounding data science and the political discourse…

  • A new resource for teaching social theory

    Along with Cheryl Brumley, I’ve been producing ‘virtual dayschools’ for the Centre for Social Ontology. They’re intended to provide accessible introductions to difficult topics by mixing up text, image and video. They’re intended as a preliminary to engaging with what is often difficult literature rather than as a replacement for it. The first draft of…

  • An initial attempt to critique co-evolutionary approaches to understanding the socio-technical

    Much like my previous post, I’m cutting this from my chapter because it’s not good enough and doesn’t really progress my overall argument. I’m still keen to develop the point though so any feedback is much appreciated. It helps us move beyond the increasingly influential notion of techno-genesis, in which human beings and technological artefacts…

  • Reflexivity and the Social Production of Distraction

    I just cut this from my chapter for the upcoming CSO book. I don’t think it’s very good but I’m still trying to develop the underlying point so any thoughts are much appreciated: To talk of ‘interruption events’ not be construed as a narrow issue of decreased performance, such that this putative fracturing of focus…

  • The Rise of the Self-Funded Studentship and What It Says About Academia (and Academics)

    I see the ‘self-funded studentship’ as a sign of everything that is wrong with higher education. Take this example I just encountered. It is for a PhD student to work on a fully developed project. I’ve always understood the funding attached to such an arrangement as a quid pro quo: intellectual autonomy is sacrificed in…

  • Theory Stream Plenary at the BSA Annual Conference

    Where I would definitely be at 5pm on Friday if I was in Glasgow: Title: ‘The Challenge of the Rich: Theorizing the Power and Political Economy of Elites and Elite Wealth’ Speakers: Professor Julie Froud (University of Manchester) and Professor Andrew Sayer (Lancaster University) Date and Time: Friday 17 April, 5-6pm Location: Glasgow Caledonian University,…

  • Transformative Practice and Theory: Where We Stand Today

    Interesting conference in Coventry: Registration now open for the MeCCSA PGN Conference 2015, ‘Transformative Practice and Theory: Where We Stand Today’   Department of Media, Coventry University, 2-3 July 2015   Registration is now open at the early bird price of £30 until 30th April. From 1st May the conference fee will be £40. Please…

  • Podcast: Andrew Sayer on Why Things Matter To People

    A few years ago I did an interview with Andrew Sayer about his book Why Things Matter To People. It’s one of my favourite books but the podcast got lost twice amidst transitions from one computer to another, as well as forgotten about for a long period of time midway through my PhD. I’m pleased…

  • Reframing Margaret Archer’s critique of habitus

    One of the most contentious aspects of Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity has been her critique of Bourdieu’s habitus. I was thinking back to this issue when reading Sam Friedman’s excellent new paper in the Sociological Review on the habitus clivé. It’s a whole dimension to Bourdieu’s work which I was completely unfamiliar with and furthers…

  • Who could object to a project that seeks to stop killer robots?

    Who could object to a project that seeks to stop killer robots? The UK government apparently: The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, an alliance of human rights groups and concerned scientists, is calling for an international prohibition on fully autonomous weapons. Last week Human Rights Watch released a report urging the creation of a new…

  • University tuition fees in England are now, on average, the highest in the world

    Great leaflet produced by CDBU in advance of the elections – needs to be distributed widely! CDBU_Tuition_fees_Infographic Hi Res

  • Workshop: Investigating the Internal Conversation

    I’m organising this workshop at Warwick in June for anyone using Margaret Archer’s work on reflexivity in empirical research. She’ll be there all day & will discuss the development of this work as well as answering questions about it. There will also be a few speakers (including myself, talking about my PhD, which I so…

  • Big Data & Society – Early Career Researcher Forum

    As part of its effort to expand beyond traditional types of academic publication, Big Data & Society has introduced an Early Career Researcher Forum targeted to scholars finishing or having recently completed advanced graduate degrees.  More specifically the ECR forum seeks work by researchers reflecting about some of the challenges of their work (related to…

  • Upper Clapton Dance (cc @Mookron)

    Reading this excellent paper in the Sociological Review reminded me of this video which I’d not seen for ages: The comments on the video would be interesting to analyse in the terms Malcolm James adopts in the paper: Back when Pro Green was a G. Now he’s makin tunes to ensure he gets that energy…

  • Cognitive Triage and Television

    In the last few months I’ve been writing about cognitive triage: the harried state of temporal accounting, attending to what is most urgent at the expense of what is most important, which we enter into when situational demands outstrip our capacities to meet them. I’ve been focusing primarily on working life but I think that…

  • The Strange Transformation of Gideon Osborne

    2003 2007 2010 2012 2015

  • The reality of the ‘rapper sword dance’ does not match the image the phrase conveyed in my mind

  • The place of sociology in the Second Machine Age

    We’ve recently seen an emerging discourse of the ‘second machine age’ considering the potential implications of advances in robots and computational technologies for employment. In a recent London Review of Books essay, John Lanchester offers an insightful overview of this issue: What if that’s where we are, and – to use the shorthand phrase relished…

  • That time we went on a pub crawl with Karl Marx

    I can’t recall encountering any other fragment of writing which brings a historical figure to life for me as vividly as this does: One evening, Edgar Bauer, acquainted with Marx from their Berlin time and then not yet his personal enemy […], had come to town from his hermitage in Highgate for the purpose of…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Videocast of the Algorithms and Accountability conference (cc @DALupton @SusanJHalford)

    I’m so glad these have been produced. I really wanted to go to this conference but couldn’t bring myself to leave the Digital Sociology mini-conference at ESS15.

  • Things I’ve been reading recently #6

    After five of these posts I’m getting slightly bored with the exercise of describing each book. But I’ll continue with the posts as a whole because blogging a list of the books that I’ve finished does seem to be helping with my prior tendency to so rarely finish a book I’d started. Books: The Utopia…

  • “I’m young enough to be all pissed off but I’m old enough to be jaded”

  • 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…

  • When shopping is a baffling ordeal

    Pretty much the entirety of my morning yesterday was consumed by trying to purchase new glasses. I already find eye tests a weirdly difficult experience because the analytical voice in my head can’t help but reflect on the naive empirical perception that the exercise is supposed to elicit and the work being done by rather…

  • Dear academic hive mind, please help me identify radical education projects in the UK

    A few years ago I produced a list of all the radical education projects that sprang up in the wake of the government’s agenda for higher education ‘reform’. I didn’t really have a clear definition of ‘radical education projects’ beyond people “trying to explore different, freer and more autonomous ways of learning”. Looking back at…

  • Relational Realism, Collective Reflexivity and Social Movements

    Relational Realism, Collective Reflexivity and Social Movements from Mark Carrigan

  • The pathetic triviality of the discourse on ‘campus censorship’

    I just stumbled across the ‘Free Speech University Rankings’ produced by Spiked Online. As one does, I immediately looked up my own institution. Warwick has been given a ‘red card’ but not, as one might expect, relating to the recent police action on peaceful protesters but rather because the student union has banned The Sun:…

  • The surprisingly vitriolic misogyny of James Bond

    I recently started reading the Ian Fleming novels for the first time. While I expected some unpleasant sentiments in them, I’ve been surprised by quite how vitriolic Bond’s misogyny is: And then there was this pest of a girl. He sighed. Women were for recreation. On a job, they got in the way and fogged…

  • Call for Papers ECREA Symposium Political Agency in the Digital Age

    I’ll definitely be submitting an abstract for this: Reminder: Call for Papers ECREA Symposium Political Agency in the Digital Age: Media, Participation and Democracy ECREA Communication and Democracy Conference 2015 9-10 October 2015, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Deadline for submission is 1 May 2015 Research on media and politics has traditionally tended towards separating the sphere of politics…

  • What would British fascism look like?

    I recently stumbled across this old* Huffington Post article by James Bloodworth, editor of Left Foot Forward, speculating about what a British fascism would look like. I don’t think it’s actually very good but it’s a fascinating question to ponder. And yet, were a far-Right government ever to win power in Britain – and never…

  • “I had it all figured out then it washed away”

    I’ve had this song stuck in my head all day. I didn’t really like it at first but I’ve come to the conclusion that 2:20 onwards is actually quite wonderful in a strange sort of way. Fake Problems are a fantastic live band and I can’t wait to hear this song from the new album…

  • Outline of a relational realist theory of anarchism

    In the last few days I read David Graeber’s new book which begins to develop a novel left-wing critique of bureaucracy. I’d seen Graeber lecture but hadn’t read anything by him previously. His anarchism comes through much more clearly in his book than it did in the lecture I saw him give on the the…

  • The dead zones of the imagination in higher education

    In his recent book on bureaucracy, David Graeber often turns to higher education to furnish examples of the broader tendency he describes. I thought this was a particularly vivid passage worth reproducing: The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways…

  • Straight with a twist”: reflections on heterosexuality beyond the heteronormal

    Having been arguing for years that (non-a)sexuality remains weirdly undefined, it’s easy for me to see the interest in the study of heterosexuality. On the other hand, it’s hard not to wince at phrases like “queer heterosexualities”, “straight queer subjectivities” and “queer aspiring straight” even though I entirely see what they’re getting at and it’s…

  • (Re)situating Queer Theory on the Critical Left

    Well this is interesting. Seems like Warwick is becoming a venue for the resurgence of what I had thought was a pretty moribund queer theory: (Re)situating Queer Theory on the Critical Left A Morning Seminar at Warwick University, 10.30am – 1pm, Friday 22 May 2015 Ramphal Building, Room R0.3-4 This seminar aims to explore and…

  • The omnipresent threat of violence under neoliberalism

    An important argument by David Graeber in his new book. I’ve been thinking about this (particularly on university campuses) since events at Warwick last term and I find his analysis deeply persuasive: And indeed, in this most recent phase of total bureaucratization, we’ve seen security cameras, police scooters, issuers of temporary ID cards, and men…

  • Academic entrepreneurship and white privilege

    An interesting story circulated during the week which was widely seen as a particularly egregious instance of white privilege within the academy: On the evening of March 25, the hashtag #CadaanStudies (“cadaan” meaning “white” in Somali) emerged amongst Twitter timelines as a small collective of Somali academics and writers spoke out, 140 characters (or less)…

  • CfP: The Politics of Data (Science)

    The Politics of Data (Science) This special issue of Discover Society will explore the political implications of ‘big data’ and the systems of expertise emerging around it, including though not limited to Data Science. In doing so it will aim to bridge the gap between the methodological discourse surrounding data science and the political discourse…

  • Is it just managers who are heating up the floor to see who can keep hopping the longest?

    I wrote yesterday about how obsessive auditing produces a profession which is incompatible with a normal life. Two interesting comments offered really important insights into this issue: rbotoole April 2, 2015 at 7:57 am Edit “let experts come in and help you” – that’s the motivation, the creation of a massive industry of assessors, advisors…

  • How obsessive auditing produces “a profession which is incompatible with a normal life”

    80% of new teachers in 2005 were still teaching after their first year. In 2015 that has shrunk to just 62%, coupled with record numbers leaving mid career. In the intervening period, we’ve seen successive governments seek to transform schooling in a way that has left the “profession monitored to within an inch of its…

  • CfP: The Politics of Data (Science)

    The Politics of Data (Science) This special issue of Discover Society will explore the political implications of ‘big data’ and the systems of expertise emerging around it, including though not limited to Data Science. In doing so it will aim to bridge the gap between the methodological discourse surrounding data science and the political discourse…

  • IFTTT just raised their game

    I’ve been using IFTTT for ages now to perform various acts of automation between my various social media accounts. It’s an incredibly useful service and the sheer diversity of ‘channels’ supported by it hint at all manner of future uses yet to be divined. Their new ‘Do’ button raises their game even further: allowing one…

  • The drip-by-drip erosion of our liberties in an age of austerity

    Towards the end of her memoir/manifesto, the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas offers an articulate warning about the “drip-by-drip erosion of our liberties”: There is little risk of anyone seizing power, declaring martial law or suspending the constitution in Britain; instead through a hundred lesser acts, the state takes more and more power to itself,…

  • 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…

  • 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…