Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • The invention of the Marvel universe

    From True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, by Josephine Riesman pg 55: One more notable bit of career foreshadowing came in September 1941’s Marvel Mystery Comics #25, in which Stan penned a text story about various superheroes who were series regulars coming together for a confab. Although it wasn’t superhero fiction’s first crossover—that…

  • The risk of (enshittified) LLMs for mental health

    If you’re even slightly interested in the social life of LLMs then listen to this podcast, interviewing Miles Klee about his recent Rolling Stone article on AI-fuelled spiritual fantasies: Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across…

  • An example of what an academic AI disclaimer could look like

    I appreciate the honesty of Inger’s disclaimer here. We need to have a conversation about the best way of doing this 👇 AI disclaimer: This post was developed with Claude from Anthropic because I’m so busy with the burning trash fire that is 2025 it would not have happened otherwise. I provided the concept, core ideas,…

  • Will Starmer’s Labour empower the far-right?

    I wrote this almost exactly a year ago and it’s turning out to be a depressingly accurate position. Time will tell about the final point, but I’m not optimistic 😟 I’ve been increasingly preoccupied by the prospect that Starmer’s Labour will follow a similar trajectory to Macron’s government: getting elected from the centre before shifting…

  • How Claude is changing: five observations about Sonnet 3.7

  • The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

    Once you accept the premise that brain uploading is possible, Kurzweil’s assumption here that it will take trial and error in order to get it right is clearly plausible. Quoted in Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever loc 1525: trial-and-error risks here are pretty awful. Let’s say we start to get close to making a sentient representation…

  • So here I am

    So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerresTrying to learn to use words, and every attemptIs a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer has…

  • Gaslight Anthem covered Smells Like Teen Spirit

    This is the best cover I’ve seen them do since Baba O’Reilly (below), even if the audio goes wrong half way through.

  • Why didn’t Will MacAskill predict Sam Bankman-Fried’s malfeasance?

    I thought this was a great, as well as hilarious, critique from Adam Becker’s More Everything Forever, loc 398: And MacAskill’s ability to forecast the future—even in the short term—is seriously questionable. Given far more information than most, he still didn’t accurately predict what would happen with Sam, just a few months after What We…

  • Your next chapter will be great

    Encountered on a pavement in Manchester in the blazing sun earlier today 😊

  • How will generative AI firms seek to optimise their models to increase user engagement? 

    How will generative AI firms seek to optimise their models to increase user engagement? The problem with social media was never the communication itself but rather the algorithmic optimisation that distorted that communication by prioritising certain forms of content over others. There’s increasing evidence that LLM personas are being driven by a comparable optimisation strategy,…

  • We’re all coming home in a while

    A time is coming (a time is coming)A time is nigh (a time is nigh)For the kingdom (for the kingdom) in the sky (in the sky)We’re all coming homeIn a while (in a while) Humility amounts to an understanding that the world is not divided into good and bad people, but rather it is made…

  • Another review of Generative AI for Academics

    Really thoughtful and balanced review of Generative AI for Academics from The Sociological Review’s Emma Craddock 😊 This book offers a very thorough and thoughtful consideration of the use of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT and Claude, in academia. It successfully balances intellectually rigorous debate with practical tips and guidance. It will be especially valuable for…

  • Webinar: Thinking with Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically

    DARIAH Friday Frontiers seminar seriesFriday 2nd May, 4pm IST / 5pm CEST / 6pm EEST Title: Thinking With Machines: How Academics Can Use Generative AI Thoughtfully and Ethically Speaker: Mark Carrigan, University of Manchester Registration: https://dariah.zoom.us/…/register/xbJkSexDQuq_0asz4rMdZg Abstract The emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools presents both opportunities and challenges for academia. While these technologies offer powerful capabilities…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #176

  • If—your—eyes—drop—they will get atop o’ you!

  • The Tea Ceremony of Writing: What We Risk Losing with AI

    Are you using large language models like ChatGPT or Claude in your writing? The evidence suggests many academics are doing this, ranging from simple editing assistance to more extensive collaboration. But as these tools become more integrated into our writing practices, we need to consider not just what they produce, but what their use might…

  • Four Ways to Use LLMs as a writing partner

    Polishing your writing Even though software like Grammarly preceded the generative wave, it has the characteristics we associate with GenAI. It offers feedback on and supports the revision of text, in a way that goes beyond the more basic facility of a spelling and grammar check. Clarifying Your Ideas Using conversational agents in this sense…

  • The embodied experience of writing

    In his guidance about powerful writing Elbow (1981: 340) suggests there are “ways to connect with thoughts as though they really matter” which can be drawn upon when writing becomes a mechanical and routine process. He offers exercises of the imagination, such as framing the idea is dangerous and writing counter-arguments to it or imagining…

  • LLMs can be used to help us go deeper into creative difficulty

    It’s often through struggle that intellectual growth takes place. As Elbow (1981: 131) puts it, “new and better ideas … don’t arrive out of the blue”. Instead they “come from noticing difficulties with what you believed, small details or particular cases that don’t fit what otherwise feels right”. Unless we are willing to grapple with…

  • Machine Writing and the Pleasure of Composition

    Until recently, Peter Elbow’s observation that one cannot write prolifically without finding some pleasure in the process captured a profound truth of the writing experience. If you hated writing it would be difficult to write a lot, for the simple reason that it would be impossibly time consuming to produce a significant quantity of words…

  • Why do I write? The question generative AI implicitly poses to us

    It’s certainly not the case that I find all writing enjoyable. Writing reports certainly isn’t. Writing e-mails more often leads in the other direction, filling my mind with clutter while diminishing the energy with which I might impose order on it. Writing journal articles rarely has this soothing quality, instead leaving me forced to jump…

  • Why it’s not a bad thing for academic writing to be difficult

    If we examine academic writing we find a peculiar practice caught uneasily between competing imperatives. As Billig (2013: loc 277) observes “in current times academics are writing and publishing as part of their paid employment” which means they are “not writing in answer to a higher calling or because they have dedicated themselves to the…

  • Prompting as a literary practice

    When working with AI language models, there’s a fundamental distinction between using them to write for us versus engaging with them as reflective partners in our writing process. The most valuable approach may not be the most obvious one. This doesn’t mean it will always need to be intentionally produced for the model. In fact…

  • The allure of LLMs as professional support at a time of crisis within higher education

    Machine writing has arrived at a time of intensifying pressure within many higher education systems. Financial constraints lead to changes in the organisation of academic work, particularly with regard to the role played by teaching. Political polarisation drives a greatest contestation of academic authority, sometimes even harassment of academics. The shifting plate tectonics of knowledge,…

  • What Makes Writing “Academic” in the Age of Generative AI?

    If we see a significant change in the nature of academic writing, would that actually be a problem? As Molinari (2023: 18) notes the “genres, jargons, grammar, syntax and overall forms have been pejoratively described by writing scholars as straightjackets, chains, pigeonholes, frauds and hoaxes” not to mention the many critics for whom it is…

  • The epistemopathic dimension of writing with LLMs

    The literary scholar Steven Connor (2019) talks about our relationship to knowledge in terms of the feelings and meanings that it holds for us. He suggests we rarely, if ever, relate to it in a disinterested or neutral way. Instead it moves us certain ways, fills us with visions of what it might bring about…

  • Generative AI and the Anxieties of Academic Writing

    I’ve been a blogger for as long as I’ve been an academic writer, even if I’ve been a writer for longer than I’ve been a blogger. After two decades of regular blogging, on a succession of strange and deeply personal spaces before launching my current blog in 2010, it was difficult for me to untangle…

  • Generative AI and the challenge of unbidden thoughts

    The novelist Anne Mallot (1991: 138) describes how “unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives” which will “float into your head like a goldfish, lovely, bright orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child looking at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. They’re often so rich, these…

  • How the GAI Assessment Debate Has Led Us in the Wrong Direction

    The common thread running through these debates is a fixation on outputs. GAI captured attention because of the ease with which eerily human outputs could be produced in response to natural language prompts. They may have been profoundly mediocre, at least initially. But it was still a remarkable discovery liable to unsettle the self-conception of…

  • Academic writing has always been in flux

    It can feel when reading academics discussing LLMs that previously settled practices have been suddenly upturned by the introduction of this strange technology into higher education. The reality is that our practices of writing and communication have been through many such changes, often within the span of an individual’s own career. I was reaching the…

  • The sensory pleasure of academic writing

    I thought it was interesting that Sword (2021: loc 1306) frames this as a matter of “cutting ourselves loose from the world of the sense and giving ourselves over to the flow of ideas”. The objection might seem like a pedantic one but I think it’s important to recognise the sensory pleasure which we can…

  • On being a mystery to ourselves

  • We urgently need to talk about the temptations of LLMs for academics

    If we want to understand how academics use large language models (LLMs) we need to begin with the reality of the conditions most of us are working within. This is a temptation I’ve experienced in my own work. I felt it strongly for the first time when struggling to complete a co-authored piece for an…

  • Generative AI and thriving in creative darkness

    What would I do if my work was automated? I was asked this question a year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and it’s one I’ve returned to frequently as academic use of large language models (LLMs) has become the core focus of my research. If I found myself in a technological utopia where the automation of…

  • The subtle pleasures of LLM’s psuedo-understanding

    The most common mistake I see academics making in their interaction with conversational agents is restricting themselves to a single prompt or a small series of prompts. This approach fails not just because it often doesn’t provide sufficient context for an adequate response, or because it precludes the reflexive work involved in refining a prompt…

  • Finding Joy in the Creative Darkness: Reflections on Writing and Stuckness

    The vision I have presented in recent posts about the trouble of writing is a fundamentally positive one. This is a fertile space if we relate to it in an open and confident way. It is only by attuning ourselves to the feelings we encounter in it, the sense of an incipient idea even when…

  • Finding joy in academic writing: understanding the role of the tools we use

    Boise (1990: 46) argues that “being able to share imperfect writing with others is a critical step in making the writing truly effortless.” My experience as a blogger over many years is that a willingness to share provisional thoughts becomes easier with practice. Once you realize that people respond to the thought as much as…

  • Machine writing and keeping your inner world awake

    What C. Wright Mills described in The Sociological Imagination as “fringe thoughts” are integral to “keeping your inner world awake.” These peripheral ideas that bubble up during our creative process are crucial to authentic intellectual work, particularly as we navigate the world of machine writing and AI assistance. Robert Boise suggests that “writers merely needed…

  • How LLMs change the relationship between thinking and writing

    I’m an extremely fast and careless writer, which I suspect encourages me to be a fast and careless thinker. I often get carried away with a particular line of thought, more tied up in the satisfaction I’m finding in it than the disinterested evaluation of it. It’s just satisfying to express it once an idea…

  • Current mood in AI generated images #175

  • The Objects With Which We Write: The Materiality of Academic Writing in a Digital Age

    What I’m exploring here are the joys which can be taken in the writing process, as well as how this shapes our relation as academics to the machine writing which LLMs are capable of producing. I use this phrase to indicate a specific focus on how LLMs can be used for writing, as opposed to…

  • The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

    I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard…

  • Using Generative AI for functional rather than expressive writing

    I advocate distinguishing between what I call functional and expressive documents in academic writing. Functional documents, such as reports, summaries, or abstracts, tend to involve academics reporting on what they have done or explaining what they will do. These involve writing, but it rarely tends to be a joyous writing of the kind that truly…

  • Finding Joy in the Mud: When and How to Use AI in Academic Writing

    There is also a role for persistence in writing. I recognise the risk that building this book around the idea of joyful writing creates the expectation that writing could or should always be joyful. Clearly it won’t be. Our response to those points where we struggle are crucial for shaping how we relate to the…

  • Generative AI and the creative confusion of academic writers

    In his guide to productive academic writing the psychologist and writing coach Robert Boice distinguishes between non-starters and non-finishers. Even if there could be some academics who experience both problems in their writing, Boice suggests in his experience these are distinct problems with a different psychological basis underlying them. While “an inability to finish resembles…

  • ✍️ How to enjoy writing in spite of the lure of generative AI

    Over the last year I’ve been working on a book How to Enjoy Writing exploring the implications of generative AI for academic writing. I felt I had something important to say about the personal reflexivity involved in working with large language models, but in recent months I’ve realised that I lost interest in the project.…

  • The lure of machine writing and the value of getting stuck

    Once you have learned to work effectively with conversational agents, there is no situation which you encounter as a writer in which you couldn’t draw on them for practical support. To the extent you are writing because you enjoy it, at least some of the time, this need not be a problem. After all why…

  • Apple’s bleak sales pitch for embedding GenAI into iOS

    I couldn’t agree more with this response from Gloria Mark: Apple’s message is clear: this is the promise of AI—you can be your unfiltered, lazy self. Say whatever you want—AI will refine it for you, smoothing out the rough edges so you won’t get fired. The deeper message in the ad is that AI will…

  • The Eeriness of Writing With Claude: When AI Mirrors Your Voice

    Over the summer I was reminded of something profound through my experience of writing a book about academic writing and AI. It’s an argument I already wanted to make, but recent events have left me more convinced than ever of its significance for academic writers. This is a project I’d made rapid progress with through…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #174

  • The Ebb and Flow of Writing: From Struggle to Unconscious Fluency

    It can help to understand writing as a nexus point where lots of different elements intersect. I might be sitting in the garden with my laptop and a can of coke, but there are many other things which are present with me in this moment—from my writing software, internet connection and accompanying eBook reader through…

  • Machine writing and the challenge of a joyful reflexivity

    If you see the use of generative AI as being about producing entire outputs purely based on your instructions, without having to directly contribute yourself, you miss out on the multifaceted ways in which we can work with these systems as part of the writing process. Rather than substituting for our own writing, it can…

  • The Ethical Grey Areas of Machine Writing in Higher Education

    Once we start to examine how academics actually use conversational agents in real settings, it becomes harder to draw a clear distinction between problematic and unproblematic use. To entirely substitute machine writing for your own, while presenting it under your own name, would strike most as problematic. But this often has little relationship to how…

  • So, what is utopia good for? For walking

    Quoted in Relationship Anarchy by Juan-Carlos Pérez-Cortés, loc 5910: Eduardo Galeano recounted that he was once at a conference in Cartagena with Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri, a good friend of his, and a student asked what utopia was good for. After a few seconds of silence, Birri replied, “What’s utopia good for? That’s a question…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #173

  • Thriving in Creative Darkness: Free Association and LLM Collaboration

    The psychotherapist Irvin Yalom distinguishes between spontaneity, “being pulled by something outside yourself” from “being pushed by some force inside that is trying to escape fear or danger.” The existential value of spontaneity lies in “being pulled by something unexpected and going off into unpredictable directions,” leading us to make new connections and articulate new…

  • Will Claude tell you if your writing is crap? The danger of LLMs for wounded academic writers

    If writing exists as a nexus between the personal and the institutional, it means that our personal decisions will co-exist with organisational ones in deciding what and how we write. The rhythms we experience as writers, in which we inhabit moments of unconscious fluency (or struggle to) as we meander through the world, stand in…

  • Interview in the Telegraph about touchscreens and digital change

    From this feature: Mark Carrigan, senior lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, says that efficiency gains from better digital technology always carry a risk for interaction between actual humans. The key question, says Carrigan, is “whether those gains can be used to free up people to interact in richer and more engaging ways,…

  • After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

    I’ll do one more read through when it gets back from my proof reader, but the book I started in September 2008 with my PhD is now finished 👇 The virtue of the detraditionalisation thesis lay in its insistence on a meta-process, a change which exceeds empirical trends which can be measured. It provides, as…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #172

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #171

  • Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt)

    Hope, perseverance, a vision (some doubt).Green ink, a 26 oz., a bad case of big-mouth.A sum of our parts and I’ve never laughed harder.A song in our hearts and I’ve never laughed harder.It don’t really matter ’cause nothing’s ever felt as right as this.

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #170

    Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible Katherine May’s Wintering pg 13

  • Plants and animals don’t fight the winter

    From Katherine May’s Wintering pg 13 Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #169

  • Immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy

    From Iain M. Banks‘s Excession, helpfully quoted on this blog: Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at. Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #168

    See, for ten long years I’ve been hustlin’ around Tryin’ to wash the sins and the sweat from my brow Tryin’ to find a better life for me and my own Just some rest for these tired workin’ fingers But nobody never gonna tell you the way You gotta figure it out boys, and suffer…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #167

  • The origin of the phrase publish or perish

    In 1928 C.M. Case reflected in the journal Sociology and Social Research that “If it be true that, for the time being at least, the quality of American sociological writing is in inverse ratio to its quantity, the reason is to be sought, among other things, in the fact, first, that the system of promotion…

  • A case study of scholarly abundance: Asexuality Studies

    In the early 2010s I contributed to the development of a field called asexuality studies. The identity of ‘asexual’ (not experiencing sexual attraction(fn)) had coalesced through a popular online forum, attracting media interest and social recognition which in turn fed into a growth of self-identification. Increasing awareness that other people shared this experience counteracted a…

  • The ‘vibes shift’ as a preemptive declaration of hegemony

    This from the consistently excellent John Ganz (highly recommend his book) captures something I’ve been struggling to articulate since Trump’s victory. Why has there been such a rush to frame this in hegemonic terms when there was a 1.5% difference in vote share between the two candidates? There’s clearly an elite recomposition underway, with tech…

  • Academic networks need to prepare for waves of enshittification

    After the US election in November 2024 there was a significant movement of users from Elon Musk’s X platform, which had been deployed politically by an owner now explicitly affiliated to a candidate. There’s a risk of overstating the size of the exodus, given that at the time of writing Bluesky has 30 million users…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #166

  • Some thoughts on reading Margaret Archer’s work as a unified project

    There were a range of points at which questions of the digital were addressed in her work, particularly in the later volumes developed collaboratively within the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO). But the tendency here was for ‘the digital’ to be subordinated to the questions of social change were the object of the CSO’s first…

  • Some notes on Margaret Archer’s theorising of digital technology

    There are four major strands in her work where this is addressed directly: There are a number of other points in her work where Archer addressed digital technology but these tended to be more marginal and less systematic. For example social media platforms were becoming mainstream during the later stages of the fieldwork for her…

  • Two reviews of Generative AI for Academics

    Notes from Mirjam Sophia Glessmer on reading the book: The other day I read something (that I cannot find again) along the lines of “GenAI creates art for people who hate art, music for people who hate music, reading for people who hate reading”, and I have been thinking about that a lot. I have…

  • For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

    So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerresTrying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failureBecause one has only learnt to get the better of wordsFor the thing one no longer…

  • RIP Michael Burawoy

    He was killed yesterday in a hit and run 🤬 A UC Berkeley professor emeritus was killed in a deadly hit-and-run crash in Oakland on Monday.  The coroner has identified the victim as 77-year-old Michael Burawoy. He taught sociology at Cal.  Police said he was in the crosswalk at Grand Avenue and Park View Terrace at around…

  • Generative AI and the conspiracy to ensure the productivity of certain academics

    From Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, by Ruha Benjamin, pg 181: It is no secret that at absurdly wealthy universities, like the one I work at, faculty are drenched with support—sabbaticals for writing, research budgets to hire assistants, grad students to help with grading, highly skilled staff for assistance with everything…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #165

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #164

  • The second digital divide which LLMs are opening up

    This piece from Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark captures my mounting concern about the second digital divide which LLMs are opening up i.e. the skills and capacities to use these systems effectively rather than the simple fact of access to them: Now, getting AI systems to do useful stuff for you is as simple as asking…

  • An abundance of knowledge obliterates the lack which generates desire

    From Darian Leader’s Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post loc 1361: Trying to explain everything to the patient will necessarily eclipse the presence of desire: if you supply a lot of knowledge, the dimension of lack is obliterated. What matters is preserving a place for what is between the lines, for what…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #163

  • The wreck and not the story of the wreck, the thing itself and not the myth

    I came to explore the wreck.The words are purposes.The words are maps.I came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail.I stroke the beam of my lampslowly along the flankof something more permanentthan fish or weedthe thing I came for:the wreck and not the story of the wreckthe thing itself and not…

  • Call for Book Proposals: University Reimagined

    Editors: Steven Jones & Sadia Habib  Publisher: Manchester University Press  Overview  Universities worldwide stand at crossroads, no longer assured of financial – or even rhetorical – backing from their host societies, and increasingly subject to political interference and media attacks. The underlying public value and purpose of higher education is easily lost amid the metrics…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #162

    You can find it, earn it, make it or steal itI haven’t found a single way to keep itCause you can leash it, it’ll leaveYou can teach it to stay and it’ll leaveYou can case and display it, decay and waste it awayAnd day by day it leaves you by degrees

  • If we only concentrate on putting out the blaze, we’ll eventually burn out

    Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, by Ruha Benjamin pg 54: Instead, growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden, transforming the plants by fostering relationships, trust, skills, community accountability, and healing. It requires cultivating new habits internally, seeding restorative ways of being together interpersonally, uprooting practices…

  • The practice of social theory

    This has come up a few times this week for various reasons. I did a summer school with Jana Bacevic at Cambridge in 2017 and the resources are still available here:

  • Call for Short Papers – One-Day Symposium (The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory)

    Call for Short Papers (750 – 1,000 words by 28th February 2025, 5pm GMT) The Process and Implications of Doing Social Theory (One-Day Symposium) A BSA Theory Study Group & BSA Early Career Forum Event To be held on Friday, 23rd May 2025 at the University of Cambridge We are delighted to invite short paper submissions for…

  • The fire and the rose are one

    Not known, because not looked forBut heard, half-heard, in the stillnessBetween two waves of the sea.Quick now, here, now, always—A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)And all shall be well andAll manner of thing shall be wellWhen the tongues of flame are in-foldedInto the crowned knot of fireAnd the fire and the rose…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #161

    So keep the front door closedKeep your ears to the groundKeep your eyes on the open roadBut don’t goAnd since I can’t forgetI want to breathe out new lungsAnd cast a whole new silhouetteI want to I tell you thisto break your heart,by which I mean onlythat it break open and never close againto the…

  • Current mood in (not) AI generated images #160

    Right there where everything is transcendentI can feel myself opening up, getting closerNo hope is enoughI’ve stopped hoping, I’m learning to trust

  • The sociological significance of TikTok

    This is excellent by Taylor Lorenz and a great counterpoint to my tendency to frame algorithmic filtering as an intrinsically destructive thing: Since 2020, TikTok has served as a major hub for progressive speech and activism. The ban will deplatform thousands of progressive content creators and skew online discourse toward conservative ideologies. It will consolidate media…

  • The growing popularity of cults in a transient, fragmented state of contemporary society

    From Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems, by Alexandra Stein loc 6540 and 6588: But the transient, fragmented state of contemporary society makes this difficult. The world is opening up, becoming global, restructuring itself toward an unknown future. This global sense of anomie engenders a basic existential crisis and fear. In…

  • CfP: The New Urgency: The Use(lessness) of Theories in Educational Research

    Special Issue: Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory Editors: David Lee Carlson and Mirka Koro, Arizona State University Overview This special issue explores the use(lessness) of theories in educational research in current political, neoliberal (post-capitalistic), and ecological contexts. It examines how theories linger, return, and transform research, while research transforms theories. Key Questions for Submissions…

  • Call for papers: Peer Review in the Age of Large Language Models

    Looking forward to doing a keynote at this workshop in May 👇 ‘Peer Review in the Age of Large Language Models’ is an interdisciplinary workshop taking place on 14th May 2025 at the University of Bath. Dr. Harish Tayyar Madabushi from the University of Bath, and Dr. Mark Carrigan from the University of Manchester, will…

  • The rebranding of University of Bolton

    It now has a whole series of different brand identities: Weirdly the UoB Manchester describes itself as “Partnered with the University of Bolton and situated within the centre of Manchester”, despite the name now being The University of Greater Manchester. Perhaps I’m being unfair, in an institution currently undergoing transition, but I don’t recall ever…

  • Manchester/Salford Critical Ed Tech Network Event, February 19th 12pm-2pm

    Dear colleagues, I hope this finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite you to an informal lunchtime gathering where we can share our thoughts and concerns about educational technology and its impacts. This is part of an exciting international initiative happening that week, with similar discussions taking place in cities around the world: https://criticaledtech.com/2024/07/26/cset-2025-critical-studies-of-education-and-technology-an-invitation-to-connect/ [criticaledtech.com]…