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  • Some notes on naturalism

    Much of Charles Taylor’s work has, in effect, been variations upon a theme. This was an overriding concern to argue against the understanding of “human life and action” implicit in an influential “family of theories in the sciences of man” as he puts it in the Philosophical Papers volume 2 (all references from this). The common feature of…

  • Why don’t more early career researchers produce podcasts?

    I’ve never understood why more PhD students and Early Career Researchers don’t produce podcasts. I’ve wondered this for a long time and the question came back to me when reading this post on LSE Impact. I think she overstates the case slightly (both in terms of the degree to which social media reproduces existing hierarchies…

  • “I have no idea what to tweet about!”

    Are you a social researcher who feels this way? Here are some ideas which might help: Have you read any interesting papers recently? Link to them and briefly explain why you liked them. Are you going to any conferences soon? Tweet that you’re going and ask if anyone else is. Are there any new stories which connect to…

  • Nathan “Flutebox” Lee and Beardyman @ Google

    (I wonder if Mae is watching this)

  • David Cameron: “I’m hardcore and I know the score, I am disgusted by the poor”

    This is inspired even by Casetteboy’s high standards:

  • Daniel Chernilo on The Idea of Philosophical Sociology – October 14th @SocioWarwick

    In the first Centre for Social Ontology seminar of 2014/15, Daniel Chernilo (Reader in Social and Political Thought at Loughborough University) discusses his work on philosophical sociology. This was the basis for a recent paper in the British Journal of Sociology. In this presentation, I introduce the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the…

  • Everything that’s wrong with the UK train network in one image

    It shouldn’t be this confusing (or expensive) to make a short journey within the Midlands.

  • An introduction to blogging and twitter for social researchers

    My course at Nat Cen has been moved to December. You can book online here. Given the increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of social research, it is inevitable that researchers are looking towards the opportunities offered by social media. This one day course offers an accessible introduction to the use of blogging and twitter,…

  • Is Harmut Rosa in a band called Los profesores?

    Or have I completely misunderstood what this is?

  • Harmut Rosa on the logic of acceleration and the good life

    His argument chimes with what I was trying to say here about the iPhone. Rosa argues that the prevailing concept of the good life in contemporary society is one which seeks to maximise our access to variety: where we could go, who we could meet, what we could do and who we could be.

  • Is American higher education as horrible as ‘advice’ posts make it sound?

    I read a lot of higher education blogs. One genre that you encounter from time to time is the ‘tough but fair advice to grad students’ post. This often offers advice on conferences or career planning. It tends to be slightly facetious and adopts a tone of demythologisation. These posts irritate me because they often appear to be…

  • Music to contemplate life to (#1)

    So I have been hanging out down by the train’s depot. No, I don’t ride. I just sit and watch the people there. And they remind me of wind up cars in motion. The way they spin and turn and jockey for positions. And I want to scream out that it all is nonsense. All…

  • If winter ends

    I dreamt of a fever, One that would cure me of this cold, winter set heart. With heat to melt these frozen tears Burned with reasons as to carry on. Into these twisted months I plunge without a light to follow But I swear that I would follow anything Just get me out of here.…

  • Stuff I want to find out

    How do norms emerge ‘online’ and is this different from how they emerge ‘offline’? What does this tell us about the ‘online’/’offline’ distinction? Is “all science becoming data science” and, if so, why is this happening? Is it possible to visualise theory in a manner akin to how we visualise data? Should theory visualisation be a…

  • Reflections on five years spent studying asexuality

    It occurred to me earlier that it’s been five years since I started my research on asexuality. After a year, I wrote this article reflecting on my experiences. When I read it back, I’m struck by how little my thinking has changed since then. I’ve felt for ages that I’m just repeating myself whenever I talk or…

  • Learning to say ‘no’ in #highered

    When I was younger, I used to feel plagued by boredom. It’s only in recent years that I recognised that it was boredom. I was aware of the experience but it had never occurred to me at the time to use that word to describe it. Part of the reason it seems so clear to me in…

  • The internal conversation of James Bond

    Earlier this week I read Solo by William Boyd. The idea of a new James Bond novel wouldn’t have appealed to me if it had been written by anyone other than Boyd and it lived up to my expectations. One curious aspect of it which I wasn’t expecting was the prominence of James Bond’s internal…

  • How not to use twitter as an academic

    I usually tend towards the view that there’s no right or wrong way to use social media. These evaluations only make sense relative to some prior purpose and so I’m sceptical when blog posts pronounce on the right way to use Twitter or parallel claims with other platforms. However I realise there are a few things which I do see as intrinsically negative…

  • 7 ways to use a blog as a research journal

    Recording particularly powerful extracts of texts to which I might wish to refer later. This can serve a practical purpose, constituting a form of reference management which both indexes a source amongst a heterogeneous range of other materials and foregrounds a particular extract of the text. This transforms the status of the archived source and,…

  • I Coulda Been A Contender

    I have no idea why but I woke up with this stuck in my head. Posted here in an attempt to externalise it and get on with my day: I’m broke and I’m hungry, I’m hard up and I’m lonely I’ve been dancing on this killing floor for years And of the few things I…

  • The Para-Academic Handbook: Discussion Event, Saturday 11 October @Hydra Books

    The Para-Academic Handbook: A Toolkit for making-learning-creating-acting was published by HammerOn Press on September 15 2014. To celebrate we are holding a discussion event at Hydra Books, 34 Old Market, Bristol on Saturday 11 October, 3-5pm. This event will extend the conversations in the book, reflecting on the challenges faced by those seeking to research,…

  • What do you actually use Evernote for?

    I’ve written in the past about my dislike for Evernote and near continuous search for an alternative to it. I won’t rehearse my issues with it here but the one that really matters is that I simply can’t stand the interface. I find it hard to pin down precisely what my problem with it is…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#8)

  • Social media: a political tool or apathy’s partner in crime?

    Social media: a political tool or apathy’s partner in crime? This is a test post – I just noticed that Pocket now has wordpress integration and I want to see how it works!

  • Crisis and Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons

    Cambridge Sociology Conference Crisis and Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons Friday Sep 26 – Saturday Sep 27 2014 Department of Sociology, Free School Lane Hi everyone, You are all hereby invited to attend the Crisis and Social Change conference next week at the Department of Sociology. With 36 presenters from the UK and abroad, two…

  • Why does the iPhone matter to us?

    My initial impressions of Bernard Stiegler were far from positive, largely ensuing from the sheer incomprehensibility of his writing. However this essay by Mark Featherstone (HT Emma Head) has reminded me why I bought Stiegler’s books in the first place after a few people explained the themes he addresses in his work. Featherstone is concerned with Stiegler’s…

  • CfP – special issue on The Quantified Self at Work

    The Quantified Self at Work Special Issue Call for contributions The quantified self movement (QSM) refers to an emerging trend identified by a range of technological devices used for self-tracking.  Examples include Microsoft’s wearable camera, the SenseCam, which provides the possibility to record autobiographical data and is worn on clothes. The Narrative Clip, formerly known…

  • Connecting Epistemologies: Methods and Early Career Researchers in the Connected Communities Programme

    See below for information about an event on research careers, identities and methods- email dave.obrien.1@city.ac.uk to register. More information on the project is here http://earlycareerresearchers.wordpress.com/   Connecting Epistemologies: Methods and Early Career Researchers in the Connected Communities Programme FREE EVENT 28/10/2014 City University London Early Career Researchers (ECRs) face a variety of issues in the…

  • I wouldn’t chide you, out perform, out write, and out rhyme you

    We’re headed to our own damn thing, prepare kid Why you think I’d let you get away with doing radio-friendly versions of what I do? Like I wouldn’t chide you, out perform, out write, and out rhyme you Outsmart, out heart, and out grind you Out shine you with the torch that was given to…

  • The future of social science blogging in the UK

    Earlier this week, NatCen Social Research hosted a meeting between myself, Chris Gilson (USApp), Cristina Costa and Mark Murphy (Social Theory Applied), Donna Peach (PhD Forum) and Kelsey Beninger (NSMNSS) to discuss possible collaborations between social science bloggers in the UK and share experiences about developing and sustaining social science blogs over time. We didn’t do…

  • Gigs I wish I had attended (#2)

  • “MAKE EM PURR” – SAGE FRANCIS

    What a wonderful video to go with this. I’m counting down the days until I see him in London next month:

  • Very interesting looking Quantified Self workshop in November

    We are delighted to invite you to our forthcoming Quantified Self Workshop taking place Thursday 13th November 2014, 1000 – 1700,Somerset House, London.The workshop focuses on the Quantified Self and Digital Quantified Self technologies. We aim to generate discussion about the opportunities these technologies create to improve sustainability. We will cover areas of health, lifestyle, transport, energy and food. Guest…

  • The Politics of Attachment

    ASCA WORKSHOP 2015 POLITICS OF ATTACHMENT 25-27 March 2015 Call for Papers General Theme The ASCA 2015 International Workshop and Conference (25-27 March 2015) calls for a reflection on politics of attachment by engaging with the decolonial, the ecological and genre. The 2015 workshop will consider all three strands as forms of attachment. Attachments align…

  • Is this how the Circle got started….?

    The ApplePay system aims to kickstart the so far slow-moving market for mobile payments, which banks and credit card companies have struggled to get people to adopt, but could also give Apple growing power in the payments industry. “ApplePay will forever change the way all of us buy things,” said Cook. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/09/apple-watch-cupertino-investors

  • Revisiting the Riots – Riots Reframed film screening

    Three years have passed since the ‘riots’ that shook England following the shooting of Mark Duggan at the hands of the Metropolitan police. But as Ferguson burns across the Atlantic following the shooting of Michael Brown and yet another inquiry exposes the  endemic corruption within the Metropolitan Police force here in the UK, it is…

  • An introduction to analytical sociology

    This is an excellent critical introduction to analytical sociology: Analytical Sociology and The Rest of Sociology by Daniel Little  

  • Daniel Little reviews Social Morphogenesis volume 1 and volume 2

    The philosopher Daniel Little has written about volume 1 and volume 2 of the Social Morphogenesis book series on his Understanding Society blog: “Margaret Archer’s contribution to critical realism has been an important part of the recent progress of the field, and her theory of morphogenesis is key to this progress. Her recent volume, Social…

  • The sociology of thinking and cognitive mechanisms

    I listened to an interesting podcast earlier, in which the psychologist Eldar Shafir discusses the ‘tunnelling effect’ produced by scarcity. This is how Oliver Burkeman describes their argument: “Scarcity captures the mind,” explain Mullainathan and Shafir. It promotes tunnel vision, helping us focus on the crisis at hand but making us “less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled”.…

  • CfP The Role of Quantified Self for Personal Healthcare @ IEEE BIBM’14, Belfast‏‎

    Call for Papers for ===================================================================== International Workshop on The Role of Quantified Self for the Personal Healthcare (QSPH’14) ===================================================================== November 2014, held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2014 in Belfast, UK http://qsph2014.dai-labor.de/ ——————————————————————— MOTIVATION In recent years there has been considerable interest in tracking a variety of health-related data via a growing number of ubiquitous…

  • The role of metaphors in framing Data Science

    This is very interesting. The author argues that “Data carpentry” is “not a single process but a thousand little skills and techniques”. He takes issue with the manner in which other ways of framing this dimension of what data scientists do obscure the craft inherent in it. I think this argument has important implications for the rapid…

  • The modern Data Scientist

    (via @AnalyticsChap)

  • Wellcome Trust Symposium and The Curious Museum of Personal Medical Devices

    Wellcome Trust Symposium on New Conceptual Approaches to Personal Medical Devices 18th-19th September 2014 Post-doctoral Suite, 16 Mill Lane, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Fuelled by the accelerating pace of technological development and a general shift to personalised, patient-led medicine alongside the growing Quantified Self and Big Data movements, the emerging field of personal medical devices…

  • Research ‘Ignite’ CFP – Being Human in a Digital Age

    The event is aimed at early career researchers in the humanities (who may be also working across disciplinary divides such as in the arts and sciences) whose research connects to the theme of ‘being human in a digital age’. Ignite events challenge researchers to make their case in a short, succinct way by giving them…

  • Notes for a Sociology of Thinking 1.4

    In a recent paper Tero Piiroinen argued that the intellectual axis of contemporary sociological theory has shifted from a concern with individualism and holism to what he terms dualism and anti-dualism. I’m not convinced as to the accuracy of this as a claim about the state of the field given the degree of sophistication which can…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#7)

  • On Sex-Favourable Asexuality

    This is an interesting article by Talia on asexual agenda. I find this particularly insightful: I often wonder if sex-favourable asexual people are such a minority because their experiences often do not make sense in asexual discourse and so they don’t stay in (or even join) the community because it’s not useful to them. I’ve…

  • What would happen if an evil scientist wiped the memories of everyone within a workplace?

    In a recent paper Tero Piiroinen suggests that “if we all just suddenly lost our memories and other relevant neural dispositions—if no one was able to remember his or her own name, let alone relatives, friends, possessions, occupation, place of residence, and so on—there would be nothing left of social relations and structures”. This is a science fiction scenario…

  • Social Acceleration and Musical Innovation

    I just came across a lovely point in Harmut Rosa’s book about the relationship between social change and musical innovation. Certain forms of music come to be seen as emblematic of the age but, as that age changes so too does the sensibility which is brought to bear upon that music: today certain forms of jazz music that,…

  • Notes on The Social Life of Theory 1.3

    I approached this book with a certain degree of ambivalence, curious as to the hostility one of my favourite sociologists has seemingly provoked in many of its readers. As someone fascinated by the sociology of sociology, it was exciting to hear that Christian Smith had written a book of this sort, even if it sounded incongruously polemical and…

  • Pop Sonnets

    My new favourite Tumblr. Some of these are very good:    

  • Harmut Rosa engages with the work of Margaret Archer

    This is very good – it’s so refreshing to see a critical engagement with Archer’s work of this quality:

  • An introduction to curation tools

    I realised when looking back over old notes that someone asked me to write this for them and then never published it. So here’s a quick post about curation I wrote a couple of years ago:  For all that digital technology offers the academy, it also presents new problems. The instant availability of information from…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#6)

    There’s a lot of film soundtracks I like but I can’t think of another one that fit a film this well. There’s a review I wrote of the film here.

  • Help: examples of academics finding, collating and filtering information

    I’m trying to put together the most comprehensive list I can of ways in which academics curate information as part of their usual core duties. However I’m struggling slightly and what I have below doesn’t seem comprehensive: – producing a reading list for an upcoming writing project– produce a reading list for a module or…

  • Struggling to put words to an idea

    This post on things that universities should teach students is a lovely read in its own right. However the final point really stood out to me: That if they haven’t, at some point, found themselves struggling to put words to an idea that they feel strongly about but can’t explain adequately, then they’ve missed an opportunity…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#5)

  • Notes for a Sociology of Thinking 1.3

    While reading Randall Collins for my other project, I was suddenly struck by how relevant it is for the sociology of thinking. I must engage with this properly: Do we not have agency? it is a matter of analytical perspective. Agency is in part a term for designating the primitives of sociological explanation, in part…

  • Notes on the Social Life of Theory 1.2

    In the preface to his Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins argues that intellectual networks hold the key to understanding ideas and their changes: “if one can understand the principles that determine intellectual networks, one has a causal explanation of ideas and their changes”. His point is to understand the way that a focus on networks, as…

  • The sociology of data science

    All science is becoming data science. Therefore data scientists have a lot of power in this regime [stifles a laugh] It’s a great time to be a data geek. This is an interesting aside made by Bill Howe of Washington University in an early lecture on Coursera’s Introduction to Data Science MOOC. I take this…

  • When writing on the iPad becomes a pleasure rather than a chore

    I’ve started using iWriter for the iPad and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In fact writing this post on my laptop now feels clunky and irritating after having spent the last couple of hours working on my social media book on my iPad. There are obvious limits to the viability of iWriter, particularly if…

  • Self-tracking, social control and cognitive triage: the trials and tribulations of aspiring financiers

    What’s it like to be a junior analyst on Wall Street making $70,000 a year in your early 20s? What sort of people are drawn towards this career path? Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits attempts to answer these questions by tracking a handful of millennial recruits to Wall Street as they navigate…

  • Solving the problem of finding images for blog posts

    I just used the Getty Images plug in for the first and it’s great – absolutely seamless search & embed for hundreds of thousands of high quality images. Unfortunately they can’t be used as featured images (I checked the license) but otherwise they’re completely free for non-commercial use.

  • When marketers are too lazy to disguise their fill in the blanks

    I didn’t realise “sociologicalimagination.org” emphasised the importance of “tutor”. It’s fun to learn stuff: Hi, I was surfing for quality websites which emphasizes the importance of “Tutor” and found “http://sociologicalimagination.org“. I’m writing up this mail just to get a hold of you for appreciating your good work on maintaining an informative & attractive website on…

  • Notes on the Social Life of Theory 1.1

    What is theory? Stefan Collini argues that “‘theory’ is what happens when common starting-points can no longer be taken for granted”. If there’s any truth to this suggestion, it points towards the irrevocably social nature of theory. The inclination to address a question in a theoretical way, the variability with which different parties will approach the same question, point…

  • ‘Governing Money After Bitcoin and the “Sharing Economy’, Bill Maurer (UCI), Mon 8 Sep, 2-4pm

    Global Research Priorities – Global Governance (GRP-GG) Invites you to a Global Governance Lecture ‘Governing Money After Bitcoin and the “Sharing Economy”: Closed Payment Communities and the Public Good’ by Bill Maurer University of California, Irvine Monday 8 September 2014, 2-4pm University of Warwick Everyone is welcome Recent and much-hyped experiments in money and the…

  • Workshop 11-12th November 2014 – ‘Occupying Politics in a Time of Alterity’

    Please see attached a call for papers for the workshop entitled ‘Occupying Politics in a Time of Alterity’ to be held at Manchester University on 11-12th November 2014. It seems that the recent encounter with the language of crisis has imprisoned political discourse and robbed it of its imagination to think and act the politics…

  • Remember when you lost your shit and drove the car into the garden….?

    Remember when you lost your shit and Drove the car into the garden You got out and said I’m sorry To the vines and no one saw it I need my girl I need my girl … Remember when you said I’m sorry To the vines and no one saw it I’ll try to call…

  • Customer experience metrics

    Having just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers, this exchange by text seems oddly sinister:

  • Call for contributions: An Alternative History of Sociology

    This open and web based project aims to contribute to a rethinking of the sociological canon and debates about the past and future of the discipline. Would you like to contribute to An Alternative History of Sociology? There’s more information here about the project and its aims. Though it’s still in an early stage, we’d be interested in…

  • An introduction to blogging and twitter for social researchers

    Given the increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of social research, it is inevitable that researchers are looking towards the opportunities offered by social media. This one day course offers an accessible introduction to the use of blogging and twitter, encompassing the possibilities they offer for social researchers and walking you through best practice. You…

  • The Philosophy of Data Science

    I just saw the LSE Impact blog posted this nice summary of the interview series I’m doing for them: Rob Kitchin: “Big data should complement small data, not replace them.” In this first interview, Rob Kitchin elaborates on the specific characteristics of big data, the hype and hubris surrounding its advent, and the distinction between…

  • The five modes of self-tracking

    Deborah Lupton has posted a very useful item on her blog, attached to a forthcoming paper, suggesting five modes of self-tracking: Private self-tracking Pushed self-tracking Communal self-tracking Imposed self-tracking Exploited self-tracking You can read the full post here. The only one I’m not convinced of is ‘exploited self-tracking’. I otherwise really like this typology and it helps…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#4)

  • The artistic opportunities afforded by self-tracking technology

    This is wonderful – running drawing. (HT Kirsty Lohman) Another long run completed. Photograph: Running Drawing/Claire Wyckoff

  • Social media @NatCen Learning workshops with me & Dhiraj Murthy

    You can book online here

  • Lots and lots of blogging

    I think I registered my Blogger account in December 2003 (during the Christmas holiday of my first year at university) so it seems I’ll soon have been blogging for 11 years. It seems slightly careless of me not to have preserved my earlier blogs, much like I regret losing pictures I’ve taken or things I’ve…

  • The political socialisation of Barack Obama

    I recently finished Race of a Lifetime, purchased because I confused it with this book that I’d actually intended to buy… it’s a great read in many respects. I love reading politics books like this because of the snippets of insight they can offer into the processes by which politicians are socialised (and socialise themselves) into leadership: As McCain…

  • Notes for a Sociology of Thinking 1.2

    How much time do you spend talking to yourself? If you put the question this way, it often makes people uncomfortable. An alternative phrasing: how much time do you spend engaged in “directed conscious thought”? This is what Tim Wilson et al investigated in a new paper published in Science. It’s exactly the sort of…

  • Social Theory as Optometry

    The notion of philosophical under labouring has been integral to the development of critical realism. It is, as Roy Bhaskar puts it, what critical realist philosophy most characteristically does. The metaphor comes from John Locke but it is deployed in a way that criticises Locke’s philosophical legacy, reframing it in terms of a much more substantive understanding of what under…

  • Call for contributions: An Alternative History of Sociology

    This open and web based project aims to contribute to a rethinking of the sociological canon and debates about the past and future of the discipline. Would you like to contribute to An Alternative History of Sociology? There’s more information here about the project and its aims. Though it’s still in an early stage, we’d be interested in…

  • Gigs I wish I had attended (#1)

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#3)

    I’d forgotten quite how terrifyingly weird and wonderful this album is:

  • Self-tracking and social control: what would techno-fascism look like?

    Earlier this week I finally bought the Jawbone Up24 after weeks of deliberation. I’d got bored with the Nike Fuel Band, losing interest in the opaque ‘fuel points’ measurement and increasingly finding it to be an unwelcome presence on my wrist. I’d also been ever more aware of how weird my sleep patterns have become in…

  • Rob Kitchin on critical data studies

    An interesting presentation and video from Rob Kitchin. There’s an excellent paper developing these arguments online here. More here.

  • What will neo-neoliberal ideology look like?

    Do you remember compassionate conservatism? It seemed vacuous when promulgated by George Bush pre-9/11 and even more so when David Cameron was going through his ‘hug a husky’ phase pre-crisis. It still seems vacuous now, at the point of its purported resurgence, though much more interestingly so given the broader ideological context within which an increasing number…

  • Call for Contributions – Special Issue on Sexism

    This looks interesting and important: feministkilljoys I am editing a special issue of New Formations on Sexism. Please see the calls for papers below! —————————————————————————————————————- This special issue of New Formations will explore sexism: a problem with a name. Sexism is a term that feminists have used to explain how social inequalities between men and…

  • Self-tracking and data sensibilities

    I recently blogged about the idea of the ‘qualified self’ and why I’m drawn to this phrase. As sometimes happens, I wasn’t being enormously serious when I started writing the post but had argued myself into a new position by the end of it. I like the ‘qualified self’ because it draws attention to the…

  • Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation

    Earlier today I came across this wonderful passage by Frederick Douglass in this book by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco: Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many…

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#2)

  • Time is always running out

    I got briefly obsessed last year by the observation that at a rate of one book a week between the ages of 5 and 80, it will only be possible to read 3,900 books in a lifetime. This is a little over one tenth of one percent of all the books currently in print – obviously…

  • Stretching the Sociological Imagination: A Conference in Honour of John Eldridge

    From Matt Dawson at Glasgow: Glasgow University will be hosting a conference in honour of John Eldridge on 16th-17th September. Entitled ‘Stretching the Sociological Imagination’ it will include papers inspired by John’s work in the fields of social theory, work and industry and the media. The event is free to attend. Confirmed speakers include John…

  • The slam poetry of Denice Frohman

    What wonderful work – more information about the poet here:

  • Qualitative self-tracking and the Qualified Self

    The idea of “qualitative self-tracking” is one that I’ve mentioned on my blog before. It’s a term in which I think but it’s also one that I’m aware of being unclear about exactly what I mean by it. Searching google shows a complete absence of material relating to it – returning only three hits for…

  • Bourdieusian Hipsters Explain Foucauldian Memes

    After a couple of years using Buffer to maintain the @soc_imagination twitter feed and occasionally looking through the analytics, I’ve noticed lots of key words that inevitably lead to a click through rate far higher than usual: Consider this post a crude experiment to test whether what I’m coming to think is true actually is. There are…

  • Ever wondered about how Tony Blair interprets his own drift towards right-wing politics?

    He was kind enough to provide an answer in this recent talk: In some cases, this will mean a certain convergence of thinking with the centre-right. Relax. It happens the world over and where it doesn’t – see the polarisation of American politics today – a country is the poorer for it.

  • Cfp: Mini Conference on Digital Sociology

    MINI-CONFERENCE ON DIGITAL SOCIOLOGY CALL FOR ABSTRACTS Eastern Sociological Society New York City February 26-March 1, 2015 Millennium Broadway Hotel In keeping with the Eastern Sociological Society’s theme of “Crossing Borders”, the Digital Sociology Mini-Conference seeks papers that address the many borders crossed – national, disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, epistemological – in digital ways of knowing.…

  • Christian Smith on the Sacred Project of American Sociology

    I’m a big fan of Christian Smith’s work. Largely, though not solely, for this book. But his new one sounds slightly odd. While it appeals to me on the level of the sociology of sociology, it’s hard not to wonder about it given how utterly scathing some of the reviews are. I’ve ordered a review copy…

  • The narrative significance of ‘unreadability’

    I’m increasingly interested in how interiority is represented in culture. I mean this as a general term for depicting inward experience of whatever sort. I’ve been primarily thinking about this in terms of film and tv so far. Partly because I happen to be someone who watches a lot of films. But there’s something interesting about…