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  • Values Beyond Value? Is Anything Beyond the Logic of Capital?

    This is excellent:

  • Troubling Narratives Conference -it happened!

    Wish I could have gone to this – it sounds excellent!

  • The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality

    In the last few years my interest in asexuality has shifted from a concern with the experience of asexual people to a preoccupation with why those who aren’t asexual find it as confusing as they do. This can seem to be a confusingly niche interest, or at least I occasionally worry that it might come across…

  • “when you come across something which you had thought special and particular to you”

    I just came across this wonderful extract in a book I’m reading. I feel slightly silly quoting from a play I’ve not seen but it so perfectly expresses a thought I’ve struggled to articulate that I don’t mind: “The best moments in reading,” Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys, “are when you come across something…

  • Then Along Came STS….

    by Nina Wakeford Then Along Came STS/ And… from Nina Wakeford on Vimeo.

  • CFP: Triage Devices: How Organizations Manage Commitments, Goldsmiths Feb 2015

    This looks really interesting: Call for papers for a Workshop on February 27th-28th 2015 at Goldsmiths College London Triage Devices: How Organizations Manage Commitments organised by Nils Ellebrecht (University of Freiburg) and Monika Krause (Goldsmiths College, University of London) with support from the ESRC-funded project “Triaging Values” Deadline for abstracts: September 19th, 2014 This workshop at Goldsmiths College brings…

  • Online writing workshop for social science PhDs and ECRs at Warwick

    Online Writing Workshop Wednesday 2nd July 10.00-16.30 Wolfson Research Exchange What is the purpose of the workshop and who is it for? This is a one-day workshop aimed primarily at Early-Career Researchers (including PhD students) in the social science community who are interested in increasing their knowledge of blogging and writing for the web for…

  • Critical theory and things just happening without anyone doing them

    I’m reading Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory. It’s very good. However the vocabulary is frustrating me for the kind of reasons I discussed here. Take this example: Conceived in terms of drive, networked communications circulate less as potentials for freedom than as the affective intensities produced through and amplifying our capture. (pg 31) I’m fairly certain…

  • Blogging as a “commonplace book”

    Milena Kremakova just introduced me to the notion of a “commonplace book” – as the (very interesting) website below details, many of the ways in which academics are coming to use blogs mirror the features of the (once much more common) commonplace book: The books served as repositories of the thoughts of others, as places for capturing the…

  • The politics of oil ownership

    This short film is excellent (and reinforces the obsession with Norway I’ve been developing since visiting Oslo a few years ago):

  • The Further Sociology of Hipsters

    Does the word ‘hipster’ mean anything? “Not anymore” says Josh, an “archetypal hipster” quoted in this Guardian article. The word itself obviously has a long history but did its present sense, referring to a diffuse yet uniform sartorial and lifestyle trend in the neoliberal metropolis, ever really have a clear meaning? In its absence, can we…

  • Evelyn Ruppert: The economies and ecologies of Big Data

    Only a couple of days to go until the journal officially launches!

  • Getting out of the mess of life

    The title of this post comes from Ian Craib’s wonderful book The Importance of Disappointment, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. His concern is with a contemporary inability, pervasive to the point that we may regard it as epochal, to live with disappointment. We struggle to tolerate the failure of our plans or the…

  • Carol Smart interviewed by Jeffrey Weeks

    This is fantastic! Why aren’t more departments producing videos like this to celebrate the work of senior sociologists? Or even just as recruitment videos for that matter?

  • The DIY PhD and the transformation of intellectual life

    As so often happens, a post by Pat Thomson recently caught my imagination and left me thinking more deeply about an aspect of my own academic experience. There are lots of reasons I find the mechanics of postgraduate education interesting, foremost amongst which is probably the fact I’ve been one for rather a long time…

  • Online writing workshop for social science PhDs and ECRs at Warwick

    Online Writing Workshop Wednesday 2nd July 10.00-16.30 Wolfson Research Exchange What is the purpose of the workshop and who is it for? This is a one-day workshop aimed primarily at Early-Career Researchers (including PhD students) in the social science community who are interested in increasing their knowledge of blogging and writing for the web for…

  • Duncan Watts on the challenge of big data

  • Online writing workshop for social science PhDs and ECRs at Warwick

    Online Writing Workshop Wednesday 2nd July 10.00-16.30 Wolfson Research Exchange What is the purpose of the workshop and who is it for? This is a one-day workshop aimed primarily at Early-Career Researchers (including PhD students) in the social science community who are interested in increasing their knowledge of blogging and writing for the web for…

  • CIM Seminar: Bodies, Rhythms and Mediation @warwickuni

    CIM Seminar: Bodies, Rhythms and Mediation July 8th, 3:30-5:30, S2.84, Social Sciences Building  The Geographies of Gaming Rhythms Thomas Apperley, University of New South Wales, Australia This paper explores the cultural re-mappings that occur through transnational digital gaming networks. While the emergence of global gaming networks—Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, various MMORPGs—in the past decade suggests the…

  • Metrics in international #highered

    This article by John Holmwood is worth reading: There are few national systems of higher education that are immune from their effects, though their use is more extensive and systematic in some places, rather than others. They seem to have gone furthest in national systems with a high proportion of public universities, especially in countries…

  • Metrics and Measurement in #HigherEd

    Paul Kirby and Meera Sabaratnam have written a thought-provoking response to the HEFCE consultation on using metrics for research assessment. Archived here because I plan on coming back to this properly at a later date. This is their account of the motivations driving this turn towards metrics, which they go on to critique: The research assessment…

  • Intellectual Trajectory and the Pleasures of Disciplinarity

    Earlier this week at Computational Social Science 2014, I heard Gene Stanley, an affable and rather polymathic physicist, reflect on his experience of collaborating with economists. He was concerned to make clear the different skill sets that physicists and economists bring to collaborative work, with each able to do things which the other can’t. But what really caught…

  • Call for contributors to A Book of Blogs #NSMNSS

    What a brilliant idea. Find out more here about how to contribute. We’ve been thinking a lot at #NSMNSS about what types of activities the network should support next. One idea we’ve been ruminating on for a while is creating a volume of crowdsourced blogs on the impact social media are having on social science research methods. (We…

  • CfP: Crisis and Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons

    Crisis and Social Change: Towards Alternative Horizons. Call for Papers. Deadline Monday July 21st. Organized by the Department of Sociology, Cambridge University Date: Sep 26-27, 2014 Venue: Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Sciences, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RQ This conference moves beyond crisis as a category of diagnosis and critique to explore alternative…

  • CfP: Children, Young People and Changing Urban Spaces’ conference at the University of Northampton

    ‘Children, Young People and Changing Urban Spaces’ 3rd and 4th September 2014 Centre for Children and Youth, University of Northampton, UK A conference on Children, Young People and Changing Urban Spaces will be held at the University of Northampton on 3rd and 4th September 2014. The conference will bring together new, multidisciplinary research exploring the…

  • Making the ‘Precariat’: Unemployment, Insecurity and Work-Poor Young Adults in Harsh Economic Conditions

    Making the ‘Precariat’: Unemployment, Insecurity and Work-Poor Young Adults in Harsh Economic Conditions Free One Day Conference at the University of Leicester July 14th 2014 In the UK, as well as in other parts of Europe, levels of unemployment among young people are disturbing. Youth unemployment is higher now than at any time since the…

  • A BSA Bourdieu Study Group Event: Are Elite Universities Meritocratic?

    Are Elite Universities Meritocratic? A BSA Bourdieu Study Group Event Tuesday 8th July 2014 10am-5pm Cardiff University Committee Rooms, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, CF10 3WT Keynote Speakers Professor Diane Reay and Dr. Vikki Boliver Bourdieu talks about university being a process of ‘elimination’ for those who lack the type of ‘capital’ valued…

  • PhD and Postdcotoral positions on Complex Sytems at IFISC (cc @thedatascilab) #compsocsci

    Pre and postdoctoral IFISC positions: Summer 2014 call IFISC (http://ifisc.uib-csic.es/) offers PhD and Postdoctoral contracts, starting September 2014 and onwards, on the following research subjects: · Multilayer complex networks · Data Science · Information processing in complex systems · Collective social phenomena and socio-technical systems · Urban systems · Collective effects in ecosystems. Interested candidates…

  • The Muppets explain Phenomenology (via @TGJBrock)

  • Normcore and the Anxieties of Big Data

    This essay by Kate Crawford (from Microsoft Research) at the New Inquiry explores the relationship between big data, the anxieties it provokes and normcore (“Having mastered difference, the truly cool attempt to master sameness”). If one accepts her contention that normcore reflects “the dispersed anxiety of a populace that wishes nothing more than to shed its own…

  • From “I’m alright, Jack” to “Fuck you, Jack”

    The title comes from Owen Hatherly (though I can’t remember where he says this). His point is about the transition from a society which is disinterested in solidarity to one that is positively antipathetic to it: (Via @jackiHS)

  • Bernard Stiegler – Hermeneutics, Heuristics, and Paideia in the Digital Epistémè

  • Doppelganger

    Doppelganger by James A Lindon Entering the lonely house with my wife I saw him for the first time Peering furtively from behind a bush — Blackness that moved, A shape amid the shadows, A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes Revealed in the ragged moon. A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have Put…

  • The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane

  • Online writing workshop for social science PhDs and ECRs at Warwick

    Online Writing Workshop Wednesday 2nd July 10.00-16.30 Wolfson Research Exchange What is the purpose of the workshop and who is it for? This is a one-day workshop aimed primarily at Early-Career Researchers (including PhD students) in the social science community who are interested in increasing their knowledge of blogging and writing for the web for…

  • BSA happiness Study Group Seminar Novermber 2014 Northumbria University

    Happiness Study Group Call for Abstracts One Day Seminar Qualitative Approaches to Happiness and Wellbeing Research Wednesday 12th November 2014, 10.30am – 3.30pm Venue: Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne This study group event will examine the advantages and challenges of conducting qualitative research into happiness and wellbeing. We welcome papers from researchers (established and postgraduate…

  • The Twitter ‘favourite’ button explained by @death_stairs

    Via ThePoke – as someone who has favourited 5,817 tweets in the last few years, this rings uncomfortably true (2, 4 and 7 in particular)

  • The weird world of high-frequency trading

    There’s another fantastic John Lanchester essay in the London Review of Books. This one reviews Flash Boys by Michael Lewis, an expose of high frequency trading that was followed by an FBI investigation into this practice the day after the book’s release (though the FBI deny the connection). I’d read about algorithmic trading in the past and found it…

  • Online writing workshop for social science PhDs and ECRs at Warwick

    Online Writing Workshop Wednesday 2nd July 10.00-16.30 Wolfson Research Exchange What is the purpose of the workshop and who is it for? This is a one-day workshop aimed primarily at Early-Career Researchers (including PhD students) in the social science community who are interested in increasing their knowledge of blogging and writing for the web for…

  • Five Recommendations for Social Scientists in responding to big data

    I just came across this great post by Helen Margetts on the LSE Impact Blog from a few months ago. It’s worth reading the post in full but what really caught my imagination were the five recommendations she makes at the end. I don’t think the methods training I received was bad but in retrospect I think it was…

  • ONLY 2 PLACES LEFT!: The Psychosocial Imagination APS Launch Symposium 13 June

    If I wasn’t committed to the Computational Social Science Conference next week I would be there: THE PSYCHOSOCIAL IMAGINATION A symposium to celebrate the launch of The Association for Psychosocial Studies Friday 13 June 2014 10.30am – 6.30pm at The British Library Conference Centre St Pancras, London with talks, responses and contributions from a wide…

  • Computational Social Science Conference

    COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE CONFERENCE Wed 11 – Fri 13 June 2014, University of Warwick, UK http://compsocsci.eu/ The increasing availability of large quantities of human behavioural data has drawn the interest of researchers across the social sciences, the natural sciences and engineering. This conference aims to bring together this interdisciplinary community to share perspectives and identify…

  • Discover Society Issue 9

    http://discoversociety.org ISSUE NINE: June 2014     Focus:   Sue Scott On the Truth in Sex: The Times they are a-Changin’, or Not   Articles: Ruth Holliday, David Bell, Meredith Jones & Olive Cheung Clinical Trails: Cosmetic Surgery Tourism Stephen Crossley “Joining the Dots”? The Role of Research in the ‘Troubled Families’ Agenda Naaz Rashid…

  • CFP: still queer / a postgraduate and early-career work-in-progress study day at Queer@King’s

    still queer / a postgraduate and early-career work-in-progress study day Queer@King’s / King’s College, London / Saturday 13 September 2014 Queer@King’s invites proposals for presentations to be given at a collaborative work-in-progress study day. We hope to foster a supportive environment in which new work and ideas can be discussed among peers, with the opportunity…

  • Slavoj Žižek (2014) “Why I Hate Snow and Office Hours”

  • CfP: What is intersectional about intersectionality now

    Call for Proposals “What is intersectional about intersectionality now?” Special Issue Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice Editors: Corinne L. Mason and Amanda D. Watson DEADLINE: June 30, 2014 Following the coining of the term “intersectionality” in Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of…

  • Workshop on animal agency and selfhood

    I really wish I could make it to this: Animals and post-human futures research network (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/current/networks/animals/) Workshop exploring animal agency and selfhood 1.00 – 4.30 Tuesday June 10th IAS seminar room, Milburn House Leslie Irvine, Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder: ‘Bridging the species boundary: Understanding the human-animal connection’ Chris Pearson, History, Liverpool University: ‘Securing the…

  • All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann

    All There is to Know About Adolph Eichmann Leonard Cohen EYES: Medium HAIR: Medium WEIGHT: Medium HEIGHT: Medium DISTINGUISHING FEATURES:  None NUMBER OF FINGERS: Ten NUMBER OF TOES: Ten INTELLIGENCE: Medium What did you expect? Talons? Oversize incisors? Green saliva? Madness?

  • Music I find inexplicably conducive to writing (#1)

  • University complaints by students top 20,000

    More than 20,000 students complained to their universities last year, a Freedom of Information request by the BBC has shown. Responses from 120 universities across the UK revealed that total academic appeals and complaints were 10% higher in 2012-13 than in 2010-11. Universities Minister David Willetts welcomed the finding. He said it showed that students…

  • So someone actually made the perfect writing software….

    It’s called Ulysses III and it is an exquisite piece of software. It combines my favourite bits of Scrivener with iA Writer. I’ll write properly about it later in the week when I have more time. I’m too busy writing in Ulysses to blog. It’s an absolute pleasure to use: I feel the need to add that ‘perfect’…

  • The International Asexuality conference – 28 June 2014, Toronto

    This notice is directed at everyone – public, press, community members and our allies – with an interest in asexuality. If this is you, please read on!The International Asexuality conference is now only 4 weeks away. The conference is a WorldPride affiliate event and will be held at Ryerson University, Toronto on 28 June 2014 – the…

  • A Brief History of John Baldessari (narrated by Tom Waits)

    (HT Patter) Interesting that this was the work of the Catfish directors.

  • Apply now: Ninja Rockstar Content Associates needed A.S.A.P

    More jobs here if these ones don’t take your fancy: Are you a native full-stack visiongineer who lives to marketechplatishforms? Then come work with us as an in-house NEOLOGIZER and reimaginatorialize the verbalsphere! If you are a slang-slinger who is equahome in brandegy and advertorial, a total expert in brandtech and techvertoribrand, and a first-class synergymnast, then…

  • I just realised @soc_imagination is 4 years old tomorrow

    And one of the things that has surprised me is how global it has become. According to Google Analytics, it’s been accessed from 211 different countries in the past 4 years:

  • The sociology of Elliot Rodger

    I wrote an overly brief post recently about the Elliot Rodger case (in the process offending some guys who are nice, though not ‘nice guys’) – this article by Richard Seymour, prefixed with a trigger warning, deftly shows how there’s much more to this case than just one person’s contingent hatred and brutality: This is…

  • CfP: Youth Activism and Resistance Conference

    And to complete this clear out of things that were in my inbox that looked too interesting not to share: Youth activism and resistance conference, Friday 13th June 2014, University of Leicester, UK On Friday 13th of June the University of Leicester will be hosting one of the British Sociological Association’s Regional Postgraduate Events. The theme of this…

  • CfP: Theorising Personal Medical Devices: New Perspectives

    CALL FOR PAPERS Theorising Personal Medical Devices: New Perspectives 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 is one which…

  • Special Issue on ‘Gender, Sexuality and Political Economy

    This looks good: Link to the Journal Issue: http://link.springer.com/journal/10767/27/2/page/1 List of Contents: 1) Susie Jacobs and Christian Klesse: lntroduction: Special Issue on “Gender, Sexuality and Political Economy” (pp 129-152) 2) Floya Anthias:  The Intersections of Class, Gender, Sexuality and ‘Race’: The Political Economy of Gendered Violence (pp 153-171) 3) Susie Jacobs: Gender, Land and Sexuality: Exploring Connections (pp 173-190) 4) Encarnación…

  • Coming across old projects you completely forgot about

    But that never went anywhere….

  • Alan Watts on Empiricism

    Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he…

  • Why Google’s driverless cars baffle me

    This sort of thing happens all the time when I use Google Docs: So why would I ever get in a self-driving car with no steering wheel?

  • “With every racist pointed finger, I hear the goose steps getting closer”

    It’s probably 12 years since I first heard this song. It’s been on my mind today as I’ve been thinking about recent events in Europe. It’s one of those songs that indexes my unfolding life, as I recurrently come back to it and find something slightly new each time. The depressing thought I had earlier…

  • The rise of think tanks

    This podcast discussion is very interesting. I don’t think I’d ever heard leading figures from the think tank world reflect so openly about how they see their work. Any adequate sociology of think tanks has to be able to account for these self-understandings: The role of think tanks in shaping public policy dates back nearly…

  • The seedy(ish) world of content marketing

    I’m getting more and more of these. How much of the content of blogs is ‘inserted’ in this way?

  • Concurrences in Postcolonial Research conference, Kalmar, Sweden, 20-23 August 2015

    Call for panels and papers Concurrences in postcolonial research – perspectives, methodologies, engagements Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden, 20-23 August 2015 In recent years, postcolonial research has set out to challenge dominating statements of the past and present. This is where the concept of concurrences comes in, which is a guiding term for this conference. It is…

  • Nigel Farage vs. Tony Blair

    Oh Tony, if only you’d used your powers for good rather than for evil.

  • So @soc_imagination is supposedly the 4th most popular Economics blog in the UK

    It feels a little wrong that it’s ranking above Simon Wren-Lewis on eBuzzing. The methodology is a little opaque and I’m wondering if the reason for this high ranking is my ‘proactive’ scheduling of the @soc_imagination twitter feed: Blog ranking based on the score calculated by Ebuzzing which considers various numerous parameters including the number…

  • Valuing electronic music

    Valuing Electronic Music Upstairs at The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JB 6 June 2014 4.30-10pm Admission free Valuing Electronic Music is an ongoing study of electronic music and the people who value it, carried out by Daniel Allington (Open University), Anna Jordanous (King’s College, London), and Byron Dueck(Open University). Our work explores how the value of electronic music transcends…

  • Margaret Archer interviewed in Times Higher Education

    See the full interview here: What has changed most in higher education in the past 10 years? Bureaucratic incursion, expressed through the regulation of funding, reward and recognition for departments and individuals, via performance indicators and sanctions. Their consequences are completely negative: collegiality becomes competition; informal esteem becomes a formal hierarchy; concern for students becomes…

  • Why do people blame their iPads for the fact they can’t concentrate in meetings?

    This is a line of thought I seem to encounter ever more frequently, perhaps reflecting how integrated into everyday life these mobile technologies are becoming: I am deeply attached to my ipad and have it with me almost constantly. I check my email obsessively and tend to all the alerts and messages generated by the…

  • The Anthropology of Hipsters (and what it reveals about Anthropology)

    Thanks to Benjamin Geer who sent me this link, following an interesting discussion we had about Bourdieu and the sociology of hipsters last week. It’s on the Savage Minds blog which I don’t read anywhere near as often as I should: Anthropologists as Scholarly Hipsters, Part I: What is a Hipster? Anthropologists as Scholarly Hipsters, Part II:…

  • “You work your day doing something you’re not proud of, and you decompress at night with television and whisky”

    the industrial economy seduced us into believing is that the deal was simple: You work your day doing something you’re not proud of, and you decompress at night with television and whisky, and on weekends you can go for a run. Right? Do that forever, and forty years from now you’re dead — that’s the…

  • The violent rage of the ‘nice guy’

    The gunman committed his killing spree just hours after posting a chilling video online in which he spelled out his murderous plans for “retribution” because of rebuffs by female students at college. Lamenting that he was still a virgin at 22, he declared, “I will kill every single blonde *** I see”, and blamed women…

  • The breaking of intellectual superstars

    I’ve blogged a few times recently about Thomas Piketty and the making of intellectual superstars. I find his elevation to “rock star” status fascinating, not least of all the deeply performative nature of this silly epithet, revealing as it does many interesting trends about the status of intellectuals in contemporary circumstances. The case has become even more fascinating with…

  • “Stop closing down the debate!”: some thoughts on racism, free speech and UKIP

    I’m currently listening to BBC Any Questions and, perhaps predictably, it’s filled with UKIP supporters following their success this week. Its astonishingly depressing stuff. But one recurrent feature has been the notion that politicians have continually suppressed free debate on immigration by “playing the race card” until Nigel came to their rescue and allowed the “silent majority” to…

  • What is it like to be a telephone fundraiser?

    A few weeks ago I blogged about the professionalisation of charities. Leon Ward just sent me this article he wrote about his own experiences as a telephone fundraiser. It’s definitely worth reading in full here. I found his description of the training given by call centre operators particularly interesting: During my training I was particularly shocked…

  • Queer Futures – new research project

    This looks like a very important & worthwhile project: Queer Futures is a national study exploring the self-harm and suicidal feelings of young LGBTQ peopleLancaster University is leading a £300,000 study aimed at reducing self-harm and suicide among young people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or questioning.International research has shown that LGBTQ adolescents and…

  • How does someone come to identify as asexual?

    Via Oozing Ink I love this. Though it does make me sad to see how something it took me 8000 words to express in academic language can basically be conveyed so much more powerfully in 6 images.

  • George Galloway: “I don’t want your fucking vote”

    Via Political Scrapbook

  • The slow death of originality? Thoughts on the self-plagiarisation of Slavoj Žižek

    There’s an interesting article by Žižek on the Guardian website. It’s a little too pop-sociological for my tastes but it’s nonetheless an engaging read. However the first paragraph of the article is lifted verbatim from his The Year of Dreaming Dangerously: During a recent visit to California, I attended a party at a professor’s house with a Slovene…

  • Next Critical Sexology Seminar – 30th May – “Sex Critical Approaches to Pornography”

    http://www.criticalsexology.org.uk 30 May 2014 | Sex Critical Approaches to Pornography A guest-organized session convened by Prof. Feona Attwood & Dr Helen Hester, Middlesex University. Venue: The Boardroom, 2nd Floor, College Building, Hendon Campus, Middlesex University (Map here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/Hendon_Campus_Pocketmap.pdf) From 2pm. (The seminar will take the form of four 10-minute-long discussion papers followed by responses and debate. This session…

  • Akello Stone on Visual Sociology

    Via @CreateSociology @CreateSociology @CreateSociology @CreateSociology @CreateSociology

  • Valuing Electronic Music

    Valuing Electronic Music Upstairs at The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, London N1 9JB 6 June 2014 4.30-10pm Admission free Valuing Electronic Music is an ongoing study of electronic music and the people who value it, carried out by Daniel Allington (Open University), Anna Jordanous (King’s College, London), and Byron Dueck (Open University). Our work explores…

  • The six challenges social media poses for social researchers

    There’s a great post by Kandy Woodfield on the NSMNSS blog. Do read the full post – it’s a panoramic yet concise overview of the current terrain. I’ve listed the challenges below for my own notes rather than as a substitute for reading the original post. The methodological challenge: “we have yet to fully address the fact that a high…

  • The Impact Agenda and the Good (Academic) Life

    This was the rather unlikely connection suggested in Jonathan Wolff’s Guardian article yesterday. I have massive respect for Wolff, who taught me as an undergraduate and is the only lecturer who has ever consistently held my attention, which left me taking this article more seriously than I otherwise might have. To be fair, he’s not talking about…

  • No, @tvlicensing, I still don’t own a TV. Would you please leave me alone?

    My annual letter from TV licensing says “naturally, we don’t want to contact you unnecessarily”. So why do they send me an annual letter? Every year TV licensing requests that those who do not own a TV “re-confirm” this. They require you to register as not owning a TV. Does anyone else find this as absurd…

  • Buzzfeed and the “the acceleration of the temporal rhythm of late capitalist visual culture”

    The quote in this title isn’t from a critique of Buzzfeed written by a contemporary critical theorist loftily bemoaning everything this site is coming to represent. It’s from a paper written by the founder of Buzzfeed when he was a critical theorist loftily bemoaning the cultural logic of late capitalism: Buzzfeed has achieved an outrageous amount of success in…

  • Warwick University Ltd Conference (not this Friday but soon)

    Great looking conference at Warwick this friday which is free & open to all: Warwick University Ltd

  • Racism and Digital Communication and Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: 2 events at @SocioWarwick 11th June

    Two excellent looking events organised by people in my department: Workshop on Race, Racism and Digital Communications, 10.30-1pm, Gillian Rose Room (R3.25), Ramphal Building, University of Warwick [with the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, Warwick] Discussion featuring Alana Lentin, Sanjay Sharma, Kirsten Forkert and Nathaniel Tkacz on transformation of race through digital communication networks, ambient racism and…

  • Call for Artwork RGS-IBG 2014: Geographies of Co-Production in the Arts

    Geographies of Co-Production in the Arts: Artists, Communities and the CityExhibition: Call for ArtworkAnnual International Conference, London, 26-29 August 2014Royal Geographical Society (RGS) with Institute of British Geographers (IBG)1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2ARCurators and convenors: Dr Saskia Warren (University of Birmingham) & Dr Martin Zebracki (University of Leeds)This exhibition at the largest annual Geography conference…

  • Academics using kickstarter

    I was intrigued to see this great project by Emma Jackson and a collaborator on Kickstarter. It’s fantastic that it seems to have been so successful for them. Is this likely to become more widespread? I find this quite exciting in some respects but also quite worrying, in so far as that it could easily be…

  • Power in a World of Becoming, Process, Entanglement & Attachment – Programme Announced – June 2-3 (please circulate)

    Apt 2014: Power in a World of Becoming, Process, Entanglement & Attachment June 2-3, University of Warwick (Ramphal)   ‘In ever era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (Walter Benjamin)   Plenary Speakers: Louise Amoore (Durham); Christian Borch (CBS, Copehagen); Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck);…

  • 31 things the current UK government have privatised or want to privatise

    child protection services the probation service the royal mail emergency calls to the fire service the land registry the NHS blood service Eurostar large swathes of the school system significant policing functions the motorway network the met office ordnance survey companies house student loans the behavioural insights team Remploy the NHS forests Lloyds the courts…

  • CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs