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  • Realist evaluation, mechanisms and theoretical minimalism

    At IACR earlier today I heard two interesting talks about Realist Evaluation. I had previously had a vague idea about what this involved, largely through encountering citations from Pawson in other texts, without ever having really grasped what it was in a concrete sense. Now I have, I’m very interested. All the more so because of…

  • A lovely review of my book!

    I was initially excited when Taylor & Francis suggested that Kristina Gupta, Todd Morrison and I extend the journal special issue that we published on asexuality into an edited collection. However my excitement was rather dashed when I found out the book was going to be £85. While it was still an improvement on the £125 price…

  • The Bullshit Machine

    The digital management guru Umair Haque seems to be having something of a nihilistic turn. At least until you get to the end of this essay, posted on his medium blog, which somewhat undermines the effect of a piece of writing I actually rather liked: I’m bored, in short, of what I’d call a cycle of…

  • Four extremely interesting digital sociology postdoc opportunities at Goldsmiths

    Working with Evelyn Ruppert: Job Title: Postdoctoral Researchers Salary: £36,009 (min) – £40,161 max incl. LW Full time (1.0 FTE) Fixed-Term from 1 November 2014 until 31 October 2017 Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London We are seeking to appoint four experienced postdoctoral researchers to join the Department of Sociology to work on a European Research…

  • Self-tracking, governmentality and social control

    This post on Org Theory, which makes reference to a superb New Yorker article about the Fitbit, nicely captures an ambivalence about self-tracking which I share: In fact, there is a whole Quantified Self movement, complete with conferences and meet-up groups. One obvious take on this is that we’re all becoming perfect neoliberal subjects, rational, entrepreneurial and self-disciplined. For me, though, what is…

  • Notes for a realist theory of social movements 1.1

    These are some notes I’ll be adding to as the project on social movements I’m working on with Tom Brock develops. Initially they’re aiming towards the revision of a paper and chapter we’ve written (as well as the conference paper we’re giving in a few days time) but we also have a much bigger project…

  • Reminder: CFP still queer / a postgraduate and early-career work-in-progress study day

    This looks helpful: 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,…

  • Notes for a realist (mis)reading of Erving Goffman 1.1

    In this series of posts I’ll be performing a realist (mis)reading of Erving Goffman, a theorist of social life I find fascinating and problematic in equal measure. By (mis)reading, I mean that I intend to read Goffman for my own purposes, focusing on what I can extract from the text which furthers the development of…

  • An introduction to blogging and twitter for social researchers

    I’ve been doing some work this afternoon on my upcoming training course at the National Centre for Social Research and I suddenly realised I hadn’t actually blogged about it yet! It’ll be a hands-on introduction to blogging and twitter for social researchers, intended to have participants up and running by the need of the day with a…

  • The poetics of the gaze in capitalist modernity

    The illusion of the gaze is homologous with the politics of the public sphere just as, strictly speaking, the logic of pop culture carries with it the discourse of the gendered body. Does not the culture of desire invests itself in the fantasy of the image? The eroticization of consumption functions as the conceptual frame for the ideology of…

  • The most ridiculous sentence I’ve ever read

    This means: not renouncing the noetic that transitionally infinitizes its objects, which is what Valery called Spirit; and yet not ignoring all kinds of sublimation processes that have phantasmatic essence that can never be isolated, thus which are, in other words, an imaginative activity coming from the unconscious and from its critique (in both senses of the genitive), that…

  • Turn! Turn! Turn!

    I blogged yesterday about the irritating preponderance of ‘turn’ rhetoric in the humanities and social sciences. I compiled the list of 44 by starting with ‘turns’ that were familiar to me. I then used a google wild card search (“the X turn” + humanities social sciences) to extend the list. I googled for a specific string if I…

  • How to Delete Your Facebook Account

    And avoid my mistake of rejoining only to delete your account once more… interesting that this has been viewed 344,000 times and that this in itself merited a mention on the radio 4 programme I was listening to which made me search for the video.

  • Help: alternatives to geo-blocking to protect sites from bots?

    For the last few weeks the CPU usage for Sociological Imagination’s server had been running at 100%. Having had this experience before, I was assiduously avoiding any unnecessary memory intensive plug ins and keeping everything regularly updated. Given that the site was starting to crash on a regular basis, I investigated further and found near continual traffic…

  • Can we have a ‘turn’ to end all turns?

    In the early 20th century there began a marked reorientation within analytic philosophy, with a concern for language gradually coming to supplant some of philosophy’s more traditional concerns. In fact, it’s not entirely meaningful to describe this as a trend within ‘analytic philosophy’ because this ‘linguistic turn’ was integral to the field formation of analytic philosophy in…

  • Some thoughts on microfoundations and methodological individualism

    The notion of microfoundations emerged from within Marxist theory as a claim that “macro explanations of social phenomena must be supported by an account of the mechanisms at the individual level through which the postulated social processes work” (Little 1991: 196). I first encountered this idea on Daniel Little’s blog Understanding Society and I’ve started…

  • Asexuality Videos from World Pride

  • Asexuality at the WorldPride 2014 Toronto Recap

    Originally posted on The Asexual Librarian: Saturday, June 28th, was the International Asexuality Conference at Toronto’s Ryerson University. It was a big hit! A lot of people turned out for it! AVEN has a photo and video thread as well as a thread for conference feedback. A simple search for “asexuality conference” on YouTube will…

  • The emergence of digital sociology

    I’m really looking forward to Deborah Lupton’s book on Digital Sociology which is due to be released next year. There’s a extract from the introduction on her blog which gives a helpful overview of the pre-history of digital sociology, focusing in particular on the way in which subdisciplinary boundaries had tended to fragment sociological inquiry…

  • Incorporating blogging into an academic CV

    These are the four options I’ve suggested in my chapter on this: Listing blog posts as individual publications under a specific subheading of your publications list e.g. giving ‘blog posts’ the same status as ‘conference presentations’ or ‘book reviews’. This might be most suitable for people who primarily submit guest posts to other websites. Listing…

  • The politics of facebook

    This post by Zeynep Tufekci on her Medium site is the best thing I’ve read yet about the recent facebook controversy. I’m struck by how this kind of power can be seen as no big deal. Large corporations exist to sell us things, and to impose their interests, and I don’t understand why we as the research/academic community…

  • Long drives

    last night I remembered being 17 I met a girl with a taste for the world and whiskey and rites of spring spent every night with cassettes that she liked  in a car that I borrowed a lot. and I could never get her to believe. ‘Cause we tasted a kiss that was sent from…

  • Two upcoming quantified self special issues

    Flagged up by Deborah Lupton on the medical QS mailing list: Sensor Informatics and Quantified Self Deadline: 18 December 2014 Preventing disease through promotion of healthy lifestyle choice is a potentially cost-effective approach to modern healthcare challenges. Choices such as diet, physical activity, sleep, smoking and alcohol, have all been associated with many medical conditions.  The…

  • Adopting a homeless person

    Is my title unfair? Part of me thinks it is but I can’t shake the feeling that this is what HandUp effectively amounts to, even though it probably does have a positive impact on the lives of the adoptees “homeless neighbors in need”. The profiles are crying out for a content analysis – how does one…

  • Cfp “The ‘Spaces and Places’ of Professional Work in the Post-crisis Economy” – RC52 ‘Sociology of Professional Groups’ Interim Conference, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, 19-21 March 2015

    Call for papers Interim Conference ISA – International Sociological Association – RC 52 ‘Professional Groups’ Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano, Italy 19-21 March 2015 Session: The ‘Spaces and Places’ of Professional Work in the Post-crisis Economy [Session linked to EU FP7 COST Action IS1202 ‘Dynamics of Virtual Work’] Convenors: Ivana Pais, Università Cattolica del…

  • Sociologies of Everyday Life – Still Time to Submit Your Paper

    I’m submitting something for this and you should to: Sociology A journal of the British Sociological Association Sociologies of Everyday Life Special Issue Call for Papers Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2014 Everyday life sociology is a well-established tradition in the discipline and interest in ways of understanding day-to-day worlds continues to be significant. These engagements…

  • The Sociology of Hard Choices

    It’s been a while since I last saw a TED talk I had any inclination to blog about (so long in fact that I only just found out that TED now have their own WordPress short code) but I really enjoyed this talk by the philosopher Ruth Chang. It uses the notion of ‘hard choices’…

  • Interview about #asexuality for an Italian magazine

    What is asexuality, and what are the social causes of asexuality? Asexuality is usually defined as ‘not experiencing sexual attraction’, though it’s important to recognise that not everyone accepts this definition and some extend it to include a low or fluctuating experience of sexual attraction. This is distinct from celibacy, in the sense that this…

  • Would you like to write for Discover Society?

          Discover Society is a free online magazine featuring articles on social research, policy analysis and commentary. It is supported by Policy Press and endorsed by the British Sociological Association and the Social Policy Association. We publish short (1500 word) research-based articles on a variety of topics. We also publish: ‘Viewpoints’ (on current social issues); ‘Policy Briefings’; ‘On the…

  • Bev Skeggs discusses the contemporary sociological imagination with Les Back

    In this lovely dialogue hosted on the Goldsmiths website, thanks to Dave Beer for flagging it up, Bev Skeggs discusses the contemporary sociological imagination with Les Back. To begin they discuss discomfort and dislocation as an integral aspect of the sociological imagination, engendering an inability to take the familiarity of things for granted, instead prompting a…

  • Maya Angelou’s Letter to Her Younger Self

    This wonderful letter by Maya Angelou was featured on Brainpickings last week. It was a contribution to a 2006 anthology, What I Know Now: Letters to My Younger Self, in which forty-one famous women wrote letters back in time to their former selves. The anthology itself looks very interesting & Maya Angelou’s letter is wonderful:…

  • Help: different approaches to managing departmental twitter feeds

    I just discovered that the Psychology department at Salford University has an innovate approach to maintaining their department twitter feed. Each week a different person tweets from the department, encompassing all students and staff. This has left me interested in the different approaches that departments can take to managing their twitter feeds. These are the ones…

  • My current research on #asexuality #awp2014

    Originally posted on "Just a friend": Emerging contemporary sex and gender social movements: My presentation on my research at the Asexuality Conference in Toronto:

  • The politics of ‘brand protection’ in #highered

    There’s a valuable analysis by John Holmwood on the Campaign for the Public University site of ‘brand protection’ in UK higher education. It’s a response to this blog post which was subsequently deleted (thankfully there are screenshots): In a recent blog, David Browne, Senior Associate on the Employment Team for SGH Martineau, Legal firm with…

  • The next phase of post-democracy? Political disagreement becoming personal prejudice, or, stop being racist against the Tories

    I listened to a fascinatingly crap podcast while in the gym earlier – Robin Aitken, introduced solely as a ‘Tory supporter’ but last seen complaining about institutional discrimination against conservatives during his career at the BBC, has produced an episode of Analysis on Radio 4 exploring whether anti-conservative sentiment is the last acceptable prejudice. It’s a…

  • The future of scholarly publishing

    Is anyone else getting these e-mails with ever greater frequency? And if so could you point me towards an explanation of what’s driving this? Dear Mark Carrigan, I am Vernon Thompson, the editor of World Journal of Social Science Research (ISSN 2332-5534). I have had an opportunity to read your paper “There’s more to life than sex? Difference…

  • Getting inside people’s frames: reflexivity and cultural sociology

    In recent months I’ve been slowly working through some of Jeffrey Alexander’s work. I’m interested in what cultural sociology has to offer as I begin to try and extend my PhD research on internal conversation & biography into my planned post-doctoral work on the sociology of thinking. However I’ve found Alexander’s work slightly hit and miss, occasionally…

  • Wait, WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? The Newbie’s Guide to the MLA Insurgency

    Originally posted on PAN KISSES KAFKA: Yesterday, I came out swinging in favor of a rag-tag band of upstarts–Lee, Sharon, David and Maria (we need to give you guys a name–the Gaggle of Four? The MLA Marauders? Help me?)–who have the gall to think they can be on the ballot of the next Executive Council…

  • Asexuality in the 1970s

    Originally posted on NEXT STEP: CAKE: https://www.dropbox.com/s/siuafzzw3f0rn8v/AsexualityBeforeInternet.pptx A copy of my presentation from the History Panel at the International Asexuality Conference at WorldPride in Toronto – feel free to comment if you would like links to or more info about anything mentioned! ?

  • Asexual History Interest Group

    Originally posted on NEXT STEP: CAKE: Asexual History Interest Group The Asexual History Interest Group is a Google Group (part mailing list, part forum, part document sharing and storage) for anyone interested in: studying asexual history learning about asexual history recording asexual history creating asexual archives and more! If you think you might be interested,…

  • 10 ways to promote your university that don’t involve viral videos

    I don’t like ‘viral videos’. I like many videos that have gone viral. But the notion of producing ‘viral videos’, with a deliberate strategy to engender virality, irritates me – it entrenches commodification of internet culture, often involves trying so hard that it doesn’t work and contributes to the blurring of the boundary between commercial and non-commercial…

  • Professional Social Media: 10 Tips for Twitter

    Originally posted on UCF History: This is the first in a series on social media that university students, professionals, and academics may find useful! Twitter for Professionalization Despite its steady popularity, some professionals still think of Tweeting as a waste of time. If you think of Twitter as just another way for people to post what…

  • Using blogs to publish working papers

    The potential role of blogs in helping disseminate working papers and other grey literature is something that has fascinated me for a long time – I’m curious about all the interesting unpublished work that is sitting in people’s filing cabinets, either to one day be worked up into a formal paper or perhaps doomed to remain…

  • Mike Savage on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century

    Mike Savage has posted a thoughtful essay on the Stratification & Culture Research Network blog reflecting on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. There’s a lot of interest here but the element that really intrigued me was the discussion of Piketty’s methodology and how it relates to current trends within sociology: Methodologically, Piketty is…

  • Critical realism and social informatics

    Well this is an interesting trend. Until PJ Wall told me about it a couple of weeks ago, I was completely unaware that critical realism has provoked such interest within social informatics – in fact I was unaware of this entire field until relatively recently and I’m rather taken with it. Witness this recent special issue…

  • The future of #highered? Zero hours lecturers in “an enterprising and innovative community”

    I’ve included a screen shot below (HT @Andr_Dim) , in case the advert mysteriously vanishes from the internet. What really disgusts me about this is the shamelessness of the mission statement – this is “an exciting time for Edinburgh Napier University” in which they seek to become an “enterprising and innovative community” through expanding their…

  • The regulation of academic social media use

    This is a subject I’ve wanted to research for some time but have struggled to see how. I suspect we are seeing the very early stages of a backlash against the uptake of social media by academics – encompassing both the regulation of its ‘improper’ use and the incentivisation of its ‘proper’ use, with the latter being in practice…

  • Owen Jones – The Establishment And How They Get Away With It

    I still think he should have called the book Toffs but I’m nontheless looking forward to reading it:

  • Where is Bitcoin 2.0 Heading?

    After a conversation at CompSocSci in which I finally grasped how Bitcoin works, I’ve been trying to learn more about it. I watched some of the live stream from the recent CyberSalon devoted to the topic. The videos from the event have now been uploaded and I’m looking forward to watching them in full. The videos are online here.…

  • What sociologists actually do and what social theorists think they should do

    There’s a great post on Daniel Little’s blog which uses a critique of analytical sociology and critical realism to explore a premise which he argues they both share: ontology dictates methodology. As he frames the issue: Both groups have strong (and conflicting) ideas about social ontology, and both think that these ideas are important to the conduct…

  • Call for Papers: Sexual Cultures 2: Academia Meets Activism

    April 8-10 2015 University of Sunderland London Campus, South Quay, London, UK  This conference, co-hosted by the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, and the Onscenity Research Network will take place on April 8-10 2015 at the University of Sunderland London Campus, London, UK Along with two keynote speakers addressing themes of intersectionality…

  • Sex therapists, pathology and asexuality

    This article by a sexual health therapist appeared on an Australian news website a few days ago. It cautions against identification as asexual on the grounds that it precludes ‘further exploration’. We are told that “sexuality is as normal as breathing” and that those deliberating about their possible asexuality should “do some exploring, take your time”…

  • Martin Scorsese and the Art of Silence

    This is wonderful: (via Explore)

  • Cfp – Moments of rupture – deadline for submissions extended

    International conference Moments of rupture: Event and negativity in modern thought October 29 & 30, 2014 Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile **The abstract submission deadline has been extended until July 7, 2014** Keynote speakers: Andreas Kalyvas (The New School, USA) Eduardo Sabrovsky (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile) Rupture is a motif central to modernity. A certain…

  • Who needs Game of Thrones? Introducing the Pugs of Westeros

  • An Alternative History of Sociological Thought

    This idea occurred to me earlier today when I read this great article on Harriet Martineau for a second time. I’d first heard of Martineau through a conversation on twitter, ultimately leading to this proposal by Steve Fuller. The longer I study sociology, the more I learn about these figures, whom for whatever reason did not make it into…

  • Writing and your imagined audience

    Do you imagine an audience when you write? I’ve become aware recently of how rarely I do this. The main reason for this has been the jarring experience of finding myself overly conscious about the particular audience I happen to be writing for in recent projects. I wrote a chapter on asexuality for a handbook…

  • The World Cup in Brazil and the Political Economy of Mega Events

    This fascinating discussion offers a penetrating critique of the politics of the world cup, reflecting on the ‘echoes of dictatorship’ that can be seen in the implementation of such a mega event within a country that has only been a democracy for a few decades. If you wonder what the next stage of post-democracy will…

  • 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

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