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  • The details of the Fourth Cultural Political Economy Workshop

    Originally posted on Bob Jessop: ? Cultural Political Economy Research Centre (CPERC) Lancaster University The Fourth Annual Cultural Political Economy Workshop Sponsored by Sociology Department Theme: Cultural Political Economy of Finance, Debt and Crisis Date: 22 May 2014 (Thursday) Place: Charles Carter A18, Lancaster University Time: 9:30-5:00 ? The details of the Fourth Cultural Political…

  • Unintentionally hilarious university recruitment videos

    (HT Sarah Burton) I’d forgotten how stunning the LSU one is. Are there others……? Via Joe Webb: Though this is surely intentionally funny – or am I being naive?

  • Academic Conferences: “Disability in Translation” and “Theorising Normalcy and the Mundane”

  • Fast capitalism and peer review

    The public debate concerning ‘scare stories’ about statins is an interesting case study for the politics of peer review. It’s an important reminder that these seemingly technical issues of scholarly communication can have important public consequences. The case seems to be framed in the media as calling into question the ‘gold standard’ of peer review. Is…

  • In Praise of Brevity

    The relative brevity of blogging vis-à-vis other modes of publication is often understood as reflecting the putative superficiality of the former. However there are virtues to brevity which are too little appreciated. Chris Dillow had a lovely (and brief) post on his blog about this a few months ago: 1. Longform writing is narcissistic. It presumes…

  • Floria Charity harassed by police and couple fined $746 for feeding homeless people

    More info here: Chico and Debbie Jimenez, a husband and wife team, aren’t handing out food in the Florida heat every Wednesday because of a court order or for a paycheck. They do it because they believe helping the poor is their religious duty. The pair run a Christian outreach group, Spreading the Word Without Saying…

  • DIY Citizenship – A Symposium: Critical Making, Activism & Design

    Reminder – DIY Citizenship – Critical Making, Activism & DesignA one-day symposium and book launch examining do-it-yourself citizenshipin making, activism and design.Wednesday 28th May, 10am – 6pmHosted by UWE Bristol’s Digital Cultures Research Centre at thePervasive Media Studio, Watershed, BristolTo mark the UK launch of DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and SocialMedia (MIT Press), a day…

  • The Performativity of Social Movements (CC @TGJBrock)

    What does it mean to talk about the performativity of social movements? The obvious answer is to look to the aspect of performance inherent in the mobilisation of contemporary social movements. In this sense protests and demonstrations can be seen as drawing upon established repertoires of activity, orientated towards an audience, which depend upon certain meanings and also reproduce these…

  • CfP: How capitalism survives? A Marxist-Feminist perspective

    How capitalism survives? A Marxist-Feminist perspective Call for Papers within the framework of the 11th Historical Materialism Annual Conference ‘How Capitalism Survives’ – 6-9 November 2014 – Vernon Square, Central LondonThe Historical Materialism annual conference in London has emerged as a pivotal site for critical, engaged, constructive, and provocative scholarship and activism internationally. This is…

  • CfP: BSA Activism in Sociology Forum

    BSA Activism in Sociology Forum welcomes new contributions from both established and early career researchers as well as sociologists outside of academia to share their hands-on activist experiences or reflections. Contributors are welcome to produce a new piece built around, but not limited to, the themes below or to respond to any future published pieces…

  • CfP: Researching Sex and Intimacy in Contemporary Life: An interdisciplinary Symposium

    Call for papers  Researching Sex and Intimacy in Contemporary Life: An interdisciplinary Symposium July 18th 2014 Hosted by the School of Law, Politics and Sociology and supported by Researcher-led Initiative funding,  University of Sussex With confirmed speakers Dr Meg Barker, Open University: http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/main/staff/people-profile.php?name=Meg_Barker Professor Andrea Cornwall, University of Sussex: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/92604 This symposium aims to bring together researchers across…

  • Looking for an Evernote alternative? Centrallo might be what you’re looking for

    I wrote a couple of weeks ago about why I think Evernote is overrated. Since then I’ve been looking for alternatives and I think I’ve finally found one. Centrallo is an initially slightly confusing hybrid between a Getting Things Done orientated task manager and an outliner application. I was initially a bit baffled by it but…

  • Asexuality in Television and Film: Explicit Mentions (a reference post)

    Originally posted on NEXT STEP: CAKE: First, a quick explanation: This list is specifically of explicit, canonical mentions of asexuality in film or television; anything with an explicit mention of the word “asexual” is included, whether it’s a good example of actual asexuality or not. Instances of possible asexuality that are hinted at but not…

  • “Why do I never listen to me?”: Internal Monologues and TV Comedy

    I wrote a few months ago about the representation of interiority in film and television. I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had about the internal conversation after six years researching it. While some sociologists are deeply sceptical of the concept, it nonetheless always seems striking to me how intuitively people grasp what it…

  • Daniel Miller on Becoming Human

  • Elizabeth Warren for President

  • Sociology as a brand

    Sociology is a damaged brand, associated with a particular kind of politics and with particular sorts of social interventions. These remain controversial. But a damaged brand is still a brand. People who are attracted to these causes are not put off by the fact that sociologists have a narrow range of political preferences, a range…

  • Podcasts: Digital Sociology at #BritSoc14

    These are the podcasts from the Digital Sociology plenary at the BSA conference. Thanks to Huw Davies for recording and editing these (as well as the digital public sociology podcasts).  

  • CfP: The media’s evolving role in sex education

    Sex Education journal — Special Issue The media’s evolving role in sex education Entertainment media have long been identified as having a key role to play in education about sex and relationships. All too often in studies of sexual learning the media have been assessed for their potentially negative effects on young people. For example,…

  • CfP: Big Data in Political Science

    SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED: CALL FOR ARTICLES NEW DEADLINE: MAY 15, 2014 RSF: THE RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION JOURNAL OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES CONFERENCE ON BIG DATA IN POLITICAL ECONOMY The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences invites submissions for its upcoming issue on “big data in political economy.” The aim of the issue and conference is…

  • Everyday Encounters with Violence: Critical Feminist Perspectives

    2015 Feminist and Women¹s Studies Association (FWSA)ConferenceEveryday Encounters with Violence: Critical FeministPerspectives9th ­ 11th September 2015School of Geography, University ofLeedsThis three-day conference aims to create an inclusive and supportivespace for scholars at all career levels to come together in a supportiveenvironment to engage in critical feminist perspectives on violence. We drawupon a wide definition of…

  • The professionalisation of charities

    I just received a phone call from a very pleasant woman from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Except she wasn’t from the WWF, she was from GoGen: “a specialist charity fundraising team” who are “engaged by some of the UK’s best- loved charities to maintain and develop relationships with their current and potential supporters”.…

  • The sociology of ‘hipsters’

    Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society. But after punk…

  • Henry Miller on The Artist and individuality, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

  • When writing is hard

    I’ve spent the last week struggling to finish a book chapter which I had assumed I could sit down and complete in an afternoon’s work. I’d forgotten how frustrating writing can be. In fact I can’t remember the last time I found something this difficult to write. I’d forgotten how weirdly gruelling it can feel, as…

  • CfP: Profiling Digital Sociologists

    A couple of years ago I started a project which I subsequently forgot all about. I’ve now remembered about the Digital Sociologist audio profiles I was putting together and I’d quite like to finish them. Would you like to be profiled? The audio is really simple to record. Get in touch if you want to…

  • I’d forgotten how much I love watching Parkour….

  • Morphogenesis and realist meta-theory: @dlittle30 reviews Margaret Archer’s Social Morphogenesis

    The philosopher Daniel Little has written about Margaret’s Archer recent book Social Morphogenesis on his 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 Morphogenesis, represents a rigorous and serious step forward in the…

  • Paul Krugman discusses Piketty with Bill Moyers

    I love the line “this isn’t a book about Gordon Gecko, it’s a book about Gordon Gecko’s son or daughter”.

  • Paul Krugman Makes Rand Paul’s Head Explode With Facts In ‘Big Government’ Debate

  • I give it a few months before Piketty shows up in web memes…

    Second, Piketty and fellow French economist and University of California, Berkeley, inequality researcher Emmanuel Saez are arguably the most important public intellectuals in the world today. Their research is driving the economic agenda pushed by Washington Democrats and promoted by the mainstream media. The soft Marxism in Capital, if unchallenged, will spread among the clerisy and…

  • The Piketty Panic and the Making of Intellectual Superstars

    I wrote last week about the rapidly emerging discourse of Piketty having won the argument. I’m somewhat suspicious of it, largely because I read enough postmodernism at an impressionable time in my life to believe that people don’t win arguments in this way. Having said this, I’m actually reading the book now and it is clearly something…

  • Digital sociology and the coming crisis of qualitative research

    This is a deliberately provocative title. But an interesting post by patter reminded me of a theme that has been on my mind for a couple of years. Pat’s post concerns the implications of the increased ‘findability’ of qualitative researchers for their practice: Once you know where someone works, a lot more detail comes within reach. Because of…

  • Become a contributor to The Asexual Agenda!

    Originally posted on The Asexual Agenda: The Asexual Agenda is a blog written by ace-spectrum people, for ace-spectrum people, covering topics at a higher level than what you find in the mainstream news. We talk about experiences, identity politics, intersectionality, academic research, asexual activism, and anything else you like. Several of our bloggers are stepping…

  • Has anyone else’s wordpress spam filter stopped working?

    There’s loads of this stuff every single day and it’s starting to get irritating:

  • Call for contributors: relaunch asexualitystudies.org as a group blog

    I’ve been thinking recently about trying to relaunch asexualitystudies.org (which is now asexualitystudies.wordpress.com because the domain lapsed) as a group blog. As I see it the site would serve four purposes: Collating news about asexuality research Curating asexuality related resources  Providing a network spacing for asexuality researchers Providing a forum for people to write shorter…

  • Jeremy Rifkin: “The Zero Marginal Cost Society”

  • Orphans

    Goodbye circus wheelMay you rest along the sea I have given you the fire of my youth And the triumph o’er my enemiesGoodbye fair weather home, and your faithless factoriesI have given you the blood and the truthfrom the wounds they laid onto meAnd whatever they left, well, I kept it for my own heartAnd the lonesome…

  • And I hate these things but I always attend

    And I hate these things but I always attend, a little sip of something to take off the edge. And I make my way through the ghosts in the room, trying to crack a smile. And who you supposed to be? You look like heaven tonight And me I’m a tomb, a corpse in a…

  • Spitting like a dragon with a similar demeanour

  • A Eulogy for Twitter

    Initially this article irritated me immensely. As clichés go, “it’s not as good as it used to be” is one I find peculiarly obnoxious, at least when it relates to the internet. But I think it actually makes some very interesting points: Those fictions have proven foolish, one-by-one. The service is filled with spam accounts: The…

  • Queering Higher Education Panel at SRHE Conference 2014: Call for Panel Presenters

    Call for Panel Presenters Queering Higher Education Panel at SRHE Conference 2014 If your work is related to where Queer Studies meets the topic of Higher Education, academia or universities, you are cordially invited to consider participating in the panel I am convening at the SRHE (Society for Research into Higher Education) annual conference this…

  • Governing Academic Life – conference marking 30yrs since Foucault’s death

    This looks fantastic! If only it didn’t clash with something equally good at Warwick on those days… Governing Academic Life A conference at the LSE and the British Library, June 25-26, 2014 Register online* June 25, 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Governing Academic Life marks this anniversary by providing an occasion for…

  • Elphinstone PhD Scholarship on technology and work-life bourdaries

    I’d love to do this. Shame I just finished one. Hmm, never thought I’d say that: (Dis)Connected Working: Managing Work-Life Boundaries in a Digital Economy The proposed project will explore organizational policies and practices related to technology and work-life balance, and the ways in which these make possible specific ways of working, living, and combining…

  • Lisa Diamond on Sexual Fluidity

    I’ve intended to read Lisa Diamond’s Sexual Fluidity for a few years. I’ve finally got round to it and I’m kicking myself for not having read it earlier. I think I’ve been gradually losing interest in sexuality studies over the last year or two and this book has near instantly reawakened my enthusiasm for it. There needs to be…

  • Why ask “why talk”?

    Well this is interesting (sort of). Though it reminds me of the ‘Free Hugs Society’ some peculiarly obnoxious students at Warwick established a few years ago, something which prompted them to go around grabbing strangers while being seemingly oblivious to how intrusive and problematic this was to many of the people being grabbed. The people behind…

  • Overcoming ‘nature vs nurture’

    The psychologist John Money used the example of language to demonstrate the misguided nature of such assumptions. You were not born with your native language, and nothing in your “nature” predisposed you to learn English rather than Swahili. Nor did you “choose” English over Swahili. Rather, language was determined by your native culture. Yet our…

  • Asexuality and Sexual Normativity: An Anthology

    The last decade has seen the emergence of an increasingly high profile and politically active asexual community, united around a common identity as ‘people who do not experience sexual attraction’. This unique volume collects a diverse range of interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical work which addresses this emergence, raising important and timely questions about asexuality and…

  • PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?

    What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process of drawing this out and thinking through its implications for research can often be…

  • Quantifying the time wasted by quasi-market systems

    I’ve just spent an hour and a half booking a stack of train tickets for the next few months. I do this a few times a year and, with practice, I’ve become pretty good at it. I object to subjugating my plans to the vagaries of the ticketing system but it seems obviously true to me…

  • Digital Public Sociology at #BritSoc14

    It was interesting to follow the #BritSoc14 tweeting last week. The quality and quantity of the live tweeting was quite striking relative to previous conferences. Not surprisingly, it was the digital sociology sessions that provoked the most live tweeting. If Twitter is a reliable guide, which it probably isn’t, digital sociology seemed to be one…

  • Theorizing Roles and Collective Intentionality: Contemporary Perspectives

    Theorizing Roles and Collective Intentionality: Contemporary Perspectives Monday 5 May 2014, 1-5pm Seminar Room 3, Chrystal MacMillan Building 15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD   Overview: Despite the arguments of committed critics, notions of roles and collective intentionality have persisted in social science and philosophy. They provide ways of conceptualizing aspects of our sociality and…

  • 5 reasons why Evernote is overrated

    It’s astonishingly easy for the syncing process to get mixed up. The synch for Omnifocus, which surely has a much more complex database, never gets confused. I seem to generate synch conflicts on a small minority of occasions that I use Evernote. These synch conflicts sometimes lead me to lose data. Usually they’re just annoying though. The…

  • How the “Internet of Things” is Killing Capitalism

    I think there’s a massive degree of overstatement in Rifkin’s argument here (not for the first time) but it’s nonetheless a powerful set of claims. Is he correct that “this is the first new economic paradigm to emerge on the world scene since the advent of capitalism and socialism in the early 19th century”?

  • Jerome Bruner’s six essential conditions of creativity

    From this Brainpickings article: Detachment and commitment. A willingness to divorce oneself from the obvious is surely a prerequisite for the fresh combinatorial act that produces effective surprise. there must be as a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition a detachment from the forms as they exist… But it is a detachment of commitment. For there…

  • The Uncompromising Pessimism of Public Sociology

    Michael Burawoy on public sociology and sociological science: I have always insisted on a division of labor between professional and public sociology. The division of labor implies contradiction as well as interdependence but sociology is of little use if it cannot give some guidance to labor as to the tendencies of capitalism, a theorization that…

  • PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?

    What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process of drawing this out and thinking through its implications for research can often be…

  • Dogs Annoying Cats with Their Friendship

  • The Centre for Social Ontology

    The Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) was established in 2011 at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Now based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, its main focus is the Morphogenetic Project. The Morphogenetic Project produces an annual volume as part of the Social Morphogenesis series. The first two volumes in this series are Social Morphogenesis and Late Modernity:…

  • Question of the Week: April 22nd, 2014

    Originally posted on The Asexual Agenda: If you’ve outed yourself as asexual, what’s your favorite reaction that you’ve gotten? If you haven’t outed yourself before, what reactions would you like to get? In general, I like people to react with interest–after all, I mentioned it for a reason–but be mostly interested in whatever topic I…

  • Tony Blair: ‘I say lies’

    Wonderful work by Cassetteboy: Alas! It’s still online here –> http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2014/apr/25/tony-blair-cassetteboy-video-mashup-bloomberg-speech

  • The opposite of everythingism

  • The Sociology of Everythingism

    There was a Guardian article last summer which really caught my imagination. It introduced the term ‘everythingist’ to explain a recurrent inability to commit because there are so many other things to do. I’m a recovering everythingist. Or maybe I’m not recovering but I’ve learnt to make it work for me (at least in my working life). Though…

  • Are 90% of academic papers really never cited?

    There’s a fantastic article on the LSE Impact Blog which addresses this often cited yet rarely substantiated claim: Many academic articles are never cited, although I could not find any study with a result as high as 90%. Non-citation rates vary enormously by field. “Only” 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82%…

  • Self-awareness and reflexive technologies

    What is it to be self-aware? Why is it a good thing? One of the strengths of the relational realist conception of reflexivity is that it doesn’t conceptualise this capacity in terms of self-awareness. One can be hyper-reflexive and yet devoid of self-awareness, constantly acting on the basis of partial or entirely fallacious self-knowledge in a ceaseless spiral…

  • PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?

    What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process of drawing this out and thinking through its implications for research can often be…

  • Games for health UK conference at Coventry University

    This looks interesting: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/digital-media-games-for-health-tickets-10613403977

  • The making of intellectual superstars

    Is this the first time a 640 page hardback book about economics has been a “#1 Best Seller” on Amazon? I suspect so. It does sound like an excellent book. I’ll almost certainly read it once it’s out in paperback. But I’m intuitively suspicious of the discourse surrounding the book and the rapidity with which Piketty has…

  • Video blogging your journal articles

    I really like this video from Pat Thomson that’s part of the YouTube channel for Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. It’s a great template for how short video blogs can tie into journal articles, presenting the ‘backstory’ of the paper and explaining the author’s intentions in writing the paper: I’m interested in how…

  • Warwick Oral History Network Seminar

    Warwick Oral History Network Seminar ‘Voices of the University’: Institutional Histories and Conflicting Communities Dr Richard Wallace (Warwick) Voices of the University Project Wednesday 7 May 4pm, H3.02 (Humanities Building) All welcome! More information on the Voices of the University Project to mark Warwick’s 50th Anniversary athttp://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/current/universityvoices/ This paper will address the ‘Voices of the University: Memories…

  • The many ways to be a ‘gray-A’

    I just came across this fascinating post. It’s worth reading in full. I have a lot of thoughts about ‘gray-A’ as a category – at some point I need to clarify these. The basic point in the post is the heterogeneity of ‘gray-A’ as a category. For those unfamiliar with the term, this is how it’s defined on…

  • Digital Sociology events at #BritSoc14

    ‘The Social Life of (Digital) Methods: roundtable discussion’, Conference Auditorium 2, Friday 25th, 5-6pm This roundtable discussion explores digital methods and their implications for sociological research. The following speakers will be taking part: Susan Halford (University of Southampton), Deborah Lupton (University of Canberra), Noortje Marres (Goldsmiths, University of London), Mike Savage, (London School of Economics…

  • Perhaps unsurprisingly Social Media for Academics is proving much more fun to write than my PhD was….

    I’m making good progress with the first chapter of Social Media for Academics. One of the main features of the book will be a focus upon reflexivity – not in any sort of theoretical way but rather on trying to help the reader walk through deliberations about how they want to use social media and what they want to get out…

  • A glossary of critical realist terminology

    I hadn’t realised this was still online. It’s a very useful resource: Absence Actualism Change Closed and Open Systems Completion Constellation Critique and Transcendental Argument Determinism Dialectics Differentiation and Stratification Emergence Epistemic and Ontic Fallacies Epistemic Relativism and Judgmental Rationality Ethical Naturalism and Moral Realism Explanation Fact-Value Facts Laws Metaphysics Ontological Extensionalism Ontological Monovalence Reasons…

  • Cycles to Gehenna

    It was less an act of hubrisMore a lonely hearts club at the helm of a magic bulletAway on a relentless bid for rarefied inertiaRattletrap forks married to the patchy terra firma Ursa Minor getting warmer I crowbar into the pecking order The dreck between the whores and Betty Ford-ers Hug a double yellow spine…

  • The Psychosocial Imagination

    I really wish I could go to this but unfortunately it clashes with something I can’t get out of. I’ve wanted to engage more seriously with psychosocial studies for ages: 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…

  • The academic blogosphere, scholarly craft and the end of ‘pluralistic ignorance’

    One of many useful discussions in Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists concerns ‘pluralistic ignorance”. He argues that this social psychological effect manifests itself in academia in relation to writing. Academic writing is a private and isolated endeavour, in which adversity (rejections by journals, lacerating criticism, endless requests for revision) are dealt with in isolation. The…

  • How many online accounts do you have?

    The process of trying to rationalise mine over the last few days has left me newly aware of how outdated the username and password system is. With a lot of effort I’ve managed to get it down to 55 accounts with their own username and password, as well as a few that use Twitter or Google ID…

  • In defence of ontology

    Any social researcher has a finite set of beliefs, whether implicit or explicit, concerning the properties of the phenomena they’re investigating. Give the manifold ways in which these beliefs can influence the investigation, it’s valuable to work towards rendering them in a maximally consistent and explicit way. The absence of this doesn’t mean that good social…

  • What is progress in social theory?

    At last year’s International Association for Critical Realism conference, I saw perhaps the most impressive conference presentation I’d witnessed in my five or six years of going to conferences regularly. Jamie Morgan demolished the notion of ‘norm circles’ offered by Dave Elder-Vass and he did so in a way which made a whole host of important meta-theoretical…

  • Foucauldian analysis and the mystification of elites

    In a recent review of The Reflexive Imperative*, Jonathon Joseph describes subjects “being encouraged to become active citizens and consumers who must make the right life choices based on acquiring the appropriate skills and information, making informed choices about risk activities, taking responsibility for their welfare and well-being and drawing on the appropriate resources (and social capital)…

  • Griselda Pollock, “Is Feminism a Bad Memory or a Virtual Future?”, Warwick, May 12

    The Centre for the Study of Women and Gender of the University of Warwick is delighted to invite you to its 2014 Annual Lecture. The lecture is free to attend (no registration required) and open to all. Monday, May 12th, 2014, from 5.00 to 7.00 Ramphal Building, room 1.13 PROFESSOR GRISELDA POLLOCK (University of Leeds) Is Feminism a Bad…

  • The Faux Underdogs of the Digital Economy

    As helpfully pointed out by Mark Ware (see comments) Springer actually has nothing to do with Axel Springer AG. So there’s two points here (the faux underdogs and the profits in scholarly publishing) which aren’t really connected in the way that I thought they were:  I’ve just been reading a provocative article by Mathias Döpfner, CEO…

  • The Public Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (part 2)

    This is the second in a series of posts about the public sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. I wrote yesterday about his arguments concerning globalisation and social movements. This provides the political context in relation to which he saw a scholarship with commitment as important. In this post I’m going to discuss what he saw this as entailing…

  • Bourdieu meets Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, Beauvoir and Mills (in Burawoy’s imagination)

    I came across this interesting project by Michael Burawoy earlier. He conceives of a whole series of imagined ‘meetings’ between Bourdieu and leading political thinkers, elaborating his own understanding of Bourdieu’s work by considering its relationship with important intellectual trends. I’ve only looked through the Mills one so far but these do look very interesting and…

  • The Public Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (part 1)

    The thing I like most about Bourdieu is his conception of public sociology. It seems clear to me that Bourdieu was a public sociologist, though others are less certain about this and I suspect it’s not a term he would have chosen to use himself. For a whole host of reasons, I’ve never been massively interested in much of Bourdieu’s…

  • The Semiotics of Academic E-mail Signatures

    I feel slightly ridiculous about this fact but I’ve spent the last twenty minutes agonising over how to change my e-mail signature. For a long time I’ve had a pretty simple and self-explanatory e-mail signature: e-mail: mark@markcarrigan.net twitter: @mark_carrigan web: www.markcarrigan.net But I’m also in the middle of doing lots of e-mailing as a research associate (in the…

  • Caring in Crisis? Communications and Public Reactions to Humanitarian Crises and International Development Causes

    Birkbeck Institute for Social Research  Caring in Crisis? Communications and Public Reactions to Humanitarian Crises and International Development Causes Saturday 7th June 2014  9.30am – 5pm  Room B33, Birkbeck Main Building (Torrington Square) We are delighted to announce that the renowned moral philosopher Professor Peter Singer will be presenting the keynote at theCaring in Crisis colloquium sponsored by Birkbeck Institute…

  • “I told ’em you will grow to be something tenacious and exalted, you are mighty, you are gracious, you are lauded”

    Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts; Poolside; 0 for 1 and don’t forget spoons twiceLukewarm folgers; mold on his moonpieRooms in his home that dissipate into fruit fliesSuicide lane wide load ride looting in the wake of an amicable marooningMy duty go from moving in packs to sharing food with a cat. [To Moms:] “it’s me, I accidentally sawed…

  • PhD Workshop: What’s the Point of Ontology?

    What’s the Point of Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process of drawing this out and thinking through its implications for research can often be a…

  • Why you should blog and tweet about your research

    I just received an update from Altmetric about one of the publications I’m tracking. I think it’s a good paper but its relative visibility online obviously stems from my own tendency to blog and tweet about it. Early adopters will inevitably gain more rewards in this respect but I’m nonetheless convinced that everyone should blog…

  • The Importance of Disappointment

    Why disappointment? In common usage, and in the dictionary, we talk about disappointment as what happens, what we feel, when something we expect, intend, or hope for or desire does not materialise. One of the difficulties of living in our world is that it is perhaps increasingly less clear exactly what we might expect or…

  • An Invitation to DIY Sociology #1

    For the last few months I’ve been playing with the idea of DIY Sociology, largely as a result of my dissatisfaction with professional associations. The intuition underlying this is that the institutional forms of academic life are not immutable, arising in a particular context and changing as that context changes, so that a relational reflexivity about…

  • Women’s Spaces and Feminist Politics: one day conference at QMUL

     16 May 2014 Time: 9:30am – 5:00pm Venue: Room 126, School of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London E1 4NS You are invited to a one-day conference organized by London Women and Planning Forum, Rooms of our Own and Women’s Studies without Walls. This one-day conference will explore the role of women’s spaces in feminist politics, focusing…

  • The Privacy of Public Sociology

    I’ve spent the last couple of hours compiling a reading list for the book project about public sociology I’m planning. I’ve been using Albert Tzeng’s invaluable resource on Sociological Imagination as a starting point, extending it through google scholar and supplemented by the notes I’ve been intermittently taking over the last year. It’s astonishing quite how much of this…

  • Cats vs racoons

    I see my cat act in a similar way when a local stray comes to steal her food. She acts aggressively towards the other cat but has no idea what to do when the other cat completely fails to respond, having no interest in performing territoriality but only in acquiring food. It occcured to me…

  • Academic scribes, their writing and their unsociability

    The paradox is that we academic scribes are not always very sociable. We cling to the library like bookish limpets that, like Kierkegaard, find real human beings too heavy to embrace. We speak a lot about society but all too often listen to the world within limited frequencies. I am proposing an approach to listening…