Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • Stuart Hall BSA Conf Event 24 April

    ​Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014) at the BSA Annual Conference in Leeds http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/bsa-annual-conference/programme.aspx The British Sociological Association invites delegates to attend the following events in memory of Stuart Hall, past president of the BSA. Presidential Event with the Activism Forum and the Race and Ethnicity Study Group: Learning from Stuart Hall: Activism Inside and Outside…

  • AGender: A Conference about Female and Transgender Masculinities

    Gender:A Conference about Female and Transgender Masculinities16 and 17 June 2014 – Leeds Art GalleryThis conference is inspired by the artwork (and lives) of the artists Marlow Moss and Claude Cahun which will be shown in exhibitions at Leeds Art Gallery during the summer of 2014. It will explore female and transgender masculinities in the context of visual arts, queer culture…

  • Social Media in Social Research conference, London

    The Social Research Association is pleased to announce our Social Media in Social Research conference, on Friday 16 May at the British Library conference centre in central London.This is the fourth SRA conference on the uses of social media, a field of increasing relevance for social research.  Our presentations this year are:•       Uninformed consent…

  • Man Walks Out Of Question Time Studio Over Immigration Row

    Curse this ranting audience member for making me warm to David Aaronovitch: If only this could be laughed off in reality. I find it hard not to be severely pessimistic when I think this through.

  • The creepy realisation that I got lured back into facebook

    I really hate Facebook. I only joined when I moved from London to Coventry in 2006, largely because everyone I met at Warwick used it. It’s something that’s useful to have when you’ve moved to a new place and you don’t know anyone. It makes it easy to archive new social connections, if that doesn’t sound like a horribly…

  • Improvisation in academic life

    I really like Steve Fuller’s arguments about ‘improvisation’. He rehearsed them yesterday in a post for Sociological Imagination about the originality of conference keynotes: For about ten years now, I’ve been arguing about the benefits of improvisational performance in academia, not simply as an experience for the audience but more importantly as a way of getting ‘experts’…

  • Nigel Thrift and Steven Koonin discuss urban science and big data

    (via Progressive Geographies)

  • David Jay on the “head clicky thing” that happens when non-asexuals suddenly understand asexuality

    I’d completely forgotten that he tells the story of asexuality on House. I must remember to include this if I do end up writing this chapter.

  • BSA Seminar ‘Masculinities, Adaptation and Difference’ – deadline extended

    BSA Gender Study Group and BSA Youth Study GroupMasculinities, Adaptation and DifferenceA joint, one day seminarhttp://bsamasculinities.wordpress.com/BSA Meeting Room, Imperial Wharf, LondonFriday 4 July 2014Call for PapersDeadline extended to 25.04.2014Since the late 1970s critical studies of men and masculinities have explored the ways in which men’s lives have been shaped by a variety of cultural, political and…

  • Older Care Home Residents and Sexuality/Intimacy.

    Conference: Older Care Home Residents and Sexuality/Intimacy. The Older People’s Understandings of Sexuality (OPuS) research group, (Manchester and Bradford Universities), is organizing a FREE half-day conference on older care home residents and sexuality/intimacy. The event will take place 2pm – 5pm, Monday 14 July 2014, conference room G.036B, Jean Macfarlane building, University of Manchester. Lunch will…

  • The politics of austerity

    Richard Seymour had a thoughtful and incisive analysis in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, released around the same time as his new book on austerity (see the video above). It addresses what I take to be the questions which the left has to address: how was it that a crisis of finance capital transmuted, as…

  • Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age

  • The Phenomenology of Reading and the Rhetoric of Theorists

    The notion of ‘clarity’ is a contested one within social theory. This was made clear to me when various posts of mine, often just embedding videos of other people speaking, attracted a lot of indignation on Twitter. There are some people who really don’t like Lacan and Žižek being criticised for their lack of clarity. The latter still…

  • The greatest tweet I have ever seen

    When I teach Wittgenstein someday I’m going to use this instead of duck-rabbit. pic.twitter.com/DpZjxys6i3 — Andrew (@andrewjrad) April 8, 2014 After posting this I suddenly realised that embedding a tweet isn’t exactly saving for posterity in the way I had intended. So I’ve uploaded the image here. Does anyone else self-archive using their blog like…

  • Reframing the ‘self’: personal identity, social identity, self-concept and self-presentation

    In his book about Richard Rorty Neil Gross makes interesting use of the notion of self-concept, understanding it as the totality of things an individual thinks and feels to be true about themselves. Our investment in a self-concept shapes our interaction by engendering tendencies towards its preservation: Beyond suggesting that actors are motivated to protect the integrity…

  • Stuart Hall BSA Conf Event 24 April

    ​Stuart Hall (1932 – 2014) at the BSA Annual Conference in Leeds http://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/bsa-annual-conference/programme.aspx The British Sociological Association invites delegates to attend the following events in memory of Stuart Hall, past president of the BSA. Presidential Event with the Activism Forum and the Race and Ethnicity Study Group: Learning from Stuart Hall: Activism Inside and Outside…

  • CfP: Love and Relationships in the Media

    Yet another international conference I’d love to present at. I either need to get myself a travel budget or stop reading calls for papers: International conference on Media and Popular Culture 30-31.05.2014. Vienna, Austria CFP for Panel ‘Love and Relationships in the Media’ Contemporary media often include content on love and relationships; however, it is difficult to…

  • Review of punk sociology

    I actually liked the ‘punk’ bit of this book less than I expected to. I’m a big fan of Nick Crossley’s work – though I disagree with him on a lot of things, engaging with it was really important for developing the theoretical perspective in my PhD. I’ve read a lot of what he’s done and the punk research…

  • Allen Ginsberg reading Howl, with music by the Kronos Quartet

    This is astonishingly good. Almost immediately after it ended, I felt the urge to turn off the computer and go listen to it again, but this time in a dark room with headphones.

  • Jack Kerouac on Resonance and Subjectivity

    I wrote a rather wordy and wooly post about resonance and poetry a few weeks ago that I wasn’t happy with. I thought back to it when I came across this earlier: Blow as deep as you want – write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic…

  • Disability Conferences: Prostheses and patenting, “crip displacements”, and disability sport

  • The Asexuals Project

    Originally posted on The Asexual Librarian: While I quite busy at the moment, I had to include this website since I just now stumbled upon it! The project is based in Italy and Spain, which may be why it fell through the cracks for me, but I just had to feature it on this blog!…

  • Scroobius Pip the storyteller

    I’ve just finished listening to the album of Scroobius Pip doing spoken word at the Royal Albert Hall. I’m now kicking myself I wasn’t there – though it’s surely a side venue rather than the hall itself. I’ve heard him do this before. But it’s never worked for me live, largely because it’s such a…

  • Asexuality World Festival 2014

    Originally posted on The Asexual Librarian: FYI: The official name of the conference has been changed as well as their e-mail address: wp2014@asexuality.org.

  • Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive

    I’m finally reading Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive by C Wright Mills. As I expected I don’t actually like it very much. I have a strange relationship to Mills, in that I find him an inspiring figure but I’m not particularly interested in his work. In this case, I don’t accept the methodological premise that social…

  • Social Theory and Intellectual Translation

    One of the problems I had when I studied analytic philosophy was my inability to map much of what I was studying onto how I saw the world. There were a few exceptions (Hume, Marxism, Causation, Political Philosophy) but I otherwise struggled to understand what was at stake in the work we were studying. This work was presented to…

  • Mobile apps for qualitative research, or, the app that never was

    About a year and a half ago, I got obsessed with an idea for a mobile ethnography app (iResearch?) that I sketched out and explored the feasibility of getting developed. I eventually decided it was a bad idea which would cost £5000-£15000 to develop. This was probably for the best. I’m certain a thousand other…

  • Is the state shrinking? Yes, even if John Redwood says it isn’t

    There’s no money left in the kitty! We’ve maxed out the nation’s credit card! By this point, I find it hard to be reasonable when confronted with these inane metaphors*. But there’s been another response, recurrently voiced by the Tory right over the last few years, which is less effective for them as a rhetorical strategy but…

  • Identity, experience and meta-categories in social theory

    I’ve just started reading Ian Craib’s Experiencing Identity. I’ve intended to read his work for a while and I’m already quite taken with it. It seems to be exactly the sort of realist engagement with the psychosocial that I’ve been looking for, after getting increasingly frustrated by ‘psychosocial studies’ but nonetheless being profoundly aware that…

  • The Causal Power of Ideas

    I’ve always tended to write in a fragmented way. This post is incredibly rare in that I’ve started writing it at what seems, at least for now, to be the beginning. I’ll usually jump in with an idea, elaborate it until I get stuck and then move onto another. If I know what I’m trying to say…

  • CfP: What are conferences for? The Political economy of academic events

    The Sociological Imagination invites short articles (500-1500 words) critically reflecting upon the prevailing forms of intellectual meeting within the contemporary academy. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How could they be done differently? What are the sociological implications of these standardised forms of intellectual meeting? Whose voices do they amplify and whose do they suppress?…

  • A cat and a dolphin learn to interact

    I ♥ this video. Via Sociological Images

  • Lots of free stuff from the Journal of Critical Realism

    The JCR’s publisher has chosen them as ‘journal of the month’. There’s more info here. I’ve listed the open access articles I’m planning to read below. From Embodiment to Agency: Cognitive Science, Critical Realism, and Communication Frameworks, Tobin Nelhaus Bhaskar’s Philosophy as Anti-anthropism, Seo Mingyu Reality, Representation and the Aesthetic Fallacy: Critical Realism and the…

  • Big Data & Society now open for submissions

    We are pleased to announce that the new SAGE journal, Big Data & Society, is now open for submissions at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bdas. The journal invites contributions that analyse Big Data practices and/or involve empirical engagements and experiments with innovative methods while also reflecting on the consequences for how societies are represented (epistemologies), realised (ontologies) and governed…

  • After Kinsey: (Re)Theorising Sexuality afnd Gender in a ‘Post-Closet’ Context

    After Kinsey: (Re)Theorising Sexuality and Gender in a ‘Post-Closet’ Context Thursday 26th – Friday 27th June 2014 Radcliffe, University of Warwick This concluding seminar will consider the epistemic, intersubjective and affective implications of ‘trans’ culture, discourse and practice. It will ask whether, to what degree and in what terms does the emergence of ‘trans’ challenge…

  • The Asexual Story Project is live!

    Originally posted on The Asexual Agenda: The Asexual Story Project is now live! The Asexual Story Project is a place where people who identify with the asexual community can share their personal stories about being asexual, coming out, relationships, or anything their heart desires. At present the site only contains a handful of stories, but…

  • Dear apple – can I have the space back on my ipad? Thanks

    While my ipad has thankfully stabilised with recent upgrades to iOS 7 (initially it crashed daily) I still haven’t reclaimed the 10+ gb that has mysteriously gone missing. If I thought this might happen, I would have bought the ipad with more diskspace:

  • Austerity comes to the Ukraine

  • Call for papers – Moments of rupture: Event and negativity in modern thought

    This looks fascinating, shame it’s so far away from me: International conference Moments of rupture: Event and negativity in modern thought October 29 & 30, 2014 Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile Keynote speakers: Andreas Kalyvas (The New School, USA) Eduardo Sabrovsky (Universidad Diego Portales, Chile) Rupture is a motif central to modernity. A certain…

  • Dr House successfully disproves asexuality, wins $100

    I’ve been invited to submit a chapter about representing asexuality  and I’m wondering if I should try and write something about the treatment of asexuality on House* (series 8 episode 9). I mean ‘treatment’ in two senses here, as the story about asexuality revolved around treating asexuality. I’ve not actually watched the full episode yet but this clip seems to give…

  • The dangers of the Kindle: attentive reading vs mining for ideas

    I love the Kindle app on the iPad. Or at least I want to love it. I’ve been using it intermittently for well over a year now and I’ve gradually realised how difficult I find it to read attentively when using it. I’m a compulsive underliner, margin scribbler and corner folder of books. I sometimes feel slightly embarrassed…

  • How to be a blogger without having your own blog

    It’s a common assumption that ‘bloggers’ and ‘blogs’ are unavoidably intertwined. There’s a sense in which it’s true but it can also be slightly misleading. It’s possible to be a blogger without having your own blog. In fact, there are a lot of advantages to doing this. Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson from the LSE…

  • Patrick Dunleavy on the Republic of Blogs

    After a long period of monopolising academic discourse, European universities went into decline as classical scholasticism, which was primarily inward and backward looking, gave way to the ideas of Enlightenment. Intellectual development moved outside the walled gardens of academia, because enlightenment thinkers shifted their various discourses into the realm of correspondence, creating a Republic of…

  • And almost six years later it was finished…

    Thanks to everyone who tweeted nice things. Even those people who reminded me that I’ve still got to do a viva which, unfortunately, will not be till the summer. In spite of what I wrote here I’m actually pretty pleased with it. Though some of the weekends in the last month that were entirely devoted…

  • Asexuality and Sexual Normativity: An Anthology (20% discount)

    Granted it’s 20% off a book priced at £85 but, as they sent it to me, I might as well circulate it. The code is IRK71 and works through the T&F Psychology Press page here. The book is an extended version of the Psychology & Sexuality special issue we produced a couple of years ago*. If you’re…

  • “Am I living my life right? As an INTP”

    This discussion is something I stumbled across a while ago. It seems far from atypical for the bulletin board, Personality Cafe, which hosts it. It begins with someone asking “Am I living my life right? as an INTP” and listing features of their lifestyle while seeking reassurance that this is the ‘right’ way to live,…

  • Groups: Challenges for Contemporary Political Philosophy

    Groups: Challenges for Contemporary Political Philosophy University of Rennes 1, November 19-21, 2014  Call for Papers Groups matter in political philosophy, most would now agree – but precisely how they matter is contentious. Group-related issues emerge in various contexts of debate: the redressing of past or current injustices suffered by ethnic or cultural minorities; the nature and scope…

  • The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies

    This relates to the issues I was rambling about here. I’ve posted about Chris Hedges in the past. I’m a big fan of his work. He’s also a very interesting man.

  • Attila the Stockbroker on Bob Crow

    There was a man who held his ground. Fought every inch, and won the day. His legacy, his members’ lot: Good work conditions, decent pay. By Tories and their tabloid dupes And those who seek more than their share Just like Millwall, his favourite team, He wasn’t liked, and didn’t care. But those who worked…

  • Only Lovers Left Alive, or what is it like to be a meta-reflexive vampire?

    I’m not someone who is interested in vampires, either in the highbrow terms you’ll sometimes find in English Literature departments or the lowbrow terms that modishly respond to their asinine revival in popular culture (also sometimes found in English Literature departments). But if the man who directed Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai has…

  • Porn Studies is Released

    Routledge Journals Publishes Porn Studies March 2014 – Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) publish the first double issue of Porn Studies, the premier dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal tocritically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical, institutional, legal and social contexts. Porn Studies is edited by Professor Feona Attwood of Middlesex University and Professor…

  • God in the Quad

    There was a young man who said, “God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there’s no one about in the Quad.” REPLY Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that’s why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by…

  • The Epistemology of Civilizational Collapse

    There was an interesting report earlier this week on a Nasa-funded study modelling the dynamics of civilizational collapse. I definitely intend to look at the study when it’s released, though I’m rather cautious about this sort of modelling given that so much of the detail abstracted away from seems obviously causally relevant to the phenomena…

  • Road to Joy

    The sun came up with no conclusions. Flowers sleeping in their beds. The city cemetery’s humming, I’m wide awake it’s morning. I have my drugs I have my woman. They keep away my loneliness. My parents they have their religion, but sleep in separate houses. I read the body count out of the paper. And…

  • Wilhelm Reich’s 6 Rules for Creative Sanity

    Following rather nicely from Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, which I came across a couple of days ago, Brain Pickings has posted these 6 Rules for Creative Sanity offered by Wilhelm Reich: Keep one’s life financially independent. Continue unabated to exercise one’s power of creativity in concrete, strenuous tasks, always seeking perfection as near…

  • Lacuna – new magazine on human rights

    CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Lacuna magazine is now live and, for the upcoming themes, we are seeking your involvement. We will next be discussing issues of austerity and prosperity, followed by the theme of war and peace. We are looking for reviews of contemporary media: books, films, theatre etc. If you have seen or read something…

  • Trying to “evade the academic literature”

    There’s a wonderful discussion in the midst of this review essay of Bernard WIlliams’s collected essays, which incidentally sound fantastic, in which the author defends Williams against accusations of lazy scholarship. I’ve written about this issue in the past (particuarly here and here) and it’s one which continues to concern me. The author of the…

  • “Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind”: Jack Kerouac, creativity and academic writing

    I just came across this wonderful list by Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, in the Beats anthology I’m slowly making my way through: Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy Submissive to everything, open, listening Try never get drunk outside yr own house Be in love with yr life…

  • Richard Dawkins, Twitter and the dangers of thinking aloud

    There’s a great Brendan O’Neill post on Telegraph blogs* in which he reflects on the self-destruction of Richard Dawkins** online and its roots in the nature of Twitter as a medium. He’s probably correct that, with the exception of a cadre of ‘skeptic’ true believers, Dawkins has through his ill considered anti-religious tweets effectively destroyed a reputation…

  • Why Medium could change academic blogging

    I wrote a few months ago about the potential value of the Medium blogging service for academics. It’s one of a range of new services which are popping up (see Kinja, Svbtle and Ghost) that differ from older platforms in a range of ways. Given the effective hegemony of WordPress, an obvious question is posed…

  • Tony Benn – The issue is Thatcher

    Tony Benn RIP (via @davidwearing)

  • Max Weber, Markets and Economic Sociology – May 7th by @nicksig1971 @sociowarwick

    Max Weber, Markets and Economic Sociology An event organized by the Max Weber Study Group of the British Sociological Association and the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick In the wake of the recent financial crisis, there is an urgent need for social scientists to think conceptually and critically about the economy and…

  • The ‘creative confusion’ of the near to completion PhD student (part 3)

    I have a PhD to do list which now has six items remaining on it. When these six items, unlikely to take over seven or eight hours, are completed then I no longer have any excuse for keeping hold of my PhD/Green Ball  My supervisor is then going to have a final read through, as…

  • PhD Comics: Les (Really) Miserables – “I Dreamed a Dream”

     

  • Sociology and Attentiveness

    The notion of attentiveness has been on my mind recently, as I find myself frantically jumping through hoops in the run-up to PhD submission. I’ve spent weeks chopping up a 70k word document, rearranging the pieces and plugging the gaps that appear as a result. After years of my PhD being so big and nebulous, it’s oddly satisfying to work…

  • The Ontology of Human Relations and Biographical Entanglement (CC @TGJBrock)

    R. D. Laing says in one sentence what has taken me thousands of words: “our relatedness to others is an essential part of our being … but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being” (Laing 2010: 26) This is what the (confusing?) diagram from my PhD is intended to illustrate. Any person’s…

  • Dear Twitter: can you suggest ways to digitally enhance conferences?

    I asked this question yesterday as I was searching for inspiration prior to a meeting about a conference I’m helping organise. There are so many ideas here, it seems unlikely we’ll be able to adopt many of them. I’m keen to explore ways to go beyond the usual repertoire of filming talks and live tweeting…

  • Using Slideshare and Prezi to disseminate your work

    One of the most obvious forms that digital scholarship can take is making ‘outputs’ public that would otherwise remain private. So for instance making slides available online after a talk or lecture. When I use slides, which is pretty irregular, I tend to make them available as part of the process of preparing. I’ll produce some slides,…

  • Doing nothing for 2 minutes: mindfulness, hyperactivity and technology loops

    I was first introduced to meditation as a teenager via the FWBO Centre in Manchester. It’s something that has always appealed to me but it’s also something I’ve long struggled with. On a number of occasions in my life I’ve sustained a meditation practice, only for it to eventually lapse. Part of the problem is…

  • Death Online Research Symposium

    REGISTRATION OPEN Death Online Research Symposium 2pm Wednesday April 9th – 6pm Thursday April 10th, 2014 Co-hosted by the Death Online Research Network and Durham University’s Centre for Death and Life Studies Collingwood College, Durham. As digital media have become an integral part of our everyday life, so have death and our afterlife become inextricably interwoven with…

  • Asexual Un-Conference in NYC

    I had to turn an invitation to speak at this because I couldn’t afford it. I wish I could go: The asexual community has put together an Asexual Un-Conference in NYC: The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network’s Community, Advocacy, and Knowledge Expo! Also known as AVEN CAKE The full details can be found here: http://avencake.wordpress.com/…

  • Embodied Being, Environing World: Local Biologies and Local Ecologies in Global Health

    This looks interesting: The Interdisciplinary Chair in Anthropology and Global Health in the College d’Etudes Mondiales and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme seeks submissions for a one-day symposium to be held in Paris, France on June 5 and 6.  The event is intended to spark conversation among scholars who are attempting to bring critical…

  • Some thoughts on Foucault and Foucauldians I’m cutting from my thesis

    In an intellectual context within which there is a pervasive and multi-faceted hostility to the idea of the human (Archer 2000 : 17-44), it follows that there is also a widespread scepticism about the notion of interiority, with doubts about the human going hand-in-hand with a mistrust of subjectivity (Giddens 1979: 38). The most sophisticated…

  • Is it ‘binge writing’ or ‘deep work’?

    I’ve tended to be quite negative about my propensity for ‘binge writing’. It suddenly occurred yesterday that this negativity may in part stem from the term I’ve adopted for it. “Binge writing” – it’s hard for that to sound anything other than negative, no? I’d implicitly framed it as a bad habit which, once it…

  • My talk at WorldPride Asexual conference

    In which I become overly enthusiastic about David Jay’s ‘heady clicky thing’ and junk most of my prepared talk:

  • The Iraq war: 10 years on

    It was just under a decade ago that the Iraq war began. I only realised this recently when reading the first volume of the Chris Mullin diaries, covering the bulk of the New Labour era and the first few years of the Iraq war. It’s fascinating to see a portrayal of these events from the…

  • Poetry and resonance

    In his recent book of essays Charles Taylor discusses poetry and resonance. This reflects his long standing interest in how “speech, linguistic expression, makes things exist for us in a new mode, one of awareness or reflection” (pg 56). What does this mean? It is a rejection of the view that words acquire meaning by designating…

  • CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE MARCH 14TH: Tangentially Queer: A Workshop on the Field Formation of Queer Theory‏‎

    CfP DEADLINE: MARCH 14TH Tangentially Queer http://tangentiallyqueer.com: A Workshop on the Field Formation of Queer Theory 16th May, 2014: London School of Economics Keynote speaker: Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London) Call for papers: Tangentially Queer seeks to explore the contemporary terrains of queer theorising, and its trajectories, histories, and field imaginaries. Throughout its academic history, “queer”…

  • Public Sociology and Sociological Writing

    One of my favourite passages by C Wright Mills concerns the tendency of academics to “slip so readily into unintelligibility”. An “elaborate vocabulary” and “involved manner of speaking and writing” become props for a professional self-image which defines itself, in part, through the inaccessibility of the work being produced: In many academic circles today anyone…

  • The intellectual sclerosis of ageing philosophers

    With Leibniz, inevitably, as with almost all ageing philosophers, a certain amount of intellectual sclerosis set in, too. In his later years, the elements of the metaphysical system he first outlined in the Discourse became so self-evident to him that he often saw no need to argue for them. they became a fixed part of…

  • A Little Soul

    Hey man, how come you treat your woman so bad? That’s not the way you do it. No, no, no.. you shouldn’t do it like that. I could show you how to do it right. I used to practice every night on my wife now she’s gone. Yeah, she’s gone. You see your mother and…

  • Invitation to contribute to WomanTheory website and celebrate International Women’s Day

    WomanTheory started as a challenge on twitter to name three women theorists, using the hashtag #womantheory. Within hours, twitter was full of the names of great women theorists, thinkers and writers.   To build this movement, there is now a website: http://womantheory.wordpress.com/ WomanTheory is a collective movement and we are asking people to tell us about…

  • Kate Millett Conference CFP Deadline Extended

    CFP DEADLINE EXTENDED: 14 MARCH 2014 Flying: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Kate Millett 30 May 2014 School of Arts Birkbeck, University of London Supported by the Feminist Review Trust Keynote: Victoria Hesford (SUNY Stony Brook University), author of Feeling Women’s Liberation (Duke UP, 2013) Papers are invited for an interdisciplinary conference dedicated to the work of Kate Millett. Millett became an iconic figure of second wave…

  • Some thoughts on DIY sociology

    In a recent post Ros Edwards and Val Gillies described the Women’s Workshop on Qualitative Family and Household Research which has been meeting independently for a quarter of a century. It began as a “nameless informal support group of five women who met at a British Sociological Association summer school for PhD students in 1988” and…

  • Things Cats Do That Would Be Creepy If You Did Them

  • My PhD in 60 seconds

    This doesn’t really map onto what I’ve actually written at all. Video abstracts are a fantastic idea but it’s perilous to do them in the middle of a five year project.

  • Why asexuality matters for the future of sexual culture

    I ♥ the asexuality media archives. Such a great project.

  • The Paradox of Civility, or, “why is this place filled with such rude assholes?”

    There was a strange and compelling article on Medium this week, reflecting on the author’s experience of being a devotee of Whole Foods, the self-certifying purveyors of ‘natural’ produce who will surely expand in the UK at some point. The author was at great pains to make clear how much he loves Whole Foods: I’ve shopped at…

  • Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some…

  • The ontology of books

    I read a book a decade ago and struggle with it. I read it again now and find it astonishingly thought-provoking. How do you explain this? It seems I bring something different to the book on the second reading: concepts, experiences and knowledge which I lacked at the time of the first reading. But what…

  • “How does one play a saw?”

    (Via Ruth Pearce)

  • Diss Never (Dig Up We History)

  • Nietzsche, Consciousness and Virtue Ethics

    I was recently intrigued to encounter Nietzsche’s evolutionary account of consciousness and find how completely I agreed with it. I would use different language but the point is pretty much the same: a faculty slowly emerges from our biological nature which, as we attain awareness of it, comes to be seen as constituting our essence (partly because, as…

  • Some thoughts on the sociology of animals

    One of many likeable things about the renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne was his relationship with animals. In an intellectual context soon to be overcome with Cartesianism, with its mechanistic understanding of non-human animals, Montaigne exhibited an admirable degree of sensitivity to the consciousness of animals. As Sarah Bakewell ably summarises, A dog, for Descartes, has no…

  • “WHY ARE YOU CLOSED? WHY WHY? TELL US THE REASON!”

    (HT James Baron)

  • Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh

    The phone slips from a loose grip Words were missed then, some apology I didn’t want to tell you this No, it’s just some guy she’s been hanging out with I don’t know, the past couple weeks I guess Well, thank you and hang up the phone Let the funeral start Hear the casket close…

  • “Feminist ‘turns’ and the political economy of knowledge production”, Univ. Warwick, 28 Feb. 2014, 2-4pm

    Workshop: Orientating feminism(s): Feminist ‘turns’ and the political economy of knowledge production The Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick Friday 28th February 28th, 2014, 2.00pm – 4.00pm Social Sciences Building, Room A0.23 Speakers: · Prof. Clare Hemmings (LSE) · Dr. Carolyn Pedwell (Newcastle) · Dr. Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths) · Prof.…

  • The audio of my BBC #asexuality interview (almost 4 years old!)

    Again courtesy of the asexuality media archive. God I love the internet sometimes. I must be careful because I could easily lose a day systematically going thorugh the contents of that archive.

  • CfP: Gender and Disability event, 10/05/14

    You are warmly invited to submit proposals for the forthcoming Gender and Disability event at the University of Sheffield. The Call for Ideas has been extended by one week and submissions will now be accepted up until midnight on Monday 3rd March 2014. Please pass this message on to anyone who may be interested. We look…

  • My new favourite term: ‘omnimaniac’

    I recently read an astonishing book, The Courtier and the Heretic, which I’d bought on the assumption it was a philosophical biography of Spinoza and Leibniz. I love philosophical biographies (and should write about them at some point) but this turned out to be something rather different. It was more of a psychobiography of Leibniz…