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  • 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…

  • 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

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  • Austerity comes to the Ukraine

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  • Dr House successfully disproves asexuality, wins $100

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    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

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