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  • 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…

  • The audio of the woman’s hour interview I did

    This has just been posted up on youtube courtesy of the asexuality media archive.

  • The future of twitter in two images

  • Using big data to quantify complex social processes

    Data Science Lunchtime Seminars February 27th, 12.30-1.30pm Room: B3.19 Free pizza! Speaker name: Alexander Petersen Title: Using big data to quantify complex social processes Abstract: New technologies are providing novel ways to curate, explore, analyze, visualize, and interpret massive sources of information, in some cases using previously inaccessible historical records, and in other cases tapping completely new…

  • The Feudal System of Online Content

    There’s a recent article in Salon which gives a great overview of the emergence of “viral publishers” (which need to be distinguished from “content factories”) which have grown rapidly but in a way entirely dependent upon the infrastructure of social media. They encompass everything that was wrong with the older content factories yet employ even…

  • The Sociology of Intellectual Faddishness and the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

    I’m resisting pursuing this thought until my PhD is submitted (and probably until I’ve finished the bulk of my social media book) but if I’m ever going to do some real work on the sociology of intellectual faddishness, it’s increasingly obvious to me that the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit would be a pretty great place to…

  • NOFX live @ Padova 16/06/2013 Full Show

    The drunken banter gets really obnoxious at points. I would still love to see them live again though.

  • Not Your Typical Call for Papers (cc @idlEthnographer)

    With the 2014 Volume, the Berkeley Journal of Sociology will focus its efforts on writing a “history of the present.”  The journal will no longer publish academic research articles. Instead, we seek compelling essays, insightful commentaries, critical analyses, and topical symposiums on the most pressing political and cultural issues of the day. Our aim is to provide…

  • Writing with One’s Feet

    Not with my hand alone I write: My foot wants to participate. Firm and free and bold, my feet Run across the field – and sheet. – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Prelude in Rhymes: 52 After spending much of the last three days cutting up my PhD and putting it back together again, what…

  • Beardyman at Coachella Festival 2013 – Full live set

  • Reach for the sky

    When I was young I was invincible I found myself not thinking twice I never thought about no future It’s just a roll of the dice But the day may come when you got something to lose And just when you think you’re done paying dues You say to yourself “Dear, God What have I…

  • Becoming Who We Are: theorising personal morphogenesis in a changing world

    This was a phrase suggested to me by my friend Holly Falconer in the early stages of my PhD. It resonated with me strongly and, since then, the working title of my PhD has been Becoming Who We Are: Theorising Personal Morphogenesis. What I’m trying to convey with this is a process (how people become who…

  • “You can’t change the past but you can make the future & anyone who tells you different is a Fucking lethargic devil”

  • “in the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn’t dream”

    We must talk in every telephone Get eaten off the web We must rip out all the epilogues in the books that we have read And in the face of every criminal Strapped firmly to a chair We must stare, we must stare, we must stare We must take all of the medicines too expensive…

  • BSA Medical Sociology Group Annual Confernece 2014 – Call for Papers

    British Sociological Association MEDICAL SOCIOLOGY GROUP ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2014 Call for papers Wednesday 10th – Friday 12th September 2014 Aston University, Birmingham We look forward to welcoming you to our 46th Annual Conference. We are pleased to announce Professor Arthur Frank University of Calgary and Dr.Tiago Moreira, Durham University have agreed to be our plenary speakers at the 2014…

  • Inside Llewyn Davis, or what is it like to be a fractured reflexive?

    I was expecting to like this film but it completely exceeded my expectations. Largely because it was such an interesting and accomplished exploration of a particular mode of being-in-the-world. Llewyn Davis is a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village of the early 1960s, enmeshed in a tightly knit cultural world of fellow folk singers and shared…

  • As I hide behind these books I read, while scribbling my poetry

    So now I hang out down by the train’s depot No, I don’t ride, I just sit and watch the people there The remind me of windup cars in motion The way they spin and turn and jockey for positions And I want to scream out that it all is nonsense And their life’s one…

  • The dark side of open access

  • Crisis and personal morphogenesis

    Sometimes by its very nature, routinization begets change, a desire for change that was laying dormant in the mind and cultural experience within the biography of the individual, which may then be trigged into activation by a concatenation of circumstances. Unanticipated crisis can break monotony and bring great change, anticipated change can bring realization of…

  • The empiricist army out to rescue ‘proper evidence-based science’ from the theorists

    So the weather in Britain has been a bit extreme recently, right? Well actually, argues Christopher Brooker, a quick perusal of the facts shows nothing of the sort: On the belief that Britain has recently experienced unprecedented rain, for instance, look at the analysis of the Met Office’s England and Wales rainfall data sets on…

  • The ‘creative confusion’ of the near to completion PhD student (part 2) #phdchat

    Am I procrastinating because I hate editing or because I don’t want to let go of my thesis? A follow up to this post. Currently contemplating the PhD as fetish object in psychoanalytical sense. Then becoming irritated with myself for getting distracted like this. Rather proving the point really. (the connection between this GIF and…

  • “No of course the roof won’t cave in”: ontological security and reflexive poise

    There are many things I dislike about 90s self-help Giddens. However one aspect that has stuck with me is his discussion of ‘ontological security’. This is established relationally between child and care-giver through the durability of trust, acting to “‘bracket out’ potential occurrences which, were the individual seriously to contemplate them, would produce a paralysis of…

  • Are Twitter now selling followers themselves?

  • Angry Johnny & the Radio

    Don’t think twice I still believe it John, we lived those nights Like we were dyin’ on the long haul drives For our Maria, with the ragged sails high And the radio on And I always have remembered, in case you’re wonderin’ 84 takes a lifetime but Bobby does it better I still sing ’em…

  • Representing Interiority in Film and TV

    The notion of ‘internal conversation’ can be contentious in some quarters within the academy. However, outside it, I’ve found that anyone I’ve spoken to about my research instantly knows what I mean when I say ‘internal conversation’ or ‘inner monologue’. I’d suggest that the notion of internal conversation, as something we listen in to needs to be…

  • Funding Opportunity – Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities

    Led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the British Academy, Being Human will be the first nationwide festival of humanities research in the UK. From 15-23 November 2014, it will draw together a programme of activities hosted by HE institutions and their…

  • Changing Intimate Exchanges and Emerging Forms of Resistance to Intensified Self-Commodification

    13th EASA Biennial Conference. Collaboration, Intimacy & Revolution . Tallinn, 31st July-3rd August Call For Papers : Changing Intimate Exchanges and Emerging Forms of Resistance to Intensified Self-Commodification (P099) This panel seeks to explore the recent transformations of individuals’ relationship between ‘self,’ ‘body’ and ‘commercial exchange’ and resistances to the expansion of intensified commodification covering…

  • Regulating Intimacy Graduate Symposium

    Regulating Intimacy Graduate Symposium Indiana University, Bloomington October 17-19, 2014 http://regulatingintimacy.wordpress.com/ Paper submission deadline: April 30, 2014 Symposium registration deadline: July 31, 2014 Intimate relationships exist in many forms but register most often in the popular imagination as sexual. Regulatory systems like marriage, criminal law, social norms, and sex education privilege sexual intimacy and promote…

  • Penguins grieving

  • CfP: What are seminars for? What are conferences for? Towards DIY 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…

  • A public address to the British Government by Anonymous

    I wonder how much more stuff like this we’ll see post-2015

  • I’m in the US version of the Metro (which I didn’t realise existed until recently)

      The full story is here. Though it’s strengthening my discomfort with repetition given it’s a less articulate version of something I’ve said elsewhere on 30+ occasions.  

  • If I circulate something via my blog do people assume it’s my event?

    I often post calls for papers and announcements on my blog. Initially this was just for things I was organising or for things someone asked me to circulate. Then I started posting anything I was considering submitting an abstract for (etc) so that I could have a URL to put into Omnifocus. In the last six months…

  • Has anyone else noticed this disturbing trend? Superstar profs doing ‘research’ in TV and web adverts

    Witness Daniel Gilbert, superstar psychologist of TED fame, starring in adverts for Prudential: And the rather less well known Adam Alter, who’s an assistant professor at NYU Stern, Weirdly Robin Dunbar, he of Dunbar’s number, starred in a Guinness advert which has now been taken offline: Any other examples? This appropriation of the trappings of…

  • CfP – Troubling Narratives: Identity Matters

    Second Call for Papers  ‘Troubling Narratives: Identity Matters’ The Institute for Research in Citizenship and Applied Human Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Thursday 19th and Friday 20th of June 2014. Confirmed keynote speakers for the conference are: Ann Phoenix, University of London Ken Plummer, University of Essex This conference builds on the University of Huddersfield’s long held tradition…

  • PhD Funding Opportunity: Graduate Teaching Assistantships at Leicester

    Leicester Sociology is pleased to offer three funded Graduate Teaching Assistantships for October 2014 entry to its Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) programme. These Graduate Teaching Assistantships are available for full-time registration and are payable as a full UK/EU tuition fee waiver for four years subject to annual progress review. The successful applicants will also receive an annual stipend and…

  • Cameron’s declaration that “money is no object” has destroyed his austerity message

    George Eaton really hit the nail on the head with this. The difficulty is how to make this case, that contra TINA there is an alternative, without it sliding into an unintended attack on the flood relief action itself: Britain today is a country in which more than half a million people have turned to…

  • Social Media for Academics

    Are you an academic? Are you interested in social media? Given you’re reading a blog post with the title ‘Social Media for Academics’ then I’ll assume that you are. In which case I hope you’ll be interested in the book that I’ll be spending much of this year writing. I’m due to deliver it to…

  • CFP “International Conference on Men and Masculinities”, 11-13 September 2014, IZMIR TURKEY

    Please distribute widely 1st International Conference on Men and Masculinities: “Identities, Cultures, Societies” will be held on 11-13 September 2014 in Izmir Turkey. Initiative for Critical Studies of Masculinities (ICSM) invites proposals for the first international conference on men and masculinities to take place in Turkey, in collaboration with Stony Brook University Center for the Study of…

  • CfP: Sociologies of Everyday Life

    Sociology A journal of the British Sociological Association Sociologies of Everyday Life Special Issue Call for Papers Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2014 Everyday life sociology is a well-established tradition in the discipline and interest in ways of understanding day-to-day worlds continues to be significant. These engagements are becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, across the social sciences as…

  • Social Theory and Health: Celebrating the work of @GrahamScambler (March 5th 2014)

    ‘Social Theory and Health: Celebrating the work of Graham Scambler’ Old Refectory UCL Main Campus 2pm -5pm Wednesday March 5th 2014 An afternoon of reflection on the connections between social theory and health in honour of the retirement of Prof Graham Scambler chaired by Prof Graham Hart, Dean of UCL Faculty of Population Health Sciences. Speakers…

  • About Participation Now

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