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  • Anti-Manifesto

    Dance and laugh and play. Ignore the message we convey. It seems we’re only here to entertain. A rebellion cut-to-fit. I refuse to be the soundtrack to it. While we entertain we’re still knee-deep in shit. There’s something wrong inside. We’ve played it safe, enjoyed the ride. You won’t like this but I’ve something to…

  • The State Lottery

    Does it seem strange to you? The confetti, the balloons, the mile-wide grins? The victory dance to welcome in the heir to a state of disrepair? ‘Cause it sure seems strange to me. They’re acting like they won the lottery. But shouldn’t they feel terror at the task that lies ahead? To feed and house…

  • BSA Early Career Theorists Symposium – Call for Abstracts

    SA: Early Career Theorists’ Symposium 6th June, 2014, held at the London School of Economics Call for Abstracts The Early Career Theorists’ Symposium is a special one-day symposium for up-and-coming theorists, organized on behalf of the British Sociological Association’s Theory Study Group. This symposium aims to bring together sociologists at a relatively early stage in their career…

  • Heidegger on Thinking 1.2

    Again I find myself somewhat repelled, though perhaps with less justification than in the previous lecture. The second lecture opens with the pronouncement that “we modern men presumably have not the slightest notion how thoughtfully the Greeks experienced their lofty poetry, their works of art – no, not experienced, but let them stand there in…

  • Heidegger on Thinking 1.1

    Following on from this enormously thought-provoking paper by Richard Swedberg on the sociology of thinking, I’ve decided to return to Heidegger for the first time since I was a philosophy student. I really struggled with Heidegger and ultimately justified giving up conditional on the promise that I would one day learn German and read the…

  • Discover Society Issue 3: Wealth

    Please circulate on local lists DISCOVER SOCIETY Measured-Factual-Critical http://discoversociety.org ISSUE Three: December 2013 Special Issue on Wealth     Focus:   John Hills The Distribution of Wealth: What We Think and How It Is     Articles:                           Caroline Knowles Millionaires Welcome: UK Migration and London Neighbourhoods John Urry The Rich-Class and Offshore Worlds Beverley Searle…

  • The Self-Talk of Intellectuals

    With regard to self-concept, my claim in the Rorty book is certainly not that, as sociologists of ideas, we should somehow let intellectuals tell their own stories. As I’ve noted above, the accounts intellectuals give of their own lives are often highly problematic from the standpoint of sociological realism. That does not mean, however, that…

  • What is ‘new’ about the new sociology of ideas?

    Charles Camic : “New” is, of course, a relative not an absolute term. For, if we take the agenda that we’ve associated with the “new sociology of ideas” and, from this vantage point, we then reconsider various other lines of work in and out of sociology, it is certainly true that some of this work does…

  • Asexuality Studies special issue editorial

    In the last decade, a growing number of individuals, self-identifying as asexual, have come together to form asexual communities. According to the largest asexual community, an asexual individual may be defined as a person ‘who does not experience sexual attraction’ (http://www.asexuality.org/home/overview.html). However, the straightforward nature of this definition masks the considerable heterogeneity, captured by a…

  • Realism, Reflexivity, Conflation, and Individualism

    The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert. Revised Edition. London: Routledge, 2009. 248pp. 10 0415560705 paperback, £20.99.  Originally published in 2006, this revised edition is updated to respond to critics and to review its thesis in light of the financial crisis. In essence though, that thesis remains unchanged. As…

  • “How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it?”
: Asexual Agency and the Sexual Assumption

    In this chapter I critically engage with existing work on asexuality and develop an account of the ethical, theoretical and methodological issues inherent in asexuality research. I utilise the work of the social theorist Margaret Archer to explicitly articulate a theoretical model within which the experience of asexual individuals can be understood. I draw upon…

  • “How do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it?”
: Asexual Agency and the Sexual Assumption

    In this chapter I critically engage with existing work on asexuality and develop an account of the ethical, theoretical and methodological issues inherent in asexuality research. I utilise the work of the social theorist Margaret Archer to explicitly articulate a theoretical model within which the experience of asexual individuals can be understood. I draw upon…

  • Asexuality and its implications for sexuality studies

    In recent years a growing research literature has addressed Asexuality, commonly defined as ‘not experiencing sexual attraction’, with a diverse range of contributions being made from a variety of fields. This article is intended as an accessible review of the topic, framed in terms of the core questions which have been addressed within the field…

  • There’s more to life than sex? Difference and commonality within the asexual community

    Asexuality is becoming ever more widely known and yet it has received relatively little attention from within sociology. Research in the area poses particular challenges because of the relatively recent emergence of the asexual community, as well as the expanding array of terms and concepts through which asexuals articulate their differences and affirm their commonalities.…

  • Uncomfortable positions in local government: negotiating cohesion, inequality and change – Hannah Jones – Seminar tomorrow

    The next Sociology Department Research Seminar will be delivered by our very own Hannah Jones in the Gillian Rose Room from 5:00-6:30 this Wednesday (4 December). We look forward to seeing you there and further details about the talk are pasted below. Hannah’s talk will be followed by a drinks reception in the foyer of the Ramphal Building- all…

  • The sociology of the quiet zone: norms and public transport

    An interesting story went viral in the last couple of days which has left me thinking about the issue of normativity for the first time in a while. I have no way to know the accuracy of the reports but that’s irrelevant. If it turns out not to have happened in this way then this account can…

  • Intersex: Medical, Cultural & Historical Contexts Symposium Dec. 5-6, 2013

    Intersex: Medical, Cultural and Historical Contexts December 5 & 6, 2013 James J. Leos Symposium in LGBT Studies University of Arizona This two-day symposium explores intersex issues-the condition of having “ambiguous genitalia,” once known as hermaphroditism, now referred to (somewhat controversially) as “disorders of sex development.” It will offer interdisciplinary perspectives drawn from the medical humanities, medicine, anthropology, and…

  • Racial Pornographics: A Special Issue of Porn Studies

    Racial Pornographics: A Special Issue of Porn Studies Edited by Mireille Miller-Young, PhD Associate Professor of Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara Contact: mmilleryoung@femst.ucsb.edu This special issue of Porn Studies will promote a discussion about race in the study of pornography. Race remains an underdeveloped area of research in porn studies, and employing racial analytics to the…

  • Notes for a Sociology of Thinking 1.1

    Richard Swedberg begins his paper Thinking and Sociology by recognising that there may be “good reasons” why these two things are rarely discussed together. Though “all of us think” and “we all know the intensely private character of our thoughts”, these thoughts are fleeting and ephemeral when considered next to things that we say and things that we know.…

  • ‘Patent Trolls’, Intellectual Property and Technological Innovation

    Over the summer the BBC website had an interesting feature looking at the ‘patent trolls’ who proactively buy patents with the sole intention of suing people for their infringement. The introduction of these ‘non-practicing entities’ into the patent system is something novel, with an influx of ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘finance people’ having transformed the system into…

  • Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETD) 2014: 23 to 25 July 2014, Leicester, UK.

    ETD2014 – the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations’ (NDLTD) 17th annual symposium – takes place at the University of Leicester, UK from 23 to 25 July 2014. We are now inviting proposals for papers and posters. The deadline for proposals is Friday, 31 January 2014. We will contact you on or around Monday,…

  • “Only marxists and conmen want to cap energy prices!”

    The government has denied reports it is seeking a commitment from energy firms to hold their prices down until 2015. The companies told BBC News ministers were putting pressure on them to commit to a price freeze. But Treasury sources say this is not part of their plan – and they were looking instead at…

  • Cognitive Micro-Foundations for Theories of Social Change

    One of the core questions addressed by my PhD has been what I’ve termed ‘the biographical dimensions of social change’ and the methodological implications of how personhood is conceptualised for how these theories are deployed in practice. I’ve argued that one of the (many) problems with the ‘individualization’ and ‘detraditionalization’ literature is that in the…

  • CfP: An Invitation to Digital Public Sociology

    What does ‘public sociology’ entail in a world of facebook, twitter, youtube, slideshare, soundcloud, pinterest and wordpress? What affordances and constraints do these tools entail for the task of “taking knowledge back to those from whom it came, making public issues out of private troubles, and thus regenerating sociology’s moral fibre”? What implications do these tools have…

  • Causal Agency and Cognitive Micro-Foundations

    One final Roy Bhaskar snippet from the Formation of Critical Realism (Pg 64). This is a quote from Bhaskar about one thing that prompted a thought by me about a very different thing: In experimental activity it is our role as causal agents that is vital, not our role as thinkers, and that immediately gets…

  • The Realist Critique of Materialism

    Just invoking materialism without specifying exactly what the sense is does not get you very far. It is often claimed that ideas and ideology have a material existence ultimately rooted in physical matter. But what is physical matter? If you go down one level of the stratification of nature you come to atoms that are…

  • Videocast: Getting started as a Research Blogger

  • LAST CHANCE – BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2014

    LAST CHANCE – BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 2014 The nomination deadline for the 2014 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize is fast approaching. Nominations must be received in the BSA office by Friday, 6 December 2013. The prize will be awarded to the best first and sole authored book within the discipline of Sociology published between: 1…

  • Asexuality and Its Implications for Sexuality Studies

    This is a pre-print of a paper published in Psychology of Sexualities Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, Autumn 2013. A copy of the final article can be obtained here.  While asexuality is usually defined as ‘not experiencing sexual attraction’ amongst those who self-identify as asexual , the question ‘what is asexuality?’ immediately becomes more complex when…

  • CfP: Social and Political Critique in the Age of Austerity

    Social and Political Critique in the Age of Austerity A one day workshop at Keele University 10.30am-6pm, Wednesday 12th February, 2014 This one day workshop is devoted to the discussion of critical politics in the contemporary age of austerity.  Following the 2007 global economic crash, which led to a raft of government bank bail outs…

  • Continuous Publishing and Being an Open-Source Academic

    One of my favourite academic blogs is Understanding Society. Written by Daniel Little, Chancellor for the University of Michigan-Dearborn, it covers an extraordinarily broad range of theoretical topics and sustains the rigour of serious academic writing while nonetheless being written in a relatively accessible way. I think it’s the best theory blog on the internet (by…

  • Education, Emotions and the Future Seminar

    The study of emotions within the field of education has been a growing area of study, which has highlighted how emotions are central to student’s learning and educational experiences both positive and negative and to the practice of education itself by teachers (Zymbylas 2007). Where education is often positioned as a rational and logical practice…

  • BISR Postgraduate Conference – Inside/Outside/In-Between: Perspectives on Space, Power and Subjectivities – 9th-11th May 2014

    Birkbeck Institute for Social Research  BISR Postgraduate Conference: Inside/Outside/In-Between: Perspectives on Space, Power and Subjectivities – CALL FOR PAPERS Friday 9th – Sunday 11th May 2014  Birkbeck, University of London Organisers Nelly Ali (Department of Geography, Environment and Development) Mayur Suresh (School of Law) Ceren Yalcin (Department of Psychosocial Studies) Confirmed Keynotes: Veena Das and Gail Lewis Overview Where are you? What…

  • Working with Paradata, Marginalia and Fieldnotes

    Free One Day Conference at Leicester Postgraduate Travel Bursaries available – please email hso1@le.ac.uk Working with Paradata, Marginalia and Fieldnotes: The Centrality of By-Products of Social Research College Court Conference Centre University of Leicester January 14th 2014 http://store.ioe.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&deptid=112&catid=42&prodid=242 Paradata, marginalia, fieldnotes and letters are all by-products of the process of social research which can add considerable…

  • If communications offices want to promote particular departments they should make videos like this

    I really like this style of video. I think these in depth profiles of the intellectual biographies of specific academics could be really effective from a marketing perspective, particularly when it comes to recruiting grad students. Orgtheorist and loyal orgtheory commenter Howard E. Aldrich is featured in a video about his intellectual trajectory and the history of…

  • CfP: DEADLINE FRIDAY: Mapping the Field: Race, Racism and Ethnicity 31st January

    The BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group conference will be held on Friday 31st January, 2014 at Newman University, Birmingham, UK. The deadline for the call for papers is November 29th and registration is now open for the conference. All the details are below: Mapping the Field: Contemporary Theories of Race, Racism and Ethnicity Newman University, Birmingham, UK, 9.45am-5.30pm Friday…

  • Call for Papers: “Cute Studies,” a special issue of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture

    Call for Papers: “Cute Studies,” a special issue of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture Cuteness has a global reach: it is an affective response; an aesthetic category; a performative act of self-expression; and an immensely popular form of consumption. This themed issue of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture is intended to…

  • A dialogue between phenomenology and realism in pedagogical and educational research

    The workshop forms part of the activity to support our Social Sciences strategic priorities for 2013-14 and falls under the Teaching research methods stream. The workshop is free to attend for delegates from both subscribing and non-subscribing institutions but booking is essential to secure your place as numbers are limited. The workshop aims to stimulate debate around the…

  • Detaching ‘agency’ and ‘choice’ from voluntarism

    I read an interesting paper by Ros Gill earlier which nicely frames one of my main theoretical interests. It’s a reflection on shifting fashions in how the relationship between culture and subjectivity has been conceptualised within cultural studies. This bit in particular caught my attention and the clarity with which it diagnoses this common explanatory…

  • “Do you know what I mean?”: Internal Conversation, Human Relationships and External Speech

    I’ve recently blogged about the role which obsessiveness plays in constituting differing modes of reflexivity. To recap: there is no logically necessary end point to deliberations and thus we must all negotiate, in different ways, the need to draw deliberations to a close so as to reach decisions about what to do and then actually do it*. Some…

  • Theorising Heterogeneity for Sociology

    I’ve recently been reading Magoroh Maruyama’s writing on the second cybernetics and I’m quite taken with it. There’s a context to his work which I only dimly understand, given my lack of grounding in the first cybernetics, though I’m still finding his writing extremely thought-provoking. One of the key themes seems to be the critique of an exclusive…

  • The Phenomenology of Inertia

    I wrote a few weeks ago about obsessiveness and how I understand it in terms of internal conversation. I’m particularly interested in the role that differing forms of obsessiveness, as a generic term for difficulty with drawing deliberations to a close, plays in making decision making difficult. There’s no logically necessary end point to our rumination about…

  • Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century

    Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century The Enduring Love? project is a major ESRC-funded study (2011-2013) that has been exploring how couples experience, understand and sustain their long-term relationships. To celebrate the end of the project we are hosting an event to launch the study findings and, with our dynamic array of speakers, to provoke wider discussion…

  • Imagine taking a Udacity class and being able to …..

    We are launching a whole new course experience designed to make sure you succeed. Imagine taking a Udacity class and being able to: Work with coaches who are available to give you personalized feedback, to guide your learning, and even to help you with code review. Build amazing projects that integrate what you’ve learned, for fun and…

  • The latent authoritarianism of libertarian politics

    I only really began to interact with political scientists last year, when I went to run a political science and social policy blog on a full time basis. The experience was an odd one, as I realised that I wasn’t actually as interested in politics (in a substantive academic sense) as I’d previously thought I was. But…

  • Holy Crap! Intersections of the Popular and the Sacred in Youth Cultures

    Holy Crap! Intersections of the Popular and the Sacred in Youth Cultures 28–29 August 2014, Helsinki, Finland Call for Papers and Sessions Holy Crap! is an international conference organised by the Finnish Youth Research Society and Network, focusing on the interrelations between popular culture, youth and the sacred. The conference aims at interrogating understandings of…

  • The Sociology of Soldiers Reuniting With Their Dogs (no, really)

    I’m someone who likes animals. I’m also someone who spends a lot of time procrastinating on youtube. These two facts converged some time ago when I noticed an interesting trend for youtube videos, usually filmed by female partners, capturing usually male soldiers being reunited with their dogs. Turns out Buzzfeed noticed it too: I love…

  • Sunny Hundal’s views on the future of blogging

    I’ve always liked Sunny Hundal and Liberal Conspiracy. I blogged there once ages ago and never got round to writing a follow up. I’ve always been irritated by those who refused to see any value in what Sunny did with the site (whatever personal objection they had to him or his politics) and was sad…

  • BSA Early Career Theorists’ Symposium

    Early Career Theorists’ Symposium 6th June, 2014, held at the London School of Economics Call for Abstracts The Early Career Theorists’ Symposium is a special one-day symposium for up-and-coming theorists, organized on behalf of the British Sociological Association’s Theory Study Group. This symposium aims to bring together sociologists at a relatively early stage in their…

  • Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? An animated conversation with Noam Chomsky

  • Girlhood Reading Group at the University of Warwick

    The recent controversy surrounding Miley Cyrus’ provocative performance at the 2013 Video Music Awards has brought the discussion of girlhood to the forefront of popular culture. The commentators puzzled over the star’s transformation — reading Cyrus as both liberated and corrupt, honest and disingenuous —and their bafflement reflected the incongruities at the heart of the…

  • Big Data Behaviourism

      From Science Rock Stars    

  • Robert Skidelsky, John Rawls and Political Philosophy

    I saw this earlier on the LSE Politics Blog and had a very satisfying flashback to being a political philosophy masters student. My struggle to articulate the intense frustration political philosophy of this sort provoked in me is what left me so ready to switch to sociology once I understood what it was: You say ‘Post…

  • Commonality and Difference

    I started using the terms ‘commonality’ and ‘difference’ a few years ago when writing this paper on asexuality. I didn’t really have a substantive theory of what I meant by them and, in retrospect, this is the one thing I don’t like about a paper I’m otherwise quite proud of. I introduce the two phrases…

  • Living With The H-Index: Metric Assemblages In The Contemporary Academy

  • The History of the UK Blogosphere

    There’s a great post on A Very Public Sociologist reflecting on how the political blogosphere in the UK has changed since the author began blogging. It strengthens my conviction that the blogosphere would be an extremely conducive object for a field analysis looking at how, say, the ‘political blogosphere’ elaborated itself through interaction at the…

  • Queer @ King’s: Programme of Events

    Queer @ King’s, Autumn 2013 Friday 15 November, Screening, 5.30pm, King’s College Strand Campus, Room S-2.18 Ruins: A Chronicle of an HIV Witch-Hunt, Zoe Mavroudi  A documentary about a shocking case of HIV criminalization in Greece, Ruins tells the story of the persecution of HIV-positive women who were detained by the Hellenic Police, forcibly tested, charged…

  • The Quantified Self and Taylorization 2.0

    There’s a provocative post on Nick Carr’s blog in which he discusses the potential expansion of self-tracking technology as a mechanism of quantified control: But, as management researcher H. James Wilson reports in the Wall Street Journal, there is one area where self-tracking is beginning to be pursued with vigor: business operations. Some companies are outfitting employees with wearable…

  • Just a pause to cool the refrain

    Give me mercy and a minute now I’m a bleed a little poison out I’m a cry a little river down And then I’m setting this whole thing on fire And I’m burning up the night she died And I’m putting every last picture aside I’m gonna say what I need to say In my…

  • Discover Society Issue 2 Out Now

    Issue 2 of online magazine of social research, policy analysis and commentary, Discover Society, out today. DISCOVER SOCIETY Measured-Factual-Critical http://discoversociety.org ISSUE TWO: November 2013     Focus:   Danny Dorling Dismantling Universalism: Inequality and Public Health   Articles:                           John Brewer Culture, Class and Protestantism in Urban Belfast  Lynn Jamieson John MacInnes and                                 Sin Yi Cheung…

  • Some thoughts on how to use NVivo effectively

    Kelle (1997) sounds a useful note of caution in an insightful discussion of the history of CAQDAS software:  The newly developed software programs for computer-aided textual analysis became tools for data storage and retrieval rather than tools for ‘data analysis’. Nevertheless, terms used quite frequently in the ongoing debate like ‘computer- aided qualitative data analysis’…

  • Feminisms, Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series 2013/14

    The next seminar in the Feminisms, Gender and Sexuality Seminar Series 2013/14  takes place on Thursday 14th November. We are pleased to announce the addition of a new seminar taking place.  Full details of the 3 upcoming seminars can be found below. You are very welcome to attend, and we look forward to seeing you there. _________________________________________________________________________________________________…

  • Imposing ‘market discipline’ on public services

    There’s an absolutely cracking article by Aditya Chakrabortty in today’s Guardian reflecting on the privatisation of the railways. I was astounded to hear John Redwood cite the railways a couple of months ago as evidence in support of the privatisation of the royal mail. I’m fascinated by the question of how much, if at all, people believe this…

  • Call for papers: Historical Perspectives on ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’

    Call for papers: Historical Perspectives on ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’ We are organising a conference with the title ‘Historical Perspectives on ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’’. This will be held in London on Monday 12th May 2014, at Queen Mary, University of London. We are interested in work that takes historical perspectives on the various diagnostic categories typified by…

  • Locating migration: street space and economy on Rye Lane, south London

    The next Sociology Department Research Seminar will be delivered by Suzanne Hall (LSE) in the Gillian Rose Room from 5:00-6:30 this Wednesday (6 November). We look forward to seeing you there and further details about the talk are pasted below. Suzi’s talk will be followed by a drinks reception in the foyer of the Ramphal…

  • So much to read, so little time

    If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print. #Keeponreading I came across this post on the CISG tumblr recently and it stuck…

  • “You obviously didn’t understand that book at all!”: social realism, strong misreading and the neo-pragmatist sensibility

    Since reading this astonishing book by Neil Gross earlier in the year I have been increasingly aware of the latent influence of pragmatism on my thought. I used to really like Richard Rorty but came to think it was just a phase, explicable in terms of the resources his work gave me to articulate my gnawing dissatisfaction with…

  • Dear @LoughboroughSU, did this seem like a good idea at the time?

  • Book Launch: After Queer

    Queer@Kings and Pluto Press present: After Queer Theory: The Limits of Sexual Politics by James Penney Book launch and discussion Wednesday 6 November at 6.15 pm Room S-1.22 (Strand campus, first basement) King’s College —– After Queer Theory makes the provocative claim that queer theory has run its course, made obsolete by the elaboration of…

  • Queer Feminine Affinities Extended CfP

    Queer Feminine Affinities Edited by Alexa Athelstan & Vikki Chalklin Extended Call for Submissions Deadline Friday 17th January 2014 queerfeminineaffinities@gmail.com For more information about Queer Feminine Affinities, and the original call for submissions, please see www.queerfeminineaffinities.wordpress.com. We were delighted to receive an overwhelming and exciting response to our initial call for submissions to Queer Feminine Affinities. However,…

  • Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century

    Enduring Love? Couple Relationships in the 21st Century The Enduring Love? project is a major ESRC-funded study (2011-2013) that has been exploring how couples experience, understand and sustain their long-term relationships. To celebrate the end of the project we are hosting an event to launch the study findings and, with our dynamic array of speakers, to provoke wider discussion…

  • Celebrity and Young people’s classed and gendered aspirations: End of Award Event – 11 July 2014

    On the 11th July 2014, Heather Mendick, Kim Allen and Laura Harvey will host an end of award event to discuss findings from their ESRC funded research project on Celebrity and Young People’s classed and gendered aspirations (CelebYouth). This interactive and participatory event will be an opportunity to share the ideas coming from this two year…

  • Empathy & Trust In Communicating Online (EMoTICON) Commissioning Sandpit

    The ESRC have recently launched the above initiative. The ESRC, in partnership with a number of other funders, is commissioning new research to develop a greater understanding of how empathy and trust are developed, maintained, transformed and lost in social media interactions. In order to develop innovative approaches and stimulate genuinely transdisciplinary collaborations, the ESRC…

  • (a)Sexuality and Pathology

    As the AVEN website describes, “in a world where sexuality is promoted as the norm, many asexuals grow up thinking that they’re somehow sick, broken or deficient” (AVEN, 2011). This raises the question of the nature of this norm, as well as how it is formed and propagated. Why would individuals who do not experience…

  • The Ambiguity of (a)Sexual Categories

    The situations one faces in negotiating intimate life without a desire for sexual activity foregrounds the centrality of the sexual assumption in the conceptual apparatus culturally available for making sense of human intimacy and human sexuality. Without the assumption of sexual desire, the salience of intimacy concepts begins to break down. While they may retain…

  • The Commercialization of the Erotic

    In contemporary society it stands starkly obvious that ‘sex sells’: it has become a cultural resource incorporated into and deliberately deployed as part of the machinations of consumer capitalism. As Elliott and Lemert (2009: 114) observes, “sexuality increasingly becomes a terrain on which the impact of global capital, ideas and ideologies are brought to bear’…

  • What is Capitalist Realism?

    Assuming I haven’t completely misunderstood Mark Fisher’s point then I’d argue this is one of the most striking examples of capitalist realism I’ve ever encountered. It was posted as a comment on this Glenn Greenwald article. Note how an assertion of the obviousness of this state of affairs goes hand-in-hand with a dismissal of the ‘rubes’ who are…

  • The Slow Death of Press Freedom?

    I find it more than a little disturbing that these two explicit threats to press freedom have been issued by the government in the space of 24 hours. Note that Cameron’s statement about the Snowden leaks comes at the same time as prominent NSA loyalists are breaking ranks in America to call for a ‘total…

  • The Stangely Poetic Character of WordPress Spam

    Because the admin of this web page is working, no uncertainty very shortly it will be renowned, due to its feature contents.

  • “Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity”

    What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges? I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking ‘Is this the one I…

  • Inaugural meeting for a SE London Campaign for Public Uni / CDBU group

    INAUGURAL MEETING SE LONDON GROUP CDBU/CPU Aim to start a Council for the Defence of British Universities-Campaign for the Public University SE London Group by comparing ‘Greenwich and Goldsmiths in the market’ supported by UCU nationally and Goldsmiths and Greenwich UCU branches + SUs, also inviting S.Bank, QMC, East London, Kent, CCC and SE London FE…

  • The Case Against Open Access

    I think the argument made here by John Holmwood is very important. My instinct is to support open access, though I think the scale of its ramifications are sometimes overestimated, however there has often seemed to be a degree of inattentiveness to economic and political context within which these arguments are being made: For many…

  • The Future of Scholarship

    The LSE Impact Blog co-hosted a conference about Open Access last week which I’m now wishing I’d gone to. I really liked the talk given by Jonathan Gray, director of policy at the Open Knowledge Foundation, which offered an adept diagnosis of the present crisis in scholarly publishing and its implications for the future of…

  • Things That Are Not Asexuality

    I found this post about what asexuality isn’t very interesting (HT Asexy Vida). I’m fascinated by how people who aren’t asexual respond to asexuality, particularly when they first encounter it. I’ve argued in the past that the almost universal tendency to explain away asexuality reveals some very interesting things about contemporary sexual culture. This helpful article does a good…

  • The value of public higher education

    An important analysis on LSE Politics Blog looking at what the British Social Attitudes survey says about public attitudes towards higher education: In an era of rising tuition fees, deepening student debt and the global commodification of learning, any remaining notion of Higher Education as a ‘public good’ may seem improbable. However, evidence from the…

  • Economists are horrible people

    I don’t think this is a particularly meaningful statement. But it’s certainly an attention grabbing one. I encountered it earlier when Salon picked up on a post by Adam Grant on Psychology Today: Why does the invisible hand want to slap you across the face? Because it belongs to a douchebag. That’s the conclusion, anyway,…

  • BiReCon 2014 – bisexual conference Call for Papers

    Call for Papers Please circulate – any queries to birecon2014@bicon2014.org.uk BiReCon 2014: Out in the World Forging links between research and communities BiReCon is a conference for anyone with an interest in contributing to, or finding out about, current work on bisexuality. The conference aims to bring together academics, professionals, activists, and bisexual communities. It…

  • Call for Papers – NGender: Seminars in Gender and Sexuality Related Research

    Call for Papers NGENDER: Seminars in Research Related to Gender and Sexuality University of Sussex, Spring 2014 NGender is entering it’s exciting fifth year at Sussex. We hope to continue the success of previous years in hosting interdisciplinary papers on a variety of gender and sexuality-related themes. NGender is organized by doctoral students and aims…

  • Transseminars – free seminars with some bursaries available for travel. See below

    Trans’ in Popular Representation (Thursday 28th November, University of Warwick) We’re delighted to announce details of the third seminar in this ESRC-sponsored series. This FREE event will focus on trans as a cross-media phenomenon involving traditional and new media from film and television to web-based media, photography and performance art. Speakers Del LaGrace Volcano (gender…

  • Call for Presentations at SPA Workshop 2013: “Challenges and Innovation in Social Policy Research”

    Call for Presentations at SPA Workshop 2013: “Challenges and Innovation in Social Policy Research: Mixed Methodologies and Impact” 16th December 2013, Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics In recent years, the use of mixed methods and methodologies in Social Policy research has become increasingly popular. Effective integration of quantitative and…

  • CfP: Discover Society

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  • Cultural evolutionary tipping points in the storage and transmission of information

    I was intrigued by this paper analysing the evolution of human culture in terms of ‘tipping points’ in our capacity to store and transmit information. It has a different focus but it’s nonetheless entirely consistent with Margaret Archer’s work on culture and could be used to historicise her account. Her approach to culture focuses on the interface…

  • The Politics of Zombies

    A few months ago I wrote about the use of zombies to represent crowds in films like World War Z. My basic point being that zombies are a shorthand for portraying the irrationalism of mass assemblies which threaten the social order. Leaving aside the sheer socio-political weirdness of this bit of the film, it also left me…

  • CfP: Centre for Women and Gender @SocioWarwick Postgrad Seminar Series

    The Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick will host a Graduate Seminar Series in the academic year 2013/2014. We would like to invite postgraduate students working in, but not limited to the following areas: Media, Culture and Gender Representations Work and Family (Trans) national Gender Intersections of Gender, ‘Race’, Class,…

  • Fat Sexualities Panel event – 19 Nov

    The next Gender and Sexuality Talks event (formerly Gender and Sexuality in the Pub) is on 19 November. It will be a panel discussion on “Fat Sexualities” — speakers on the panel include Dr Charlotte Cooper, Dr Caroline Walters, Ingo Cando of Wotever World and Bethany Rutter of fashion blog “Arched Eyebrow”. Tickets are available on…

  • So what do the Tea Party do now?

    Overall, 47% of the public says they think of the Tea Party movement as separate and independent from the Republican Party, while somewhat fewer (38%) say it is a part of the Republican Party, and 14% do not offer an opinion. Attitudes on this question are little different from when it was asked in April…

  • Social Morphogenesis: Variety, Reflexivity and Agency

    The account of ‘social morphogenesis’ offered by Archer and her collaborators is that of a process driven by the generative mechanism of ‘variety producing more variety’: as novel items (ideas, techniques, products, skills) are added to the cultural and social systems, so too the range of potential compatibilities between them increases. Innovation and even invention become matters of…