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  • CelebYouth on Blogging

  • Mark Murphy on Blogging

  • Ben Baumberg on Blogging

  • Evelyn Ruppert on Digital Sociology

  • Noortje Marres on Digital Sociology

  • Queer Now and Then seminar series, University of Manchester

    The Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture (CSSC), The University of Manchester Public Events 2013-4 – All Welcome QUEER NOW AND THEN Organised by Professor Laura Doan, this set of events welcomes a number of scholars to explore queerness in relation to time and history. Wednesday 16 October, 5pm (Venue TBC) (co-sponsored with EAC)…

  • Critical Realism and American Sociology

    What was initially obnoxious ranting and then a mildly interesting but bad tempered argument is turning into a really fascinating discussion on org theory: What a lot of CR proponents seem to  fail to understand is that American’s sociology scientific image is not a set of philosophical “positions” (postmodernism, positivism, etc.) in the British or continental style.…

  • Quantified Self Research Network – Inaugural Event

    Tuesday, September 17, 2013 from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM (BST) Leeds, United Kingdom At this inaugural event there will be presentations from researchers who have been exploring quantified self or self-tracking either empirically or theoretically which will stimulate discussion around the potential and implications for future developments. We hope that this event will stimulate…

  • Being Human, Personal Identity and Biography

    This is the last of a series of posts in which I’ve looked at Archer’s account of the emotions in Being Human. She sees the internal conversation as rooted in the  ongoing and situated affectivity through which we unavoidably find ourselves connected to our environment. These first-order affective responses are clustered around nature, practice and…

  • Proposal: Digital Scholarship Reading Group @WarwickUni

    Would anyone be interested in this? It’s an idea that has been recurrently coming to mind for some time and I never do anything about it. Basically I’m suggesting that we choose a particular book chapter or journal article each month (or so) on digital scholarship (broadly construed) then meeting to debate and discuss it.…

  • Asexuality, Identity and ‘Scratching an Itch’

    It’s pretty great when you stumble across people discussing your work on the internet. All the more so when they ask thought-provoking questions which make you reconsider arguments you’ve made in the past and encourage you to explore their limitations: Asexual elitism is an elitist attitude where some asexuals don’t consider other people to be asexual…

  • The Strange World of Educational Viral Marketing (part 2)

    A couple of months ago I wrote about my bemusement concerning the e-mails I receive on an increasingly regular basis about the various websites I edit. These thoughts came back to me yesterday after a presentation by Emma Head on mummmy blogging and particularly the way in which the most popular mummy bloggers have been able to…

  • Cluster hire in Transgender Studies at the University of Arizona

    Faculty Cluster Hire in Transgender Studies The University of Arizona is pleased to announce a cluster hire of 4 tenure-track faculty positions in transgender studies over the next two years. Two positions are being offered this year in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS), with a start date of fall 2014. Two positions…

  • Relationality, Reflexivity and Power

    I read a really engaging chapter earlier by Ismael Al-Amoudi called Authority’s Hidden Network: Obligations, Roles and the Morphogenesis of Authority. I’d encountered some of his earlier work (particularly his attempt, which I’m extremely sympathetic to, at a critical realist reading of Foucault) but I hadn’t realised he was now doing such fascinating work on social morphogenesis and…

  • Being Human and Second-Order Emotions

    In this series of posts I’ve been looking at Margaret Archer’s account of first-order and second-order emotions. In the previous post I discussed the process through which an individual comes to deliberate on their first-order emotions – represented schematically as discernment –> deliberation –> dedication. It is through this process that personal identity emerges: As the…

  • The paradox of Brutalism

    The paradox of Brutalism was its intent to at once produce an earthy, everyday style for the use of the proletariat (one where they wouldn’t have to mind their manners inside) and at the same time create avant-garde, shocking images, to be ‘a brick-bat flung in the public’s face’. – Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism, Pg…

  • Becoming Who We Are: Social Relations and Personal Morphogenesis

    At any given moment I exist in relation to a we. But I also bring to those relations a ‘me’ made up of things which have happened to me and things which I have made happen. Many aspects of the past ‘me’ deposited in any present moment belong to the domain of psychology. Beyond this…

  • Manufacturing Consent in an Age of Austerity: Bashar al-Assad the “naughty child”

    As anyone who follows me on Twitter will probably have noticed, in the last week I’ve been gripped by the march to war in Syria and what has seemed to be the new playbook, tentatively trialled with Libya, which the US and UK now draw upon in manufacturing consent for ‘military intervention’. For anyone with…

  • ‘Theory’ is what happens when common starting-points can no longer be taken for granted

    ‘theory’ is what happens when common starting-points can no longer be taken for granted. For example, literary critics in the English-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s disagreed about many things – about the authorship of certain Jacobean plays or about the influence of Keats on Tennyson or about whether D. H. Lawrence was a…

  • The disturbing experience of finding yourself emphatically agreeing with Peter Hitchens

    The Good Samaritan did not have a gun. I make this simple point to deal with those who seem to think that you can show mercy and pity by lobbing cruise missiles into war zones. I make no claims to be a good person, but I am more and more annoyed by warmongers who dress…

  • Howard Becker, Blogging and Phenomenology

    There’s a really nice post on Jon Rainford’s blog which talks about Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists and its potential lessons for bloggers: This second edition examines some of the changes in technology in the twenty years since it was first published, especially in terms of ways in which computers have enhanced the ability…

  • Spring Breakers, Late Capitalism and Nihilism

    My friend Marta just posted an analysis of Spring Breakers which we saw together a few months ago. I wanted to write something about this but found myself struggling to articulate anything despite being captivated by the film. I really like this section of the article in particular: “Look at all my shit. I’ve got…

  • Being Human and What Matters To Us

    In my last few posts on Being Human I’ve looked at Archer’s account of emotionality. Integral to this is the internal dialogue through which first-order emotionality (natural, practical and social affectivity) gives rise to what Archer calls second-order emotionality. She represents this process  in terms of stages of discernment, deliberation and dedication. I initially found her thinking on…

  • Why academic podcasts are much more valuable than people realise

    There’s a great post on Savage Minds here which discusses a new anthropology podcast series. It makes some important points about the potential value of academic podcasts: Its fascinating to listen to the interview version of an article (in fact, its much more convenient than reading the article!) but its even more fascinating to have…

  • Not scheduling my academic life at all – reply to @raulpacheco

    I really enjoyed Raul Pacheco-Vega’s post yesterday on how he schedules his work life ‘to the very minute’ so I thought I’d offer my own reflections. I’m intellectually fascinated by how people organise their everyday lives for both personal and academic reasons. I used to have massive difficulties with procrastination and focus. I still do…

  • “For the women of the world, kill terrorists”

    They love their children less than we do so they are less than equal They abuse women so we kill them cos they are bloody villains That’s right, we are the feminists For the women of the world, kill terrorists Liberate them from their burqas They feel more free with their children murdered

  • Austerity Chic and Class Politics

    The revival of austerity regalia is linked to another revival: that of the idea of empire. In the same tacky gift shops in which one finds the “Keep Calm and Carry On” dinner plates, one also finds the “British Empire Was Built on Cups of Tea” trays. This melancholic sense of loss is associated with…

  • CfP: Hard Times – Austerity and Popular Culture

    Although the British Prime Minister David Cameron popularised the renowned axiom ‘the age of  austerity’ in a speech of 2009, political discourse has long given shape to popular rhetoric on  the subject. The sentiments of ‘make do and mend’ and ‘boom and bust’ offers two such  examples that have filtered into popular and national conscious.…

  • Normativity, Social Science and Secularism: Reply to @rightscholar

    (see here for context) Thanks for the thoughtful response and apologies for what seems to have been a slightly shrill note to my comments in retrospect. I wasn’t consciously commenting with a sociological hat on (so to speak) but I take the point nonetheless – the implication of MacIntyre’s work for sociology is, I would…

  • 17 reasons why you should blog about your research

    It helps you become more clear about your ideas. It gives you practice at presenting your ideas for a non-specialist audience. It increases your visibility within academia. It increases your visibility outside academia and makes it much easier for journalists, campaigners and practitioners to find you. It increases your visibility more than a static site and…

  • The strange passions of ex-leftists

    There is a breed of ex-leftists who can’t stand the left more than anyone. They have the zealousness of the convert and the bitterness of ex-lovers. Cohen is one; another is Bloodworth, who he describes as a “genuine leftist rather than a poseur”, who has gone from being a member of the Trotskyist Alliance of…

  • EduWiki Conference 2013 – Call for proposals

    ============================================== EduWiki Conference 2013 – Call for proposals ============================================== Wikimedia UK’s second annual EduWiki conference will take place in Cardiff on 1 and 2 November 2013. A recent white paper from TurnItIn, the online plagiarism-prevention service used widely across higher education in the UK, claims that “Wikipedia has an outsized presence as a content source for…

  • Being Human and Transvaluation (part 1)

    In the previous few posts on Being Human, part of a broader project to blog thematic overviews of all Margaret Archer’s major books, I’ve been looking at her account of the emotions. This is absolutely integral to her understanding of reflexivity, it’s covered in less depth in the reflexivity books and, unless it’s understood, it’s easy…

  • The books I’m currently reading (#1)

    It occurred to me recently how much I like the ‘books received’ feature on Stuart Elden’s blog and that I might like to do something similar. Unfortunately he seems to get lots of books sent to him, whereas I get comparatively few.  In retrospect I really didn’t take advantage of working in the same office…

  • What’s the point of ontology? Outline of an approach to the sociology of social theory

    Ontology itself, or what we might more accurately describe as the practice of ontological reasoning within sociology, remains contested. As Wan (2012: 20) observes “the (mostly legitimate) distrust in ontology has led researchers to abstain from ontological commitments and interrogations”. The degree of convergence which does exist in the conceptual vocabulary of sociology (‘structures’, ‘institutions’,…

  • “Oh ‘INTP’. So that’s what I am”: Identity and Alterity in a Digital Age

    A couple of years ago I did a conference presentation called “The Difficulty of Working Out Who You are: Sexual Culture, Sexual Categories and Asexuality”. Or at least I gave a presentation this title. In reality it didn’t actually do what it said on the tin because I’d rather jumped the gun and given a…

  • Being Human, Emotionality and Everyday Life

    My last few posts on Being Human have looked at Archer’s account of the emotions. She argues that affectivity should be understood as relational, emerging as commentaries on human concerns (understood generically as bodily well-being, performative competence and social self-worth) rooted in nature, practice and sociality. In each case affectivity arises as part of our engagement in different relations:…

  • The Last Outing project

    The research study “The Last Outing: Exploring end of life experiences and care needs in the lives of older LGBT people” has been funded by the Marie Curie Cancer Care Research Programme, and is led by Dr Kathryn Almack at the University of Nottingham. The project is funded under a call for research to explore…

  • Youth Researcher Development Workshop

    FINAL CALL FOR PRESENTERS (Please circulate widely) British Sociological Association Youth Study Group Researcher Development Workshop for Research Students and Early Career Researchers BSA Seminar Room, Imperial Wharf, London, Thursday 7th November 2013 The BSA Youth Study Group invites research students and early career researchers working on or with an interest any aspect of youth research…

  • Being Human and Social Normativity

    In my last two posts on Being Human I discussed Archer’s account of emotions as commentaries on human concerns and her analysis of natural, practical and social affectivity. In this post I’ll explore her understanding of social normativity in greater detail before moving onto a discussion of the transition from first-order emotionality to second-order emotionality in a post next week. From the…

  • Floating Cities, Class War and Matt Damon: what more could you want?

    I like Matt Damon. I like Science Fiction. I loved Neil Blomkamp’s first film District 9. So it was pretty inevitable that I would be excited about Elysium. As if that wasn’t enough, there was the added benefit of the film’s heavily trailed politics, as described by Gavin Mueller from the Jacobin: Trailers for Elysium…

  • ‘Negative Solidarity’ and the Cameroon Concept of Fairness

    This wonderful interview with Owen Hatherley is worth reading in full but this particular extract stood out to me: I’m tempted by two different poles. One of which is to see New Labour as the final death of the Labour Party. Because it was just so much worse than everyone thought it was going to…

  • Being Human: Natural, practical and social affectivity

    In a previous post I introduced Archer’s idea of emotions as commentaries on human concerns. Her account construes emotions as relational and situated, clustering around specific human contexts: the natural order (body/environment relations), the practical order (subject/object relations) and the social order (subject/subject relations). In this post I’ll expand on the particular form of emotionality which is…

  • Conceptualising biographical events

    One of the arguments I’ve tried to make with my PhD is that any approach which seeks to use the individual life course as a unit of analysis needs to be extremely careful about how biographical events are conceptualised. This issue can seem strikingly unproblematic when considered in the context of our lives – stuff happens…

  • BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought- 6th Sept

    BSA Meeting Room, London.  We are pleased to announce our speakers for the forthcoming seminar to debate contemporary issues in realist thought. Please see attached flyer for further details and abstracts. Graham Scambler, University College London ‘Taking interdisciplinarity seriously: realism and explanations of health inequalities’ Sue Clegg, Leeds Metropolitan University ‘Realism as a theoretical resource’ Mark Cresswell, Durham University ‘PEDAGOGY…

  • “What was Visual Sociology?”: specialisation and fragmentation within disciplines

    There’s an interesting post on the CSIP blog by Michael Guggenheim. Along with Nina Wakeford, he’s convening Goldsmith’s new MA Visual Sociology. The strange formulation in the blog’s title stems from his desire to overcome the visual epithet, such that the terminology of ‘visual sociology’ could be confined to the past. There’s an interesting question here about how terminology…

  • Emotions as commentaries on human concerns

    In Being Human Archer argues for a view of human beings as having a “rich inner life” which is partly constituted through our engagement in a “continual running commentary with the events going on around us” (Archer 2000: 193). For instance, as I sat down to write this post I quickly looked at the clock…

  • Human Beings, Social Agents and Social Actors

    One of the most interesting things about Archer’s approach is also one of the things which I think is most frequently misunderstood: how social actors (singular) relate to social agents (plural). If (mis)read in isolation, her recent books can give the impression of her having taking some kind of individualistic turn when, in reality, nothing…

  • Researching Affect and Psychosocial Studies

    For those interested in psychosocial approaches to research, this video series I just stumbled across will be of interest. It’s from a seminar series which was jointly organised by people from Cardiff University and City University a few years ago. It aimed to “bring recent interest in affect with older traditions, especially those developed in…

  • CFP Beyond Binaries: Exploring the Psychosocial (A Postgraduate Conference at the University of East London, UK)

    The idea of the psychosocial (or psycho-social) can be traced back to Sigmund Freud’s early writings, particularly ‘The Future of an Illusion’ and ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ address sociological notions of structures, classes, society, the masses as well as psychoanalytic concepts of the individual, the psyche, the Superego, drives, etc. Many scholars after Freud have…

  • BSA Gender Study Group CfP Gender and Quality of Life

    Gender and Quality of Life BSA Gender Study Group One Day Conference: Friday 17th January 2014, University of Lincoln, UK Keynote TBC http://bsagenderstudygroup.wordpress.com/ What constitutes a good life has captured the minds of thinkers across time and cultures. In Aristotle’s terminology, eudaimonia, people were called upon to realize their full potential in order to achieve…

  • ‘The Priority of Practice’: Human Embodiment and Learning From Nature

    The initial project of book blogging Margaret Archer’s last book has spiralled into a plan to cover each of her major books.  I was planning to reread them all at some point anyway: I read them all in sequence during the second year of my PhD and have only really looked at isolated sections since…

  • Workshop – Alterity, Intersubjectivity, Ethics, 30 September 2013

    Registration n is open to attend ‘Alterity, Intersubjectivity, Ethics’. This is a one day multi-disciplinary workshop exploring theoretical directions for the study of ethics and morality. Monday 30th September 2013, 9am – 5pm Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, University of Cambridge 8 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX Website and registration: www.otherethics.wordpress.com<http://otherethics.wordpress.com> Contact: alterityandethicsworkshop@gmail.com<mailto:alterityandethicsworkshop@gmail.com> The ‘ethical turn’ across the…

  • The Practice of Spectating

    There’s an interesting passage in Margaret Archer’s book on agency which argues for an active view of spectating and its status as a learned achievement attained through personal engagement: Spectating is far from being a passive activity, as is evident at football matches, but is equally the case at music concerts, art exhibitions and chess tournaments. It…

  • The (un)intelligibility of academics and being ‘a mere journalist’

    In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible way is liable to be condemned as a ‘mere literary man’ or, worse still, ‘a mere journalist.’ Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly used, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable. The academic man in America…

  • The constitution of social movements: biography, relations and collectives

    We would all agree that social movements are ‘collective’ ventures, for example, but what makes a venture count as collective? Is it a matter of numbers? If so, how many? Is it a matter of a type of interconnection between people, an organization or network? If so, how is that interconnection itself defined? Does ‘wearing…

  • CfP: Quantified Self and Self-Tracking

    In the last few years there has been a significant increase in public and academic interest in the use of devices or techniques for the accumulation, aggregation and analysis of personal data. Apps for mobile phones such asTrack My Run and body tracking devices such as Jawbone, Fitbit and Nike’s Fuelband have perhaps garnered the widest attention with their ability to…

  • BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought- 6th Sept

    BSA Meeting Room, London.  We are pleased to announce our speakers for the forthcoming seminar to debate contemporary issues in realist thought. Please see attached flyer for further details and abstracts. Graham Scambler, University College London ‘Taking interdisciplinarity seriously: realism and explanations of health inequalities’ Sue Clegg, Leeds Metropolitan University ‘Realism as a theoretical resource’ Mark Cresswell, Durham University ‘PEDAGOGY…

  • Taking the ‘inner eye’ out of introspection

    Do you have an experience of inwardness? Do you feel inner activity which is known to you in a way it is not to others? Margaret Archer suggests that most people would assent to some claim of this sort. Obviously, this would not entail we ought to accept the report of this experience but it…

  • Howard Becker’s 23 Thoughts About Youth

    I came across this interesting little post on Becker’s site earlier this week. It’s worth a quick read for anyone interested in youth studies and/or Becker’s work. HT Kip Jones for the video of Becker playing at an ASA conference. Everyone (at least everyone above a certain age) knows–it is no more than common sense–that, in…

  • #HigherEd and the ‘Consumerization of IT’

    Dave Coplin, ‘chief envisioning officer’* at Microsoft, recently gave an interesting talk on ‘Re-Imagining Work’ at the RSA. As part of a broader argument concerning the increasing disjuncture between how digital technology is used outside the workplace and how it is used within the workplace, he discussed the ‘consumerization of IT’ and its implications for organisational structure.…

  • Economists and the Politics of Austerity

    This wonderful post by Simon Wren-Lewis, who is far and away my favourite economics blogger, gets to the heart of austerity politics and its implications for economics as an academic discipline. The underlying question has long fascinated me: are economic ideas adopted by political actors as clothing for pre-existing policies or do these ideas actually…

  • The Genesis of Value

    The Genesis of Value by Hans Joas is a complex book which begins with a deceptively simple question: how do values and value commitments arise? It even states its answer at the outset (“values arise in experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence”) before immediately recognising that the meaning of both question and answer are far from…

  • The Beginner’s Guide to Multi-Author Blogging [v1.0]

    The term ‘blogging’ has a strange history. For some, it still conveys a rather unglamorous image, captured in Andrew Marr’s infamous remarks a few years ago that “a lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting”. Associated with this stereotype is…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Habit(us)

    One of the most contentious arguments made in Margaret Archer’s recent work is the critique of habit(us). What she’s saying here often seems to be misunderstood. She’s not expunging habit from social ontology, only suggesting that its putative role in socialisation needs to be relativised to an account of particular social conditions. As she notes,…

  • “Oh there are other people just like me? I’m not so weird after all”: the internet, social change and social integration

    I’ve been preoccupied recently by parallels I keep observing between common features of asexual biographies and those of other groups who share a common trait. In the case of asexuality this ‘common trait’ is not experiencing sexual attraction. Exactly what this entails about the individual’s experience and what, in turn, this experience has come to mean to them…

  • The Reflexive Imperative, Social Change and Cybernetics

    One unexpected aspect of the Reflexive Imperative was Archer’s return to cybernetics in its conclusion. Though having long seen herself as a critic of this theoretical tradition, the systems theory of Walter Buckley was an important influence on the Morphogenetic Approach. In the Reflexive Imperative she critically engages with the ‘second cybernetics’ of Magorah Maruyama…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Communicative Reflexivity

    Communicative reflexivity relies on interlocutors to complete and confirm internal conversations. However doing this in a sustained fashion necessitates the interlocutor is sufficiently similar and familiar to enter into these deliberations in a meaningful way. We are all capable of expressing our internal speech to external others but what matters is the nature of the…

  • BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought- 6th Sept

    BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought Friday 6 September 2013 BSA Meeting Room, London.  We are pleased to announce our speakers for the forthcoming seminar to debate contemporary issues in realist thought. Please see attached flyer for further details and abstracts. Graham Scambler, University College London ‘Taking interdisciplinarity seriously: realism and explanations of health…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Autonomous Reflexivity

    In contrast to the fractured reflexives (deliberation leads to the intensification of affect) and the meta-reflexives (deliberation tends to problematise self and society) autonomous reflexivity is constituted through purposeful, self-contained and instrumental deliberation. It is promoted by situations where instrumental rationality tends to advance the concerns of subjects: These situations are distinctive because they confront…

  • Proposal: Quantified Self Research Network

    This post is a very tentative first step towards something which I hope others would share my enthusiasm for. I first encountered Quantified Self via Caspar Addyman who I worked with on Your Brain on Drugs. I had to drop out of the project before we finished the Boozerlyzer but it was great to see Caspar subsequently…

  • Guest Post: @TGJBrock Reflects on International Association of Critical Realism 2013

    This year the International Association of Critical Realism (IACR) held a conference on ‘Organising for Alternative Futures’ at the University of Nottingham. IACR is something of a Mecca for critical realists who get to present their work to many of the ‘big names’ in the field, including to the founder of the philosophy, Roy Bhaskar. Whilst…

  • Books, social media and ‘thinking-through-writing’

    For the last couple of weeks I’ve been rereading Margaret Archer’s The Reflexive Imperative and I’ve been blogging about the book on a loosely chapter by chapter basis. I’ve now written eight of these instalments and have a couple more planned before I finish. I’ve gone back to the book for a number of reasons. I’m at…

  • Call for research participants: being single in Britain today

    Forwarded call for participants. Please forward on to your networks and contact Eleanor (details below) for further information. Call for research participants: Single spaces: Single-life in Contemporary Britain www.singlespaces.co.uk We are conducting a large-scale, British Academy-funded research project into single-life in contemporary Britain. The research will provide an overview of what it’s like to be…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Fractured Reflexivity

    This is the second of four posts in which I’ll explore the modes of reflexivity which are so integral to the argument Archer makes in The Reflexive Imperative. Underlying these concepts is an understanding of social morphogenesis as leading to the ‘situational logic of opportunity’ given the generative mechanism of variety to produce more variety. The arguments…

  • Technology, Not Tenure: The Politics of the Digital Turn in #HigherEd

    An absolute must read in the Chronicle of Higher Education for those interested in digital change within higher education: Last year, a former Princeton University president, William G. Bowen, delivered the Tanner Lectures at Stanford, continuing a long tradition of college leaders’ using the top floors of the ivory tower to speak difficult truths about…

  • BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought- 6th Sept

    BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought Friday 6 September 2013 BSA Meeting Room, London.  We are pleased to announce our speakers for the forthcoming seminar to debate contemporary issues in realist thought. Please see attached flyer for further details and abstracts. Graham Scambler, University College London ‘Taking interdisciplinarity seriously: realism and explanations of health…

  • BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought- 6th Sept

    BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought Friday 6 September 2013 BSA Meeting Room, London.  We are pleased to announce our speakers for the forthcoming seminar to debate contemporary issues in realist thought. Please see attached flyer for further details and abstracts. Graham Scambler, University College London ‘Taking interdisciplinarity seriously: realism and explanations of health…

  • BSA Education Study Group Study Day 17 September

    BSA Sociology of Education Study Group one day Conference & re-launch Young Peoples Educational Identities in Challenging Times Tuesday 17 September 2013, 10:30-16:30 BSA Meeting room, Imperial Wharf, London Keynote Speaker – Sara Delamont (Cardiff University), Winner of the 2013 BSA Distinguished Service Award Over the past 70 years the field of the sociology of…

  • Making love, making gender, making babies in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s

    Making love, making gender, making babies in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s 6-7 September CRASSH, Alison Richard Building West Rd, Cambridge Registration is now open. Please visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/2080/ By the end of the twentieth century, a combination of profound social changes and major techno-scientific innovations had reorganized ‘the sexual field’ into three separate systems. The…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Meta-Reflexivity

    After much prevaricating, I’ll start today on posts which discuss each of the four modes of reflexivity in turn. I’ve chosen to begin with meta-reflexivity, which is the initial focus of my data analysis at present. For practitioners of meta-reflexivity, the social order is problematized rather than internalized or normalised. Circumstances have conspired developmentally to inculcate selectivity…

  • “So what is it I’m trying to say exactly?”: Iteration and Articulation

    Earlier today I was writing a paper for the International Association for Critical Realism conference next week. It was intended as a final statement of what my PhD is about, drawing the threads together and getting some feedback before I finish writing up over the next month or two. I’ve struggled endlessly to ‘frame’ my PhD over…

  • Beyond ‘fateful moments’ and ‘turning points’: a realist approach to biographical research

    Advocates of biographical research talk of it offering a “dynamic interplay of individuals and history, inner and outer worlds, self and other” which expresses an idea of “human beings as active agents in making their lives rather than being simply determined by historical and social forces” (Merrill and West 2009: 1). While biographical research has…

  • ‘Shaking Up’ the Social Sciences

    A recent blog post by Nicholas A. Christakis on the New York Times site about the need for ‘shaking up’ the social sciences has provoked a great deal of debate online. The author argues that while the natural sciences have flourished in the last century, giving rise to “whole new fields of inquiry” resulting from “fresh…

  • The Reflexive Imperative, Social Change and the Financial Crisis

    As a precursor to the posts in which I’ll look in detail at each of the modes of reflexivity as discussed in the Reflexive Imperative, this post looks at one particular aspect of Archer’s arguments concerning autonomous reflexivity. Much as contextual continuity is argued to distribute communicative reflexivity among the population and contextual incongruity is associated with meta-reflexivity, Archer argues that context discontinuity is…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Shaping a Life

    In the previous post of this series I explored Archer’s arguments about relational reflexivity: on this view the socialisation process should be understood as an active and ongoing engagement by a individual that is profoundly shaped by the matrix of relations within which they were embedded at any given point in time. There are two key concepts Archer uses…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Relational Reflexivity

    In the next post of this series I’ll cover the theory of socialization offered by Archer in the Reflexive Imperative. She argues that existing theories of socialisation tend to assume a ‘normative consistency’ in the natal environment which, given the intensification of social and culture change, becomes increasingly impossible. As such socialisation can no longer…

  • Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought – September 6th @BritSoci Meeting Rooms

    This seminar intends to take a broad overview of contemporary realist thought within a variety of disciplines and consider current theoretical and methodological issues with respect to realism. We would like to initiate a broad discussion within the following areas: Realist dialogues across perspectives and disciplines. How can realism engage with other schools of thought…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Internal Conversation

    In the third part of this series of posts covering The Reflexive Imperative I will unpack in more detail what Archer means by the notion of ‘internal conversation’. As discussed in the previous post on The Reflexive Imperative and Social Change, an integral part of her account is a denial of the homogeneity of reflexivity.…

  • What’s a Collective? The Ontology of Groups, Crowds and Crews

    Session Organizers Frederic VANDENBERGHE, University State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, frederic@iesp.uerj.br Margaret ARCHER, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, margaret.archer@epfl.ch Session in English Half a century ago, we talked about the Proletariat, but without examining too closely the ontological status of collectives as distinct from collectivities: Does a collective exist? Is it just a…

  • British Sociological Association Youth Study Group: Research Development Workshop for Research Students and Early Career Researchers

    British Sociological Association Youth Study Group Research Development Workshop for Research Students and Early Career Researchers BSA Seminar Room, Imperial Wharf, London, Thursday 7th November 2013 The BSA Youth Study Group invites research students and early career researchers working on or with an interest any aspect of youth research to attend a research development workshop. Building on similar…

  • The Politics of Circulation, Human Agency and Building Your Own Information Environment

    In the spirit of structured procrastination I thought I’d put some thoughts down which occurred when reading Dave Beer’s paper on the Politics of Circulation earlier today (weirdly enough, also in the spirit of structured procrastination, it’s like I have some impending deadline that is leading me to find ever more creative displacement activities). In…

  • The Reflexive Imperative and Social Change

    In the second part of this series of posts, I explore Archer’s notion of the ‘Reflexive Imperative’ and how it relates to her theory of social change. In the previous post I explained how Archer sees reflexivity, the regular exercise of the mental ability to consider our selves in relation to our circumstances and vice…

  • If only Aneurin Bevan had been around in 2003…

    4th November 1956, Trafalgar Square rally. Aneurin Bevan delivers one of the great anti-war speeches, condemning the government’s decision to take military action against Egypt in the Suez crisis.

  • The Reflexive Imperative and its Relationship to the Morphogenetic Approach

    Over the next week I’ll be rereading Margaret Archer’s The Reflexive Imperative and, partly because I’ve never done it before, I’ll be blogging my engagement with each chapter. I’m interested to see how it goes, how long it takes and how much it adds to the depth of my engagement with the book. I found…

  • “Where the fuck do they get their shit from!?”: Reality Television, Austerity Politics and Digital Public Sociology

    It was with some trepidation that I found myself  watching Nick and Margaret’s We All Pay Your Benefits. This unspeakably contemptible show is presented as an “ambitious experiment” in which Nick Hewer and Margaret Mountford (who weirdly enough finished a PhD in papyrology at UCL last year) “want to discover how much benefit is enough to live on and…

  • Frédéric Vandenberghe on Margaret Archer’s “Morphogenetic Quartet”

    Unlike Giddens, who is an eclectic thinker and a theoretical opportunist, Archer is more of a systematic theorist who carefully crafts out a series of fundamental concepts (e.g. analytical dualism, the morphogenetic sequence, the stratification of society and agency), and resolutely sticks to them. Wary of fads and fashions, the grand lady of British social…

  • The relationship between debate/discussion/dialogue and self-identity

    The notion of ‘critical space’ offered by the American sociologist of religion Doug Porpora is central to how I see the world. I realised earlier today that it’s one of the few ideas to fall into that category which I’ve never blogged about. Critical space confronts us whenever we enter a conversation with diverse others…