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  • 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…

  • The strange world of educational viral marketing

    Does anyone else get e-mails like this? I went through your blog while surfing in Google, and was very much impressed with your site’s unique information. So, just thought of dropping you a note of appreciation. Well, my name is Jenny and I’m from Graduatedegreeprogram.net. We recently published an infographic “13 Unusual Masters Degrees” which…

  • Structure your procrastination and turn a vice into a virtue

    For years I’ve tended to chronically over-commit myself in all areas of life. I find it difficult to say ‘no’ if I encounter an interesting opportunity or have an interesting idea. However I periodically get quite exhausted and have brief phases of dropping projects left right and centre. Clearing up the free time is an…

  • “Why are there no great British social theorists?”

    This interesting discussion between John Urry and Chris Rojek is from the 2011 BSA conference. The question in this post’s title comes from Rojek at 14 minutes. Rojek cites an argument made by Bryan Turner to ask the question. He argues that British sociology has tended to import continental theory, synthesise it and export it…

  • A discussion of the craft of giving (bad) presentations needs to consider avoiding slides entirely

    This presentation by Nick Hopwood seems to have circulated quite widely this morning. It’s a satirical presentation attached to this post, visually illustrating all the presentational mistakes he observes in the attached article. It makes a lot of useful points in a very effective way, though given Nick is presumably vaguely aiming this at PhDs…

  • In defence of Jacques Lacan (sort of)

    Last week I wrote a sightly irritated post speculating about the psychopathology of Jacques Lacan. This persuasive comment by someone I had been unfairly and unnecessarily rude to on Twitter merited reproduction in its own right. I’ve underlined a few sections which I thought were particularly interesting. The comment nicely captures exactly what had intrigued me about…

  • The spatial politics of Millbank

  • Unpicking habitus and reflexivity: a case study of the stressed academic

    In a powerful paper which has circulated widely on Twitter, Ros Gill argues that digital technology is implicated in both an intensification and an extensification of academic labour: Alongside the intensification of work in academia, we are also experiencing its marked  extensification (Jarvis and Pratt, 2006) across time and space. Paradoxically, as University lecturers have increasingly reported…

  • CfP Deadline Reminder: 31st July 2013: Queer Femininie Affinities

    CfP Deadline Reminder: 31st July 2013 Queer Feminine Affinities, Edited by Alexa Athelstan & Vikki Chalklin, Call for Submissions, Deadline 31st July 2013 queerfeminineaffinities@gmail.com Queer Feminine Affinities aspires to become the first collaborative book that collects a diverse variety of written and visual materials by, on and for femme, queer, alternative and subversive feminine voices and communities…

  • Interesting media project exploring #asexuality needs participants

    Do you class yourself as Asexual? Would you be happy to talk about your life and experiences for a documentary? We are looking for asexual individuals who are willing to talk openly about their feelings for a television documentary. The production company, who work regularly with Channel 4 and BBC3, would ideally like to speak to people under the age of 35. However…

  • Enquiring into Wellbeing: Reflections on Culture, Method and Inner Truths

    This symposium will reflect on the process of enquiring into wellbeing in diverse social and cultural contexts. Papers are invited that address one or more of the three main questions below. Most papers should have an empirical basis in the author’s own research, but critical reviews of the wider wellbeing literature will also be considered.…

  • “I’m having an argument with myself”: memory, identity and agency

    I was reading an astonishing essay on memory by Mike Jay last night. He’s always someone who stands out to me in the London Review of Books (and similar publications) because I once interviewed him and, having accidentally deleted the interview, was too embarrassed to ever admit this. I did a podcast with him about…

  • Did you know that “first class tickets are required for first class travel”?

    As has so often happened in the last year of my life, I found myself on an unpleasantly crowded train home this evening after a long day in London. I could not fail to be aware of the impending crowds as I began to board the train – the hordes of people who had ran…

  • “So what exactly is this Digital Sociology group going to do then…?”

    It’s only one day to go until the first event of the BSA Digital Sociology study group myself and Emma Head setup earlier this year. In the hope I’ll have something useful and interesting to say at the start of the day, I thought it would probably be a good idea to collate some ideas…

  • Sociologists and anthropologists reflect on the craft of writing

    This wonderful project undertaken by the Department of Anthropology at Durham University has solicited short reflections on writing from an intriguing selection of authors from across the social sciences: We have written to a number of scholars who have made a significant contribution to the social science literature and asked them to write a short…

  • The Psychopathology of Jacques Lacan or, Why Can’t Theorists Just Say What They Mean!??

    I was quite taken recently with comments Chomsky made about Lacan. I originally came to Lacan through Žižek, as the intriguing way in which Slavoj deftly weaved Lacanian ideas into discussions of film piqued my curiosity. So I bought Žižek’s book about Lacan. Five years on I cannot for the life of me remember anything about this…

  • So what the hell is ‘quantitative easing’?

    For a long time John Lanchester’s coverage of the financial crisis has been the best thing about the London Review of Books. Yet even by his own high standards, his most recent essay is spectacularly good:  It’s done so through quantitative easing, which involves buying back its own bonds using money that doesn’t actually exist.…

  • Noam Chomsky Calls Postmodern Critiques of Science Over-Inflated “Polysyllabic Truisms”

    A couple of weeks ago Open Culture posted a great video featuring an interview with Chomsky being rather scathing about Žižek and Lacan. Today they’ve posted another one where Chomsky discusses the political implications of post-structuralist thought in equally scathing fashion. I was amused by the abuse that was directed at the @soc_imagination account after tweeting…

  • The lessons of music culture for scholarly communication

    Dave Beer makes some interesting points in this short article which frames current debates about open access in terms of trends within music culture, which have been driven by broadly similar structural processes and have been playing themselves out for much longer. Some people argue that rendering academic publishing more ‘open’ could prove hugely problematic,…

  • Open research and ‘self-promotion’

    I just read an interesting (though slightly depressing!) post from Nick Hopwood giving useful advice to PhDs and ECRs. I’m not quibbling with his advice per se and I genuinely enjoy his blog but I took issue with this paragraph: I had vague ideas that academics, with a few obvious exceptions, get on in their careers by doing…

  • How to write 1000 words a day and not go bat shit crazy (within the first two weeks)

    A few weeks ago I encountered this interesting post, from which this one takes its title, on the Thesis Whisperer which I tweeted from various accounts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the post proved popular. I was quite taken with the idea and thought I’d give it a try. I’ve experimented with writing targets in the past and…

  • “These kids don’t want to carry on. They want to see the whole bloody thing burn”

    Something snapped in August 2011, and it was a long time coming. If you listened to what those few rioters to have got near a journalist had to say – ‘The whole country is burning, man’; ‘We’re showing the rich people we can do what we want’; ‘They’re screwing the system so only white middle-class kids can…

  • The Sociology of Intellectual Faddishness or, Why it’s unfair to blame everything on Foucault

    There’s an ongoing argument here about the nature of sociology. Having initially been rather rude, Max Parkin offered what I thought was a perfectly reasonable response which I thought I’d reproduce here because, leaving aside the needless unpleasantness, it’s turned into an interesting discussion. Sociology is not art. It has nothing to do with art, nor with…

  • Spatio-temporality and Social Structure: Or, what Realists can learn from Goffman

    If we bracket the time dimension in order to focus on hierarchically organized social space, we have to take into account that agent X, in pursuing specific goals, is faced with external institutional and figurational structures which, from his/her perspective, present a mix of manipulable and non-manipulable features or properties. This structural mix is both…

  • The surreal position of ‘trade unions’ within contemporary political discourse

    On Any Questions last Friday, Graham Brady (chair of the 1922 committee) offered his analysis of the recent controversy over Unite’s role in the selection of a replace for Falkirk MP Eric Joyce. Brady opined that the real problem facing political parties was to recruit more members so as to prevent this sort of influence…

  • Alienated and alienating writing (by alienated and alienating social scientists)

    The problem for social scientists is that our jargon, like that of the natural scientists, is heavily biased towards nouns and noun phrases. Our big words are nearly always nouns, such as “re-ethnification”, “mediatisation”, “deindividuation” and all the other “isations” and “ifications” that dominate so much empirical and theoretical writing. […] The preference for nouns is…

  • Pahnl’s miniature world

    More here

  • CfP: Making Trans Count

    Call for Submissions for Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.1: Making Transgender Count As a relatively new social category, the very notion of a “transgender population” poses numerous intellectual, political, and technical challenges. Who gets to define what transgender is, or who is transgender?  How are trans people counted—and by whom and for whom are they enumerated? …

  • The growth of ‘marcomms’ and the transformation of higher education

    There are obvious inefficiencies in this competition as increasing resources have to be devoted to marketing and recruitment … The cost of financing higher education through the botched loan scheme means that the Treasury has insisted on an overall cap on student numbers. This creates a zero sum game where the sector is unable to expand overall…

  • The Great University Gamble

    Understandably, headlines focused on this dramatic rise in price and its apparent expense for graduates, while obscuring the greater burden placed on the publicly backed student loan scheme, which requires an increase in upfront government borrowing. In the medium term, Public Sector Net Debt is projected to grow by an additional £20 billion as a…

  • The shifting language of research ‘participation’

    The relation of people like us–researchers in the social sciences–to the people we gathered data on and wrote about was beginning to worry us all. We had left behind the innocence of being happy when we used the tricks we had been taught, and continued to teach to our students, to “get access” and “gain…

  • BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought

    BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought Friday 6 September 2013 BSA Meeting Room, London. As the new convenors of the BSA realism study group we are pleased to announce a seminar to debate contemporary issues in realist thought. We intend to facilitate discussion with a range of speakers to consider what…

  • The 2014 ISRF Essay Competition – Theory of Social Behaviour

    ‘The research investigator as instrument across the human sciences’ The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JTSB) intend to award a prize of 7,000 CHF for the best essay on the topic ‘The research investigator as instrument across the human sciences’. This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose…

  • Digital / Moving Image and Networked Performance: on Cultural Transformations

    Summer school / conference 8-12 July, Milburn House, University of Warwick Full Programme Digital / Moving Image What are the images of today, and what do they do? They are operational (Farocki), as they become the computational foundation of military operations in computer vision software. They are navigational, as they emerge as part of the experience…

  • Race Critical Public Scholarship – pursuing justice in austere times, UEL, 17th July, 10.30-5.30

    The climate of so-called austerity is hardening inequalities, including institutional racism, and has facilitated a resurgence of overtly racist political parties and a troubling renewal of  popular racism across Europe and beyond. In recent decades, there has been an implication that engaged scholarship in the field of race equality should address the state – perhaps…

  • Critical Realism: Problems and Prospects

    Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service New York University 295 Lafayette Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10012 August 14-15, 2013 August 14: 7:45-8:30:  Breakfast and Welcome 8:30-9:00: Opening Remarks, Mervyn Hartwig and Roy Bhaskar 9:30-10:45: “Emergence or Suprvenience?”, Phil Gorski; Commentator: John L. Martin 10:45-11:00: COFFEE BREAK 11:00-12:15: “Causal Powers”, Ruth Groff; Commentator:…

  • The growth of advertising and the political economy of dissatisfaction

    Advertising is no less important in producing and regulating the new spirit of capitalism. It too conducts a subtle game of instrumentalizing unhappiness and dissatisfaction with capitalism as a motivation for consumption. This was witnessed as early as the 1920s, when American marketers targeted a growing collective sense of ennui and alienation from urban-capitalist existence, a feeling…

  • “But isn’t that what the psychologists do?”: the dangers of disciplinary boundary work

    To respond to this particular crisis of measure, economics and psychology are being forcibly re-married. Behavioural and experimental economics have their earliest origins in game theory in the 1940s, which allowed economists and psychologists to compare normative rational choice-making—that is, according to neo-classical economics—with empirical choice-making, as observed under laboratory conditions. The gap between economists’…

  • The ‘Liquid Narrative’ of Spring Breakers

    I contemplated writing a review of this film when I saw it a few months ago but wasn’t confident I could do it justice. So I was fascinated by this unusual interview with Harmony Korine about the film: Though the interview has made me want to go back and see the film again:

  • Two potential directions for para-academic digital scholarship

    Para-academics mimic academic practices so they are liberated from the confines of the university. Our work, and our lives, reflect how the idea of a university as a place for knowledge production, discussion and learning, has become distorted by neo-liberal market forces. We create alternative, genuinely open access, learning-thinking-making-acting spaces on the internet, in publications,…

  • Baking an idea in the unconscious mind

    My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying delbierately, and…

  • The AHRC’s Collaborative Skills Development call

    The AHRC’s Collaborative Skills Development call is aimed at supporting the development of innovative, collaborative training packages for PhD students and early career researchers in the arts and humanities. The 2013 call will operate with three strands: The Organisation-led strand will offer funding of up to £60,000 to enable Research Organisations to offer training and skills development activities to…

  • Call for papers: ‘Getting Social Research into Policy & Practice’

    We’re very pleased to announe the Call for workshop papers for “Getting Social Research into Policy and Practice”, the Social Research Association’s annual conference on 9 December 2013 at the British Library, London. The SRA annual conference is a unique event: it is the only forum the UK has for bringing together social researchers from all sectors…