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  • 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…

  • Why are conspiracy theories popular?

    This morning’s article on the LSE politics blog was a thought-provoking discussion of conspiracy theories and the increasing weight of social scientific evidence concerning their emergence and dissemination. This is a topic that’s fascinated me for years and one which, until I started to realise that reading these sites on a daily basis would drive…

  • The Empty ‘Posturing’ of Žižek and Lacan?

    This interview (via Open Culture) will perhaps divide opinion. It follows on quite nicely from John Searle’s comments about Foucault, Bourdieu and continental obscurantism which I found recently. Before I express a view, let me offer a preamble: I own and have read a lot of Žižek books, though the ratio between my owning and my reading of…

  • Caught Between Zombies and Chavs? The aesthetics of the crowd in an age of austerity

    I love book shops. There are few things in life that give me greater pleasure then entering a book shop to choose a book at random. While I occasionally buy some utter crap through the enthusiastically scattergun approach I take to book buying, it’s much more common for me to stumble across books that I…

  • The ALEC Rock

  • Rethinking the vision of sociology one might want to argue for

    it may be time to re-think how to situate our ourselves and our commitments in relation to, not only what one is against, but also what vision of sociology one might want to argue for. It is not a mattter, to my mind, of answering disciplined instrumentalism with hyperpolitical posturing that dwells in the delusion…

  • RIP James Gandolfini

    This was the scene I was looking for from Get Shorty but I can’t find it on Youtube.

  • CfP: Gender violence and virtual worlds: brave new world(s) of regulation?

    Virtual Worlds and Online Games now play a large part in society and social past times; they are popular and mass culture. Women actively participate in various online environments and Virtual Worlds, forming a significant part of these communities. However, Virtual Worlds provide a different space for people to inhabit. Cyberspace has traditionally been regarded…

  • “They were stalking the corridors, the lecture rooms, the offices…”: open research, ethics and impact

    The Last Seminar by Stan Cohen must surely merit consideration as the strangest paper ever to appear in a Sociology journal. It tells the story of a gradual invasion of the university campus by those who are neither expected nor welcome: research participants. Encountering  strangely familiar figures in their everyday working lives, befuddled sociologists suddenly…

  • CfP: The Sociological Craft Project

    In this new feature the Sociological Imagination invites short (2500 word max) contributions reflecting on any aspect of academic craft. We use the term ‘craft’ in the broad sense conveyed by Richard Sennett: Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labour; it serves the…

  • Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick Competition for 3 PhD Studentships

    Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick Competition for 3 PhD Studentships CIM is pleased to announce a competition for three PhD studentships funded as part of an ESRC Professorial Fellowship award awarded to Professor Celia Lury on the topic ‘Order and Continuity: Methods of Change in a Topological Society’. Professor Lury will act as the primary…

  • Some reflections on editing books and special issues while doing a PhD

    This interesting post by Pat Thomson left me speculating on the future of edited books. I co-edited an edited book (see below) early in my PhD, with an existing project inviting me onboard as a fourth editor – largely, I assume, because my knowledge of the  asexuality literature was useful to the project. It was a great…

  • Quantified Self and Philosophical Anthropology

    Last week I listened this Radio 4 documentary about the Quantified Self which was much better than I anticipated. However I was confused at what I couldn’t help but see as the vacuity of the esteemed critics invited by the programme. Their objection seemed to be that the idea of self-measurement (as if this was…

  • 3 tips for managing institutional, project and group twitter feeds in #HigherEd

    In the last few years I’ve jointly or solely managed a whole range of twitter feeds – including @sociowarwick, @bsatheory, @bsapgform, @bsadigitalsoc, @lsepoliticsblog, @bsarealism, @digital_change, @soc_imagination, @asexstudies, @dis_of_dissent, @warwicksocsci and probably some others that I’ve forgotten about. Along the way I’ve learnt a lot about what works and what doesn’t. Given that we seem to be…

  • Art, research and sociology’s promiscuity

    I’ve just come back from two days talking, thinking and occasionally getting frustrated by the question of the relationship between art and social research. This is something I’ve been curious about for ages. Here are some reasons why: I think the communicative repertoire exhibited by most sociologists is profoundly limited and I think of performance, in the…

  • Conference: Recognising Diversity? Gender and Sexual Equalities In Principle and Practice

    Recognising Diversity?: Gender and Sexual Equalities In Principle and Practice marks the end of the research project ‘Recognising Diversity?: Equalities In Principle and Practice’, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (PI. Dr. Sally Hines, Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS), University of Leeds).  The project was designed to provide knowledge transfer of…

  • Third International Conference on Social Computing and its Applications

    Third International Conference on Social Computing and its Applications http://socialcloud.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/confs/SCA2013/Calls.php Sep 30–Oct 2 2013, Karlsruhe, Germany Qualitative and quantitative social research has changed significantly with the rise of Web 2.0, which has enabled publishing of user-generated content on an epic scale. This ‘Big Social Data’ is most evidently manifest in the advent of social media…

  • Do iPods block out internal conversation?

    This is a claim my supervisor has made from time to time. It’s one I’ve tended to be rather sceptical of but it came to mind earlier when I was walking home, with no music as a result of having forgotten to pickup headphones when I left the house. To say that listening to music…

  • The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Sociologist #2

    This is the letter by Stephen Mugford which prompted yesterday’s post. Reproduced with his permission: Laurie, I listen to TA as a podcast, so timing and order can be a bit scrambled. So it was that only recently I heard one on ‘intoxication’ from 2012. I’m writing to you because it provoked in me a…

  • Downfall – NSA’s Prism revealed to dear leader

    Downfall – NSA’s Prism revealed to dear leader from Anonyops on Vimeo.

  • Calculative Devices in the Digital Age: a call for papers

    Call for Papers: Calculative Devices in the Digital Age Department of Geography Durham University 21-22 November 2013 Keynote speakers (tbc): Prof. Pat O’Malley (Sydney)   Prof. Marieke de Goede (Amsterdam)   Prof. Rita Raley (UCSB) The Securing against Future Events project is organizing a two day conference on the forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with…

  • Tacitly assuming that research participants exist in an environment insulated from research

    I just listened to an interesting lecture by Shane Blackman  and wanted to get a thought down on paper (so to speak) while it was still fresh in my mind. He recounted a number of instances where participants in ethnographic research he was conducting cited concepts from other research during the period of fieldwork – things like…

  • The role of universities in social mobility

    On 3rd July in London the Paired Peers Project (www.bristol.ac.uk/pairedpeers) are launching their final report:   ‘The role of universities in social mobility’.   Melissa Benn, Phil Brown, Miriam David, Danny Dorling, Les Ebdon, Eric Thomas, Aaron Porter and Steve West  are all confirmed speakers.   The event is from 9:15-5pm with a wine reception until 6pm.   Please see…

  • The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Sociologist

    This wonderful phrase comes from Stephen Mugford who just forwarded me a letter he wrote some time ago complaining about the largely unacknowledged reinvention and rediscovery which can be seen in contemporary sociology and how it compares to the much more innovative research trajectories which he argues can be seen in disciplines like cognitive science. I think there are…

  • Seeing scholarly publishing with fresh eyes

    A research student of mine was thinking about submitting his first paper to an academic journal. He casually asked how much he would be paid for his contribution, acknowledging it probably wouldn’t be much. I explained that not only would he not be paid but that for some journals the authors were themselves expected to…

  • An interview with David Jay: Why Asexuality Matters For The Future of Sexual Culture

    In this podcast I talk to David Jay about the future of the asexuality community, the implications of its increasing visibility and its relevance for sexual culture more broadly.

  • Some thoughts about the sociology of sociological theory

    As anyone who looks at my blog regularly might have noticed, I’ve been reading Nicos Mouzelis very  closely recently (and also spelling his name wrong up until finally noticing my persistant mistake a moment ago). There are two things I enjoyed about his work. Firstly, there is a panoramic view of contemporary sociological theory, with his…

  • Biographical approaches to studying subcultural social worlds

    In his book on relational sociology Nick Crossley offers an account of ‘social worlds’ which I have found very thought provoking but ultimately quite problematic: Social worlds are networks of interaction demarcated by their participants’ mutual involvment in specifiable sets of activites. They form around sports, art forms and genres, pastimes, occupations, locations, conflicts and…

  • Rethinking the craft of social research

    It is still the case that most social scientists view the research encounter as an interface between an observer and the observed, producing either quantitative or qualitative data. Equally, the dissemination of research findings are confined to conventional paper forms of publishing, and research excellence is measured and audited through such forms, be it in…

  • The emergence of sociological media? Is social media becoming mainstream within UK sociology?

    I wrote a short article for the BSA Teaching Journal last week arguing that we are seeing the early stages of social media use becoming mainstream within UK sociology. I’m interested to know what others think of this argument so here is the evidence I cited: Almost 30 Sociology departments now have a twitter presence.…

  • In defence of the book

    To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as…

  • The Sociological Craft Project (#2)

    I wrote last week about my interest in sociological craft and increasing preoccupation with the idea of creating a forum (probably as part of sociologicalimagination.org) within which accomplished sociologists could reflect on the processes underlying their work in ways which would be helpful to PhDs/ECRs as well as addressing broader disciplinary questions about the purpose…

  • CSWG Graduate Seminar Series – Negotiating Modern Masculinities – 5th June

    The second seminar in the CSWG Graduate Seminar Series this term is entitled ‘Negotiating Modern Masculinities‘. The seminar will be held on Wednesday the 5th of June, 5pm-7pm in the Ramphal Builing, room R0.14. Presentations include: Joseph Oldham, University of Warwick – ‘The ‘Blair Masculinity’ in British Spy Fiction’ Emma Hutchinson, University of Warwick –…

  • Getting started with social media – some thoughts for a talk I’m doing next week

    I think social media is becoming increasingly integral to academic life & will only continue to be so –  reasons include the increasing centrality of the digital in wider society, the impact agenda, precarious academic labour and the individualization of professional  identity, normalization… I think a minimal online presence is pretty much essential at this…

  • Dewey on Individuality

    Individuality is at first spontaneous and unshaped; it is a potentiality, a capacity for development. Even so it is a unique manner of acting in and with a world of objects and persons. It is not something complete in itself, like a closet in a house or a secret drawer in a desk, filled with treasures that are waiting…

  • Digital scholarship and the tendency of academics to “slip so readily into unintelligibility”

    For sociology to be to be effective, especially beyond the academy, it must have literary ambitions. Mills’ assessment of the quality of the sociological writings of his time is damning. He argues that there is a ‘serious crisis in literacy’ in which sociologists are ‘very much involved’ (1959:239). Mills’ position here is an extension of…

  • The Sociological Craft Project

    In the appendix to Sociological Imagination, entitled On Intellectual Craftsmanship, C. Wright Mills advocates keeping a file or journal within which to record your ideas. He argues that doing so: encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams.…

  • Academics: bring your own identity

    Originally posted on Amber at Warwick: academic technology: You’re probably familiar with Linked-in: it is a profile service for many sorts of people and I’ve noticed that outside the UK it is used for academic networking too, more so than inside the UK, at least in the circles I move in. It has 225 million members. You…

  • LS Lowry and the Sociological Imagination

    This isn’t the blog post I have intended to write for ages about LS Lowry’s profoundly sociological sensibility. But it is a percursor to it because this article so succinctly describes exactly the point I’m trying to make about Lowry’s work: What is amazing, and what confounds all efforts to cram Lowry into boxes marked “pessimism”…

  • What is Digital Sociology?

    Tuesday 16th July 2013 BSA Meeting Room, Suite 2, 2 Station Court Imperial Wharf, Fulham, London SW6 2PY This inaugural event for the BSA’s Digital Sociology Group brings together a diverse range of speakers who, in a variety of ways, work within the nascent field of digital sociology. Rather than proceed from a substantive account…

  • BSA Teaching Group Conference on June 15th

    BSA TEACHING GROUP CONFERENCE Saturday 15th June 2013 Nottingham Trent University Sponsored by the Higher Education Academy  The BSA’s Teaching Group is pleased to announce a regional conference hosted by the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University. This event is aimed specifically at sociology teachers and will bring together a variety of guest speakers in…

  • It worries me how excited I am about this software launching…

  • RFR Masterclass – Facet methodology – principles and practices workshop

    Facet methodology – principles and practices workshop Wednesday 12 June 2013 2pm – 4pm Professor Jennifer Mason, Co-director, Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life Registration fee @ £50.00 http://www.crfr.ac.uk/eventsandtraining/training/masterclass-facet-methodolo gy/ ‘Facet methodology’ – is an inventive orientation to researching the multidimensionality of everyday lives and relationships, which puts researcher creativity and imagination…

  • Interdisciplinarity and the poverty of post structuralist intellectual strategies

    Post-structuralism exchanges the undesirable situation of lack of communication between the social sciences for the equally undesirable one where the internal logic of each subdiscipline is completely ignored. To be specific, there is little satisfaction with the present status quo where the boundaries between economics, political science, sociology and anthropology have become solid blinkers preventing…

  • Invitation to contribute to the CelebYouth project website

    ‘The role of celebrity in young people’s classed and gendered aspirations’ is an ESRC funded research project which examines the relationship between celebrity culture, inequalities of class and gender and young people’s educational experiences, identities and transitions. The project has an active website (http://www.celebyouth.org/ ) and twitter account (@CelebYouthUK) and the team regularly post blogs about…

  • What’s the point of sociological theory?

    By maintaining its specialized logic and orientation it is capable of providing a set of conceptual tools that can operate as a theoretical lingua franca, as a flexible vocabulary with no foundationalist pretensions, which can help sociologists establish bridges between their own and other disciplines, as well as between competing social science paradigms. This is…

  • Participants needed for art/research project about asexuality

    Holly Falconer and I are working on a project exploring asexuality through photography. Over the past two years she has done portraits of people across the UK, and is now looking for a few more volunteers to complete the project. She is especially seeking people over the age of 40 and couples. You can read…

  • Call for Papers/Participants – Gendered Knowledges: An interdisciplinary workshop

    Call for Papers and Participants Gendered Knowledges: An interdisciplinary workshop The Gendered Knowledges project is holding a Gender and Sexuality(ies) Interdisciplinary Workshop on 12th June 2013 at the University of Warwick. Gendered Knowledges is a newly launched research project that aims to explore radical interdisciplinary pedagogies in relation to Gender and Sexuality. The project, funded…

  • “What kinds of creatures do we think we are?”: Human Sciences in the ‘Age of Biology’

  • Digital Humanities but No Digital Sociology

    All these changes in scholarship have been taken up with a great deal more enthusiasm by some in the academy than others.  Our colleagues in the humanities have embraced digital technologies much more readily than those of us in sociology or the social sciences more generally.  A casual survey of the blogosphere reveals that those…

  • CfP: Queer Feminine Affinities

    Queer Feminine Affinities Call for Submissions Deadline 31st July 2013 Website: http://queerfeminineaffinities.wordpress.com Email: 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 emerging from within the UK. Inspired by collections like Joan…

  • CfP: Tensions of Rhetorics and Realities in Critical Diversities

    Call for Papers Tensions of Rhetorics and Realities in Critical Diversities Edited byAlexa Athelstan, Nichole Edwards, Mercedes Pöll & Sanaz Raji(University of Leeds) Website: http://tensionsrhetoricsrealities.wordpress.com/call-for-papersEmail: tensions.rhetorics.realities@gmail.com We warmly invite your contributions to our edited collection entitled Tensions of Rhetorics and Realities. The book will be submitted to the Routledge series Advances in Critical Diversities (eds. Yvette Taylor…

  • Moral behaviour in animals

    In this talk the primatologist Frans de Waal explains the transition underway from a tendency to construe animal behaviour (including the human animal) in terms of competition, aggression and domination to a new understanding of a pervasive capacity for cooperation and empathy. It’s a fantastic talk, not least of all because of the animal videos he shows as…

  • The frustrations of philosophers: Richard Rorty, sociological explanation and intellectual biography

    I’m finally in the process of reading this intellectual biography of Richard Rorty by Neil Gross. I’ve intended to for a few years now, given my long term fascination with Rorty, however it was only recently that I had it pointed out to me that I’d find the substantive analytical themes of the book interesting…

  • ‘Trans’ as Everyday Culture @SocioWarwick

  • Deadline Approaching: FWSA Small Grants Scheme 2013

    Dear all, The FWSA offers a small grant of £250 for workshops, seminars, conferences and networks organised by and aimed for postgraduate students. This money can be used for a variety of purposes and can be used alongside other awards. The lead organisers named on the application form must be FWSA members at the time…

  • What are you doing tonight? I’m going out to commit some sociology…

    In the wake of a foiled terrorist attack in Canada, recent comments have offered a fascinating insight into mindset of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper: Now is not the time to “commit sociology,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday in the wake of a foiled terrorist plot to attack a Via Rail passenger train that has some now…

  • “So what’s your PhD about?”

    It’s an attempt to develop an explanatory framework through which personal changes over the life course can be explained retroductively in a sociological way. I’m using an empirical case study (two years of longitudinal interviews with 18 students taking different degrees over their first two years of university) to try and develop a practical strategy for…