Mike O’Donnell’s talk on “Charles Wright Mills and the (Continuing) Problem of Radical Agency” from the C Wright Mills session I organised at the BSA conference in Leeds. Will go up on Sociological Imagination once I’ve finished editing the session and gathering the related material I want to post up with it.

An introduction to multi-author blogging Publishing on the web as a researcher Single author vs multi-author blogging “Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now” Multi-author academic blogs are the way of the future Ten Commandments for Editing Someone’s Work Cite or site? An article which…

Community Development Journal Plus – ePublishing as supplement to core journal End user online survey of eBooks in Higher Education  Sage encouraging and supporting the use of social media by their authors to reach a wider audience (see here and here) The History Blogging Project – a case study worth looking at in greater depth for the report…

NatCen Social Research, Sage and the Oxford Internet Institute will be launching our new network for methodological innovation at the end of May. The network will explore whether social science researchers should embrace social media and, if we do, what the implications are for our methods and practice? We know that social media tools are…

Part 3 of a conversation recorded at the BSA conference 2011. Will go up on various sites once I’ve finished editing.

Part 2 of a conversation recorded at the BSA conference 2011. Will go up on various sites once I’ve finished editing.

The Sociological Cinema is edited and published by Valerie Chepp, Paul Dean, and Lester Andrist, a team of three graduate students in the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland. The idea of The Sociological Cinema came to us over the course of several conversations in which we repeatedly found ourselves discussing our use of video clips in the classroom. While teaching…

I’m compiling a directory of sociological bloggers for sociological imagination – do you want to be on it? If so please fill out the form below & I’ll add you to the directory.

Part 1 of a conversation recorded at the BSA conference 2011. Will go up on various sites once I’ve finished editing.

Increased communication and exchange at the pre-publication stage could, perhaps, serve to exacerbate this problem. However while this is undoubtedly a risk, it is far from an inevitability and, furthermore, the costs are outweighed by the benefits. Part of the problem stems from the strikingly monological and unidimensional way in which publication tends to be…

“There’s no money left” So in case you hadn’t heard, there’s no money left. A profligate Labour party frittered it all away and, just like any household that had done the same thing, we now have to ‘tighten our belts’. However my interest in this presentation isn’t the erroneousness of the household finance metaphor, the political uses…

I dislike the author intensely but she is absolutely spot on in this case. As Colin Crouch argues in his post-democracy thesis, the professionalisation of political communication is one of the defining characteristics of late capitalist political culture. The internal democracies of parties are hollowed out, parliamentarians live lives far removed from the electorate while…

Dear all, We are delighted to announce that registration for Marginal Cartographies: Researching beyond borders, to be held at the University of Warwick on Saturday 28 April 2012, is now open here: http://marginalcartographies.wordpress.com/registration/ The £10 registration fee includes lunch and refreshments, as well as a wine reception. You will also find the programme for the…

The survey verified that research libraries are rapidly developing publishing services. By late 2007, 44% of the 80 responding ARL member libraries reported they were delivering publishing services and another 21% were in the process of planning publishing service development. Only 36% of responding institutions were not active in this arena. These libraries are publishing…

The new presses are based in or closely collaborate with university libraries and combine an established publishing knowledge with the expertise of the library staff in areas such as digitisation, data management, archiving, preservation and faculty relationships. The close association between library and university press, or indeed the integration of the press into the library…

The Digital Scholar is a book I’ve been intending to read for quite some time. It’s also fittingly an instance of Bloomsbury Academic’s particular approach to digitally enhanced publishing. The digitally enhanced book is accessible through a webpage with four tabs, each with distinct functionality: An overview of the book, bibliographical/publication information, table of contents…

I was just reading this post on the Good Men Project: it’s a question by a guy who’s worried he’s being ‘used’ as a ‘substitute boyfriend’ by a female friend who regularly calls him to talk before bed. The ‘expert’ columnists advise him that, yes, he is being used and that he should break off…

BSA TEACHING GROUP Call for micro-lectures To all Postgraduates in Universities local to Birmingham At the BSA TEACHING GROUP ANNUAL CONFERENCE BIRMINGHAM, 29th SEPTEMBER 2012 Do you want to: Enhance your profile?         Keep sociology teachers up-to date? Talk to the people who will be writing the next generation of textbooks for…

What do people gain from all the toil    at which they toil under the sun? A generation goes, and a generation comes,    but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down,    and hurries to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south,    and goes around to the north;…

Dear members of IACR and friends of critical realism,   Christian Smith, who shared the 2011 Cheryl Frank Memorial Prize with Alan Norrie,   for his book “What is a Person?” will give his lecture:     “Human Nature, Human Goods, and Motivation for Action”     at the Institute of Education in London  Wednesday…

The word ‘blogging’ often has negative connotations. Yet blogging can be understood both as an output and as a platform. Many negative views about blogging are connected to a certain idea of what it is: a single author, using it as a forum to express their views to a world which, in my cases, isn’t particularly…

Did you hear the ’59 Sound coming through on grandmother’s radio? Did you hear the rattling chains in the hospital walls? Did you hear the old gospel choir when they came to carry you over? Did you hear your favorite song playing one last time…? Tell all the young boys, young girls,  All the young…

A presentation by Dr. Ashley Mears from the University of Boston -‘Pricing Looks: the Gendered Production of Value in an Aesthetic Economy’ Fashion modelling is one of a handful of occupations in which women routinely earn more than men, commanding wage premiums up to 75 percent. How do women manage to earn more than men…

In light of the funding council emphasis on collaborative partnerships for research and impact, both with other HEIs and with private and public organisations, it is crucial that today’s researchers are capable of working effectively with a range of organisations. What it is: An interactive workshop on effective engagement with non-academic partners. Led by: Dr Maggie Leggett,…

Connecting at a distance: creating a collaborative language learning community. This seminar will combine insights from our experience and hands-on opportunities to evaluate technologies for connection and collaboration in an informal, international community. We will build and expand our own personal learning networks to help find support for the challenges faced in your individual contexts.…

University Publishing In A Digital Age By publishing we mean  simply the communication and broad dissemination of knowledge, a function that has become both more complex and more important with the introduction and rapid evolution of digital and networking technologies. There is a seeming limitless range of opportunities for a faculty member to distribute his…

Interview with Martin Eve, associate lecturer and tutor in English Literature at the University of Sussex. Founding Editor of Orbit: Writing Around Pynchonand formerly Chief Editor of Excursions. Formerly an internet developer.

You can tell Gayle, if she calls, That I’m famous now for all of these rock and roll songs. And even if that’s a lie, she should’ve given me a try. When we were kids on the field of the first day of school. I would’ve been her fool. And I would’ve sang out your…

This is for the messed up kids bound like dynamite, The wandering drunks out on the town tonight, For the romantic killer that’s never been caught, For the crackpot who hit the jackpot and stopped. This is those who climb right to the top, Just to feel what it’s like to drop, For the critical…

As Peter Miller and I have argued elsewhere, the government of an “economy” becomes possible only through discursive mechanisms that represent the domain to be governed as an intelligible field with its limits, characteristics whose component parts are linked together in some more or less systematic manner (Miller and Rose 1990). For the bioeconomy to…

DSM IV cautions that individuals within any diagnostic group are heterogeneous: its categories are only intended as aids to clinical judgement. But it promotes an idea of specificity in diagnosis that is linked to a conception of specificity in underlying pathology. The broad categories of the start of the twentieth century – depression, schizophrenia, neurosis…

My aim is descriptive and diagnostic – to begin to map the new territory of biological citizenship and to develop some conceptual tools for its analysis Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself, Pg 137, Princeton University Press In short: my plan is to do the same thing with sexual experience in late capitalism….

The new style of thought in biological psychiatry not only establishes what counts as an explanation, it establishes what there is to explain. The deep psychological space that opened in the twentieth century has flattened out. In this new account of personhood, psychiatry no longer distinguishes between organic and functional disorders. It no longer concernes…

Therapy seems to mean a getting back to basic sensory and visceral experience. Prior to therapy the person is prone to ask himself, often unwittingly, “What do others think I should do in this situation?” “What would my parents or my culture want me to do?” “What do I think ought to be done?” He is thus…

Human beings, characteristically try to reform and improve themselves. Inescapably, at any historical moment, they do so in terms of knowledges and beliefs about the kinds of creatures that they are. Over the first sixty years or so fo the twentieth century, human beings – at least in the advanced industrial and liberal democratic societies of the west – came to…

In advanced liberal democracies – the geographical and political regions with which I will be concerned in this chapter – genetics takes its salience within a political and ethical field in which individuals are increasingly obligated to formulate life strategies, to seek to maximize their life chances, to take actions or refrain from actions in order to increase the…

Harvey,L & Gill,R. (2011) The Sex Inspectors: Self-help, Makeover and Mediated  Sex. in Ross,K. (Ed) Handbook on Gender, Sexualities and Media. Oxford:  Blackwell, 2011 The aim of this chapter is to explore the contours of a new genre that has come to the fore in recent years as part of the proliferation of reality or…

Nikolas Rose, “Governing Conduct in the Age of the Brain” from Clinical Ethnography on Vimeo. How did we go from understanding and acting upon ourselves as psychological selves with inner depths to understandings and acting upon ourselves as corporeal beings with biological characteristics? Two main epistemological shifts: The emerging of a neuromolecular gaze (the brain becomes seen…

“I believe that the obligation to recover is linked to a reudction in the tolerance of our societies for difference and a belief that there is only one proper way to live your life. And if you don’t live your life in this way… if you’re not autonomous, if you’re dependent on someone, if you…

Previously, one might suggest, the role of medicine was not to transform human capacities but to restore a lost normativity. The body had its natural norms, illness was a loss of those norms, and medical intervention sought to restore those norms or to mimic them in some way. The hope was that, with a cured or at…

Review of the Edge of Darkness We first meet Detective Tommy Craven greeting his daughter at Boston station. He’s clearly a loving but overprotective father, a man subtly ill at ease with the modern world. His daughter chides him for ‘always’ being early, and on the way home answers his probing questions by suggesting he…

Over the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, human beings came to understand themselves as inhabited by a deep interior psychological space, and to evaluate themselves and act upon themselves in terms of this belief (Rose 1989). But over the past half century, that deep space has begun to flatten out, to…

Enhancement, like susceptibility, is future orientated. Almost any capacity of the human body or soul – strength, endurance, attention, intelligence and the lifespan itself – seems potentially open to improvement by technological intervention. Of course, humans, at almost any place and time one cares to investigate, have tried to improve their bodily selves – using…

Digital researcher resources A guide to using Twitter in university research, training, and impact activities Supporting researcher engagement with social tools The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice Special issue on blogging in sexuality studies Social media for grad students Using Twitter for research

Twitter in Further Education If you build it, they will come? How researchers perceive and use web 2.0 Social media: A guide for researchers Content clustering and sustaining digital resources How funders’ practices influence the future of digital resources Ensuring long term access to digital information The digital information seeker Learning literacies for the digital…

10 ways researchers can use Twitter Creating a successful online presence Video interviews with Warwick bloggers Google scholar and its citation data Blog readership: build and maintain an audience Open access: what’s in it for you? Blogging about your research: first steps RSS Feeds: how they work Personal branding for researchers Facebook for researchers Making…

An excellent training course which was run by the University of Warwick library in late 2011: Publishing on the web for postgraduate researchers Creating a blog and writing your first post Single author vs. multi author blogs Journal, search and citation alert subscriptions Podcasts, videocasts and iTunes U: subscribing to multi-media content Managing online identity…

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently pondering internal comms within universities and how social media can transform it. At present, it is constrained by a degree of over-reliance upon e-mail which is ludicrous. Everyone realises it’s a problem and yet, in spite of the technological options now available, there has seemingly been little serious…

I learned how to hammer in the burning August sun Learned how to lie and cheat How to steal and just how to run I fell asleep most nights with somebody else’s blood on my tongue, your tongue You learned just how to run But it’s just the blues, Mary, the blues Swirling around my…

The connections between Manning and Assange have been concocted by a secret grand jury in Virginia that allowed no defence counsel or witnesses, and by a system of plea-bargaining that ensures a 90 per cent conviction rate. It is reminiscent of a Soviet show trial. The Obama administration’s determination to crush Assange is revealed in…

In a recent post Martin Weller argued plausibly for a ‘rebirth’ of the university press as “a place that runs a set of open access, online journals”. His case for this is partly economic: Running journals on an ad hoc basis across universities is inefficient. By centralising resource you could support several journals. At a…

In the process of writing that last post I realised that my monograph plan is no longer as fuzzy as it once was, which I take to be a sign in and of itself that continuous publishing works as a way of developing ideas i.e. a few months ago this amounted to little more than…

A few months ago myself and Pat Lockley wrote an article for the LSE Impact Blog about continuous publishing. This was actually a phrase introduced by the site’s editor for the title but it captured perfectly what were we trying to get at. Given I’ve been semi-consciously trying to do this since then, I thought it…

Monday, 21 November 2005 Joined at lunch by a Yorkshire MP, a mild-mannered fellow, incensed by The Man’s latest foray into education. ‘We’re opening the door selection. Whatever safeguards we put in place, whatever assurances we give will be absolutely worthless once the Tories are in power.’ And then: ‘I think we will lose the…

Assembling the findings of multiple primary qualitative studies using a systematic process may have a number of additional benefits: they may help generate more comprehensive and generalisable theory; they may add greater breadth and depth to existing systematic reviews of effectiveness by focusing on the views of those towards whom the interventions are directed[8]; or…

It is symptomatic of the sort of pseudo-radicalism that, at least for a time, was all too pervasive in the philosophical world: striking a blow against ‘Truth with a capital T’ was seen as a political act (and perhaps a tacit justification for a lifetime of de facto political quietism from academics safely ensconced in…

Circulating information to other postgraduates via the PG Forum email distribution list Maintaining the PG Forum pages of the BSA website & the Facebook fan page. Supporting and hosting PG Focus podcasts Making contributions to Network Assisting with the processing of BSA Support Fund applications by joining the panel of members who grant awards from the…

6th Annual Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference Marginal Cartographies: Researching Beyond Borders Department of Sociology – University of Warwick CALL FOR PAPERS In the age of globalisation, British mainstream academic research seems to pay too little attention to other parts of the world. In this context, Marginal Cartographies: Researching Beyond Borders, the 6th Annual Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference which will…

C. Wright Mills: Legacies and Prospects – 50 Years On Friday 13th April, 11-12.30pm  In March 2012 it will have been 50 years since the death of C. Wright Mills. In that time the world has changed beyond recognition: the Cold War ended, the Keynesian consensus broke down, a globalizing neoliberalism rose to the ascendancy…