It’s vital to talk to fellow #PhD students, but don’t compare yourself/your work to them/theirs! (@MsEmmaB) Write at least 250words everyday; update your bibliography everyday; follow all interesting avenues (@public_uni) use PhD to meet interesting people, learn skills and get involved in external projects (@DBarnardWills) And travel! (@slewth) never leave until tomorrow what can be done today #PhD and,…

The fact Twitter offers no real tools to control who follows you is a source of concern for some academics. In part this might be a function of a broader reticence towards online publishing. However I think it also stems from how Twitter is conceived as a medium. If you are presenting at a conference,…

Twitter has a definite image problem. It first penetrated the public consciousness in a way which has left it defined by celebrities and, particularly for academics, this is unattractive. If you want to persuade academics to use it, it’s important to illustrate that the academic twittersphere (I hate the term but have yet to come…

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…

National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) 2012 Call for Papers about Asexuality November 8-11, 2012, Oakland, CA. Papers on any topic at the intersection of women’s and gender studies and asexuality will be considered.

Until people started calling themselves homosexual, it didn’t make much sense for anyone to refer to themselves as heterosexual. Up until that point, it had simply been taken for granted and, as such, escaped scrutiny either by individuals or by society more widely. As adjectives both homosexual and heterosexual were coined in 1892, in an English translation of work…

First they taught us to depend on their nation-states to mend, our tired minds, our broken bones, our bleeding limbs. But now they’ve sold off all the splints and contracted out the tourniquets and if we jump through hoops then we might just survive. Is this what we deserve? To scrub the palace floors? To…

This book presents current research focusing on sexual minorities. It discusses topics that include gay and lesbian parenthood; asexuality; media representations of trebly marginalised minorities; the effect of imaged contact on heterosexual women’s attitudes toward lesbian women; and, the high-school experiences of sexual and gender minority youth and best practices in the development of interventions…

The BSA postgraduate forum is sponsoring an event of  Social Class and Educational Aspiration for postgraduates involved in this area of research. The Conference and Workshop will be hosted by the  University of East London On Tuesday 20th and Wednesday 21st  March 2012. The event is structured around five keynote lectures by leading social class…

Yeah I am sick and tired of people who are living on the b-list Yeah they’re waiting to be famous, and they’re wondering why they do this And I know I’m not the one who is habitually optimistic But I’m the one who’s got the microphone here so just remember this Well life is about…

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…

Until 2001 there wasn’t an asexual community. Why was this?  The question is more complex than it appears. The internet was a necessary condition because it allowed a geographically dispersed group to connect. Was it a sufficient condition though? It provided the infrastructure for a disparate group to connect. However there still had to be…

Are you interested in being a Postgraduate Forum Convenor? Our existing team work together to make sure that student members of the Association are kept up-to-date with matters of specific interest to them. They will also facilitate contact between student members and the BSA Council. In return for their hard work and dedication. Postgraduate Forum Convenors are…

To define the reality of the human condition and to make our definitions public To confront the new facts of history-making  in our time, and their meaning for the problem of political responsibility. Continually to investigate the causes of war, and among them to locate the decisions and defaults of elite circles. To release the…

In this podcast I talk to Nick Crossley about his recent book Towards Relational Sociology. The interview covers relational sociology, interdisciplinary approaches to social theory, the future of social theory and the contested status of quantitative methods.

There seems to be three tendencies within the literature: medical/psychological, queer theory / cultural studies / women’s studies, sociological & anthropological. With the latter two having a lot of convergence in outlook if not methods. My own work started in the third category and now sits on the border between the second and third category.…

The traditional conception of socialization rests on the assumption that socialization is simply a matter of internalization. Dispositions which ‘fit’ the subject’s social placement are internalised from the social. Exactly what the socialising agent is called varies e.g. family, schooling, class. Behind this divergence about socialising agents is a convergence about how the subject is…

Skip 8 minutes in for it to start:

Are you interested in being a Postgraduate Forum Convenor? Our existing team work together to make sure that student members of the Association are kept up-to-date with matters of specific interest to them. They will also facilitate contact between student members and the BSA Council. In return for their hard work and dedication. Postgraduate Forum Convenors are…

Asking technical questions Asking questions relating to your institution Asking questions relating to doing a PhD Promoting events within your institution Promoting broader academic events Dialogue about research interests Dialogue about the process of doing a PhD Seeking support in your PhD Offering support in your PhD Promoting your activities Courtesy of Virginia Yonkers: Looking…

This talk has grown out of my research into sexual culture and asexuality i.e. people who do not experience sexual attraction. When you view contemporary sexual culture from a perspective that doesn’t take sexual attraction for granted, it poses a range of troubling questions about how contemporary society thinks, talks and behaves sexually. In my…

To maintain that social relations have a reality of their own (sui generis) means saying that they are not simply derived from something else, but reflect an order of reality of their own with internal dynamics that require theoretical-practical conceptualization. This order of reality is not derivable from or reduicble to this or that particular…

Are you having money problems? Worried about the *nasty debt* you’ll face when you graduate? No need to fear any longer. Shiny capitalism 2.0 is here to save you! Wonga will sort out your cash flow in no time at all, in 15 minutes you’ll have the money directly in your bank account and no…

Responsible department: Department for Education There is a need for an informed public debate on the purpose of education. No expansive debate has taken place in recent years. Significant global, environmental and socio-economic conditions make such a debate vital. Policies are set by dominant political parties representing a minority of the electorate. Ministers often have…

“I came to identify as asexual this way: I have never understood the desire to engage in the acts that define sex, from kissing on down the list. My body doesn’t function that way – it doesn’t excite me. Other things excite me: a good protest, a fine steak, reaching the top of a mountain…

The art criticis who contemplate Hirst’s work are like clever children playing with one of those stereoscopic postcards: they flick it this way and that, to show the Emperor alternately naked and adorned. Thus they get their kicks. – Will Self

What I mean by emotional purchase is analogous to the idea of Merleau-Ponty (1979) that we have a basic need for an ‘optimal grip’ on the world rooted in our embodiment. He argues that our bodies sit in a prediscursive relation with the world and, as we move through this world, we strive to maintain…

There are in fact only two kinds of people to whom unworldliness comes naturally: holy fools, or the arrogant and priviliged. The former do not respect the kingdom of this world and the latter are so carefully protected from its realities that they do not need to understand it in order to sruvive… The poor,…

It has become widely accepted in lay and academic circles that the Internet and associated digital technologies are transforming the manner in which human beings interact with others and understand themselves. In her seminal work Turkle (1996) argues that such technologies are engendering profound cultural changes through the renegotiation of conceptual and experiential boundaries which…

It’s been a long and lonely trip but I’m glad that I took it because it was well worth it/ I got to read a couple books and do some research before I reached my verdict/ Never thought that I was perfect/ Always thought that I had a purpose/ Used to wonder if I’d live…

REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR SPENT STUDYING ASEXUALITY #UKRIOTS AND SOCIOLOGY HOW WE COULD DO ACADEMIC PUBLISHING DIFFERENTLY… MY RESPONSE TO TOM “SUE THE OPPRESSIVE LSE FEMINAZIS” MARTIN CHAVS, FERAL YOUTH, MORAL PANICS, #UKRIOTS

Steve Fuller on the Future of the University Stephen Turner on Normativity Simon Williams on the Sociology of Sleep Dave Elder-Vass on the Causal Power of Social Structures Martin Allen and Patrick Ainley on the prospects for UK Education Catherine Coveney on Cognitive Enhancement and Modafinil Social Theory and the Politics of Austerity Public Universities…

Lights are out, phones are dead and I’m the only thing that’s running in this city except for the clouds and then they’re coming down for if I knew my way around, I wouldn’t feel so dizzy Where’s the tele? Nobody can tell me I don’t speak a lick of that language and got a…

Restructuring economic and social relations around the temporal value of efficiency has the effect of making all relations instrumental to productive outputs. Everything and the activity of every being becomes a means to optimize productive potential. But would we ever really treat someone we really care for in an efficient manner? Would we express our…

Dewey has as his target two pathologies. The first sets the state against the public, and is attributed to liberal individualism and its arguments for the minimum state. The second is attributed to the conditions of modern corporate capitalism in which there appears to be an ‘eclipse of the public’ brought about by the dominance of…

Neoliberalism found fertile ground in academics whose predispositions to ‘work hard’ and ‘do well’ meshed perfectly with it’s demands for autonomous, self motivating, responsibilised subjects. This is gendered, racialised and classed, too, to be sure, in ways that merit urgent attention that I have been unable to give in this short piece. The lack of…

it is notable how much self-contempt runs through such accounts, and the way they draw on the language of pathology. In the extract that begins this section, the male professor characterises himself as variously ‘addicted’, ‘obsessive’ and ‘compulsive’ when he might more accurately be seen as enacting quite reasonable strategies in order to cope with…

A punishing intensification of work has become an endemic feature of academic life. Again, serious discussion of this is hard to find either within or outside universities, yet it is impossible to spend any significant amount of time with academics without quickly gaining an impression of a profession overloaded to breaking point, as a consequence…

It is all too common today for sociologists to assert that their sociology is critical, non-value-free or reflexive, and having done so to abandon any attempt to conform to the sorts of standards of reasoning and proof which are characteristic of scientific thought.

Early in 2009, when the Obama stimulus was under discussion, I was stunned to read statements from a number of well-regarded economists asserting not merely that the plan was a bad idea in practice — a defensible idea — but that debt-financed government spending could not, in principle, raise overall spending. Here’s John Cochrane: “If…

Economists had good enough intellectual frameworks to have seen the risk of something like the banking and balance sheet crisis that burst upon us in 2008. But they ignored that risk. My best answer is that they were caught up in the spirit of the times, with its faith in the wisdom of markets and…

Although usually described as ‘fly on the wall’, a more accurate metaphor for this kind of research is ‘cat on the prowl’, for a good participant observer is more like a stray cat. She is curious and interactive but not threatening. Occasionally intrusive, but easily ignored. – Sarah Thornton, Seven Days In the Art World 

I am exploring how empirical and theoretical work on the internal conversation can contribute to the practice and theory of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). I argue that the enormous literature on CBT (particularly clinical data) represents a unparalleled resource  to theorists of the internal conversation. Conversely I argue that the internal conversation can act powerfully as a…

Can anyone recommend any other videos like this? I think I want to write an article for SociologicalImagination.org about envisioning socio-technological futures…

I mean it’s still a bit silly! But not in a socio-technologically unfeasible kind of way.

Occupy protesters should target governments not City, LSE chairman says | UK news | guardian.co.uk. The chairman of the London Stock Exchange has urged the Occupy movement to blame irresponsible governments rather than City institutions for the global financial crisis. The LSE is the target of the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protest, but Chris Gibson-Smith believes the inhabitants of the…

But don’t know where to start? Then go to automatic insurrection. If you don’t get the joke, click ‘again’. If you still don’t get the joke then there’s basically no hope for you. Sorry.

In an article over the summer Julian Astle, former director of liberal think tank Centre Forum, suggested that the UK had been governed for much of the last two decades by a ‘secret club’: Numbering no more than 15 frontline politicians and a similar number of key advisers, it includes the last remaining Blairites and…

A scandal is brewing at the LSE. Tom Martin was a 39 year old student who signed up to do an MA in Gender, Media and Culture at the LSE. Six weeks later he quit. He has recently initiated legal action against the university for £50,000, claiming anti-male discrimination and false advertising. You can read his…

I’ve had long standing issues with Serco ever since I was a teenager (long and not particularly interesting story!) and, as I’ve got older, I’ve found the extent of their activity and its general opaqueness rather troubling. However until I happened to check the Wikipedia page I didn’t realise quite how much stuff they do:…

Hi, my name is Mark Carrigan and I’m a final year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Warwick. My research is an attempt to answer a question that’s fascinated me since I was at school: what makes people who they are? How do different sorts of structural, cultural and personal factors intersect in…