So this is a draft version of a presentation I’m giving at the International Association of Critical Realism conference in Norway on Tuesday. For various reasons, I’m really nervous about it – going on here because one person has already agreed to listen to it. But if anyone else would be so kind any feedback…

In the corner of the exhibition a three-hour film, Mouth of the Tyne, shows footage of Smith in the mid 1980s, explaining the ideas on devolution he lobbied for in the 1960s: Britain divided up into eleven locally administered areas, each of which would control the ‘commanding heights’ of its local economy. These would elect…

Given that I’m two months away from being contractually obliged to submit my first solo edited collection to the publisher, this is a rather depressing question. But it’s difficult not to ask it. If my only other experience of editing a book is anything to go by, a volume jointly produced with a number of…

In navigating and understanding the turbulent times in which we find ourselves living, the contribution made by sociology is even more significant. Sociology is uniquely placed to provide insights into the social environment in all its variety, allowing for an enhanced understanding of social movements, political processes and personal troubles. The papers presented will provoke…

I’m starting to practically sketch out plans for a project I’ve had in mind for a couple of years now: a social history of Coventry told through life history interviews with life long residents of the city who were born prior to the second world war. I’ve been fascinated by the changes the city has…

I had a fascinating conversation with Martin Eve earlier about alternatives to commercial academic publishing. One of the most thought-provoking bits of the discussion was the question of what ‘prestige’ means in terms of academic journals: reputation or influence arising from success, achievement,rank, or other favorable attributes. distinction or reputation attaching to a person or thing andthus possessing a cachet for others or for the public Journals seen as prestigious have a reputation for possessing favourable attributes: they are well managed, have high editorial…

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed a fly, Perhaps she’ll die. There was an old woman who swallowed a spider, That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her, She swallowed the spider to catch the fly, I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, Perhaps she’ll…

Perhaps one of the best things I have ever seen on Youtube:

As a type of social man, the intellectual does not have any one political direction, but the work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article, does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, are the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of…

Currently in the process of extending the literature review for my thesis. After intensive trawling through Google Scholar, I’ve found about 60 papers I’m trying to download into drop box for easy day-to-day reading on my iPad. Turns out that, even with my University of Warwick log in, I can only access about 50% of…

In response to this article which castigates ‘the left’ for political opportunism and point scoring without any evidence before swiftly going on to argue that the riot proves the need for traditional Tory hang ’em and flog ’em policies (without providing any evidence for this) with  a claim that Tory cuts don’t go far enough thrown in for…

Interesting article in the Guardian today about IDS’s social impact bonds and their magical capacity to fix ‘Broken Britain’: But the plan put forward yesterday by Iain Duncan Smith, Oliver Letwin and Labour MP Graham Allen to issue “early intervention bonds” to solve the infinitely complex problems of families in trouble flaps away into delusion. Here is…

University of Westminster Site: Cavendish, Room: Pavillion, 115 New Cavendish Street, London, W1W 6UW Map & Directions: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about/how-to-find-us/cavendish The Publics Research Programme at The Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at The Open University, with the University of Westminster, is convening a two-day workshop in central London on 21 and 22 July 2011 on the theme…

The abstract for a presentation I’m doing at the BSA Media Study Group in Leicester next Wednesday: In this presentation I draw on critical realist theory, particularly the work of Margaret Archer and Christian Smith, to offer a tentative framework through which to study the impact of social media upon social practices of protest and…

On July 15th I’ll be part of what will hopefully be a fascinating panel discussion on sexual categorization at the Understanding the Social World conference at the University of Huddersfield. Here’s the abstract for my presentation: In this presentation I draw on my fieldwork into the asexual community (8 in-depth interviews, 174 surveys and an…

Hi all – we’re trying to recruit another news editor & two editorial assistants to work on Sociological Imagination. The former involves finding Higher Education news stories and writing short (100-200 word) summaries about them and the latter involves posting up links/videos/pictures etc likely to be of interest to SI readers on the blog, facebook…

It has been over 50 years since C. Wright Mills wrote the Sociological Imagination. 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 and the internet began to transform human communication and culture. In recent years, with 9/11 and…

Remember when teachers, doctors, nurses and lollipop ladies crashed the stock market, wiped out banks, took billions in bonuses and paid no tax? No … me neither. Please copy and paste this into your status for 24 hours to show your support for the strike against the UK government’s latest attack against public sector workers.

The full version of an article by Martin Eve and Jennifer Jones on the Guardian website last week. Makes for superb reading, particularly this bit which stood out to me after a year of teaching 5 undergraduate seminars a week: The PhD sits at the eye of this whirlwind of commodification, poised as it is…

Core academic values are profoundly imperilled by the government’s higher education ‘reforms’. In this presentation I engage with the theoretical question of what these values are, as well as how they are threatened, as a basis for formulating strategies for their defence. I argue for the need to distinguish between the cultural and structural dimensions…

Workshop on asexuality at the University of Warwick Interview with the Wellcome Collection’s web editor Public Universities and Public Futures Social Theory and the Politics of Austerity Cognitive Enhancement and Modafinil Post-Neoliberal Futures

The government should cut its ties with the “expansionist” European Court of Human Rights, says a report by a right-leaning think tank. The Policy Exchange report says the recent row over prisoners’ voting rights highlights the issue. The report, written by a former government adviser, Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, says the UK has become “subservient” to…

Business organisation the Institute of Directors (IoD) has called for collective bargaining to be scrapped for teachers and NHS staff. They are among a set of proposals the trades unions have described as a “Thatcherite fantasy world”. The IoD put a series of recommendations to government to cut red tape and boost private sector growth.…

This is a second attempt to visually represent the ontology I’m working within in my PhD research.  One of my key aims is to try and offer an emergent account of psychobiography, able to capture the complex multidimensional causality which shapes a particular person’s unfolding biographical trajectory. The top half of the diagram represents the…

Blogs are often seen as a somewhat unglamorous medium. Witness BBC journalist Andrew Marr’s dismissal of bloggers at the Cheltenham Literary Festival last year:  “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.” However in conversations about blogging, the product is often…

Welcome to my new blog. For a number of years now I’ve had a personal blog and a research blog but as my PhD has progressed they have got increasingly neglected. The former went into decline because I started to find it much more fun to turn what would be blog posts into articles for…