• How Roy Bhaskar talked about the spiritual turn before it was released

• The problem of generative AI from a cybernetics perspective: conversational agents as variety machines

• Use Claude to put radically different theoretical approaches into dialogue with each other

• Out Now: Margaret Archer’s Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

• Are we bringing vibes to a gun fight? Judith Butler’s theory of social change

• CfP: Sociology of the 1980s

• Five thoughts about combining sociological reflexivity and psychoanalysis

• On temporising

• Articulating what is latent is easier then articulating what is repressed

• The philosopher Frank Ramsey (1903-1930) on how ludicrous it would be to expect academics to publish papers every 6 months

• Book launch: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics, March 28th at 3pm-4pm

• International Association of Critical Realism 2024: Looking Back to Look Forward

• Thought experiment: if society turned up in the Lacanian clinic seeking treatment, what would the diagnosis be?

• What might a glitch aesthetic entail when applied to concept work within social theory? 6 speculative propositions

• Webinar: A dialogue between Critical Realism and Postdigital Research

• Juri Lotman’s semiotics as a theoretical resource for making sense of the cultural ontology of generative AI

• The silent inner world

• Margaret Archer’s Final Book: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics. Launch event on March 28th, 3pm GMT

• Some thoughts on GAI, trust and the future of the human sciences

• Behavioural scientists were the lay preachers of late neoliberalism

• Judith Butler’s engagement with psychoanalysis

• Intuition as social theory

• Call for Papers: One-Day Symposium on the Legacy of Margaret Archer – August 3rd, University of Warwick

• Adorno and the Busenattentat (breast action)

• Margaret Archer’s interest in reflexivity was there from 1979

• How common is counter-plagiarism within social theory?

• Your friendly neighbourhood social theorist version 1.0: a conversational partner to support theorising

• Lacan’s concept of symbolic castration and political authority

• What we need today is not a theory of a new age

• The challenge of feral sociology

• 📍Margaret Archer’s final book: Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

• Margaret Archer’s final paper: Coincidence – A word with two meanings for explaining and predicting the future

• The (thin) relational reflexivity of working with conversational agents

• On the machinic qualities of human interaction and the human qualities of the machine

• Lacan’s twelve-fold typology of desire: a case study of Elena Tonra’s Romance

• The alternative to avant-garde theorising

• Understanding concepts by tracing their journey through the theory/practice nexus

• Human cognition meets machine cognition, human cognition gets better

• A Lacanian spin on Margaret Archer’s concept of contextual incongruity: the meta-reflexive as hysteric

• What are the analytical payoffs of Margaret Archer’s realist social theory?

• Computational sociology of knowledge as a tool for redesigning the knowledge system

• Why did Giddens largely ignore Bourdieu?

• Epistemic relativism and the escape from the real

• CfP: Symbolic Interactionism and AI

• Lacan tried to save the subject from structuralism

• Platform capitalism, historciality and Andrew Abbott’s sense of modernist temporal ontology

• Andrew Abbott on the practice of theorising

• Lacan on the biographical momentum of partial objects

• How do we visualise an assemblage?

• Hannah Arendt on machinic rhythms and their power to consume our autonomy

• Online reading group: Margaret Archer’s Social Origins of Educational Systems

• What is social ontology? Margaret Archer’s introduction in 13 minutes

• Postmodernism: the anxious dreams of boomer theorists?

• Does anyone actually understand Lacan’s diagrams?

• The Role of Professional Bodies in the Development of Sociology

• Stuart Hall: “I would do without theory if I could. The problem is I can’t.”

• Digital education and conjunctural analysis

• How platforms shape the parameters of agency

• Nature’s aim for everything includes its cessation

• Theorising permanent instability and volatility as necessary rather than contingent features of the environment

• Platform & agency: becoming who we are in a digital world

• Alan Levinovitz on empowerment epistemology

• Bhaskar’s concept of ‘present-moment awareness’

• To what extent was Roy Bhaskar’s later philosophy shaped by Theosophism?

• Big Data, Critical Realism, Human Agency and the Future of the Social Sciences

• Societal collapse is a process rather an event

• 9 Stoic Rules For A Better Life (From Marcus Aurelius)

• On learning what matters to us

• Maurizio Lazzarato’s a-signifying semiotics and the computational infrastructure of generative AI

• On platform and agency

• Generative AI and the destabilization of cultural objects

• The sociology of the digital daemon

• On sociological cynicism about AI

• Sociotechnical change as an invitation to reflexivity

• CfP: The Realist Approach to AI

• The role of stories in sociological explanation

• Memorial to Margaret Archer at the 2023 IACR conference

• “We all have a sense of what really living, and not just existing, would be. We know that there’s a level of life that’s rare to attain”

• Charles Taylor on the Four Modes of Modern Seeking

• Theory is most productive not when it gives the right answers but when it poses the right question

• The relational possibilities of generative AI in knowledge-production: an initial sketch from realist relational sociology

• Hey Claude, how would Alfred Whitehead have analysed the cultural ontology of generative AI?

• A video reflection for the IACR 2023 Margaret Archer memorial session

• Claude AI the social theorist. Or, can we have theorising without thinking?

• Ontological and cultural humanism

• Personal change as paradigm shift

• Cliodynamics and social collapse

• Niklas Luhmann’s critique of organisational sociology

• The humanistic roots of systems theory

• Margaret Archer (1943-2023)

• Margaret Archer’s late papers on artificial intelligence

• ChatGPT: analyse Margaret Archer’s four modes of reflexivity in terms of Lacanian theory

• ChatGPT and the future of communicative reflexivity

• Theorising as a psychodynamic process

• Reading the Archers

• A collection of video lectures and interviews with Margaret Archer

• What is a ‘quilting-point’ in Lacanian theory?

• What would the young Slavoj Žižek think of the old Slavoj Žižek?

• AI as modernity’s last stand

• Simone Weil’s apophatic concept of attention