At various points in the last few months, I’ve seen the claim made that the senior management of universities hold their staff in contempt. A claim like this can’t help but be polemic and I’m not sure how helpful it would be to examine the particular cases if we’re interested […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
I’m (re)reading this important paper by Tressie McMillan Cottom in advance of a talk which Karen Lumsden and I are doing tomorrow on the dark side of (digital) public engagement. We were asked to suggest a reading for the session and this immediately occurred as the most suitable. It’s a insightful, careful […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Towards the end of his life, Pierre Bourdieu underwent an activist turn and offered a public sociology which I’ve long thought we can learn much from. In his Firing Back, he offers important ideas about how academics and social movements can work together. He maintains that “the work of academic […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
What is a ‘student’? To many outside higher education, such a question would seem absurd. A student is “a person who is studying at a university or other place of higher education”. But what this means has undergone profound change in recent years, such that ‘the student’ as a category, as […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
It was perhaps inevitable that I would find myself obsessing over the role of social media in the current strikes. In my academic life, I’m a sociologist studying how social media is used within universities and how this is changing the academy. In my non-academic life, I’m a digital engagement […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
After nine days of strike action, I’ve begun to realise how formative I have found this experience and how frequently I will think back to it in coming months and years. In part, this is a reflection of the novelty of the action itself for me but also the novelty […]
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Social media reassures me I’m not alone in my fascination with Sussex VC Adam Tickell’s role in the current university crisis. As Tom Slater put it, it’s disturbing to realise that “someone who is capable of such excellent critical analysis, expressed with such elegance, has now become an appalling neoliberal […]
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
What is a troll? The term is encountered with ever greater frequency yet its meaning has changed with the years, moving from a definition in terms of motivation (deliberately producing discord for amusement) to a definition in terms of behaviour (the fact of having produced discord in an online community). […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
In the last week, I’ve found myself obsessing about the use of social media in #USSStrikes. This was probably inevitable, helping with two social media campaigns related to the strike while also being someone who studies social media. In preparation for a teach out later today and to feed into […]
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
At a recent event, I heard an extremely distinguished professor make the argument that there was a certain sequence to career development which all academics who sought jobs in high status university ought to pursue. One ought to publish papers in well regarded journals before writing books. One ought to […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
As anyone reading this blog regularly will be aware, I’m very interested in the dynamics of discipline formation and the implications they have for the capacity of the social sciences to respond to changing circumstances. There are a variety of mechanisms which emerge from organised knowledge production and operate to […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
I’m currently reading On Intellectual Craftsmanship, in preparation for a talk I’m doing in Berlin next week. This famous appendix to The Sociological Imagination is something I’ve long been inspired by, finding in it a way of organising my own life that belies the text’s apparently humble ambition to merely […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The network scientist Emmanuel Lazega studies collegiality and bureaucracy as ideal typical forms of social organisation which co-exist in a fluctuating balance within organisations. Collegiality involves actors recognising each other as autonomous, existing in relationship to each other and necessitating consensus as a preliminary for what will always be non-routine […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In his contribution to the Centre for Social Ontology’s workshop on human enhancement, Doug Porpora presented his initial results from an analysis of the emerging literature on human enhancement. He observed that this literature is scattered throughout many journals across disciplines, rather than featuring in the central journals of any […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Reading Factories for Learning by Christy Kulz, I was fascinated to learn of the new right’s cultural war on the educational establishment in the 1980s which I had only been dimly aware of. I knew the central place of the local authorities in this but I hadn’t realised how central […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
In a recent article, Michael Burawoy warned about what he termed the spiralists. These are “people who spiral in from outside, develop signature projects and then hope to spiral upward and onward, leaving the university behind to spiral down”. While he was concerned with university leaders, I observed at the time […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
In a thought-provoking essay, Jana Bacevic reflects on the problem of prediction and its relevance for social scientists in a post-truth era. This issue has become institutionally relevant, as opposed to being a philosophical consideration or a practical challenge, for two reasons: One is that, as reflected in the (by now overwrought […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Accelerated Academy #4 Academic Timescapes: Perspectives, Reflections, ResponsibilitiesMay 24-25, Villa Lanna, Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences After meetings in Prague, Warwick and Leiden, the fourth Accelerated Academy conference calls for a more nuanced perspective in order to advance our understanding of academic temporalities as experienced, understood, controlled, managed, imagined and […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
What are learned societies for? This is how Jennifer Platt answers this question on loc 119 of her history of the British Sociological Association: Learned societies such as the BSA are a vital part of the social structure of academic life; not every eligible person belongs to one, but nonetheless […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes