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Why do computational methods matter for education? Jan 18th at 4pm GMT
In an infamous article from 2008 the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine argued that ‘big data’ made the scientific method obsolete. While hype about the data deluge has become more nuanced since then, it is undeniable that digital data has led to profound transformations in social scientific methodology. Disciplines and fields such as Data Science, Computational […]
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Blog Maggot
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ChatGPT’s limerick about Nietzsche’s depressiveness
There once was a man named Nietzsche Whose thoughts were quite miserable and dreary He believed in no meaning Life was just a sickening So he spent all his time feeling teary Instigated by Steve Watson.
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The ladder of abstraction
Over the last few years I’ve often found myself using the phrase ‘ladder of abstraction’ to describe my own movement from philosophy to social theory to qualitative sociology and on to education. It reflects two bifurcations in my experience which have bothered me intensely at different points in my career: the split between activism and […]
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I am large, I contain multitudes
Walt Whitman – Songs of Myself, 51 The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, […]
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What is trauma?
I’m currently reading a remarkable book by the physician Gabor Maté. In the Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing In A Toxic Culture he argues that trauma is ubiquitous within contemporary society; a reality which is obscured by the tendency to exceptionalize trauma as a categorical affliction of a subset of poor souls in […]
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The romance of the ascent of the humanity
It’s an idea he is being critical of but this is beautifully put by Roberto Unger in The Religion of the Future: Humanity rises. Its rise is not inevitable, not at least in the more guarded and realistic versions of the romance of ascent, but it is possible. (Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, two philosophers […]
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The only thing that’s left to do is live
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Year’s End
Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The […]
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The eye-on-the-object look
I was delighted by this from Auden’s Horae Canonicae series. The ‘eye-on-object look’ in which we ‘ignore the appetitive goddesses’: You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk […]
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The pleasure of returning to novels
I’ve spent the last month rereading most of Irvine Welsh’s novels. In the late summer I read Jonathan Franzen’s novels again, after his most recent book reminded me of my love for his work. I feel a vague sense of guilt when I read books again. In part it’s awareness that the constraints of the […]
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Choose life: some notes on Lacan’s death drive
I found this lecture from the excellent Derek Hook extremely helpful for understanding how Lacan reconceived the classical Freudian sense of the death drive, which it should be noted was originally proposed by Sabina Spielrein. I’m interested in this topic for a number of reasons, not least of all the compulsive elements of digital agency […]
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Next year’s going to be better than this
I’d like to take this opportunity and toast to me For being exactly who I’m supposed to be ‘Cause life is gonna do what life does I don’t wanna look back and regret who I was Let go of the expectations and then fire one Forget the tally sheet before all my time’s up And […]