Tag: Digital Universities

  • Data Power 2019: anyone interested in putting together a digital universities panel?

    Call for Papers Deadline for submissions: January 31, 2019 DATA POWER: global in/securities A two-day, international conference Date: Thursday 12th and Friday 13th SEPTEMBER 2019 Venue: University of Bremen, Germany With increasingly globalized digital infrastructures and a global digital political economy, we face new concentrations of power, leading to new inequalities and insecurities with respect to data […]

  • Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to […]

  • The rightward drift of Slavoj Žižek

    I’ve picked up a Slavoj Žižek book for the first time in a while and found the characteristics which led me to take a break from his writing have only grown over time. He links Me Too to victimhood early in Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Humanity. From pg 6: As […]

  • The generational politics of critical theory

    This observation from loc 785 of The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory by Razmig Keucheyan caught my eye. His concern is with the intellectual implications of a generation’s dominance within critical thought: The new critical theories have not been developed by ‘new’ theorists, if by that is meant biologically young intellectuals. There are, of course, young […]

  • CfP: Post-H(uman) index? Politics, metrics, and agency in the accelerated academy

    CfP: Post-H(uman) index? Politics, metrics, and agency in the accelerated academy

    November 29th and 30th Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge Organised by Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan and Filip Vostal  Keynote: Liberalism Must Be Defeated: The Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene by Gary Hall, Director of Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. The conference seeks to conceptualise change in contemporary knowledge production in […]

  • The intellectual sclerosis of the superstar intellectual

    There’s a fascinating and honest account in Daniel Drezner’s The Ideas Industry, reflecting on his own growing celebrity and the lethal challenges which have come with it. This is something I’ve often wondered about, particularly in relation to how widely one reads and the circle of people one engages with. From pg 247: Furthermore, there […]

  • The incredible shrinking scope of the celebrity intellectual

    What is it like to be an celebrity intellectual? I thought this was an admirably honest answer by Yuval Noah Harari to the question of how fame has changed his life. It seems obvious he would be far from alone in this experience, suggesting we could reflect on it as symptomatic of knowledge production by celebrity intellectuals […]

  • What does the case of Jeffery Sachs tell us about the accelerated academy?

    The Idealist by Nina Monk, cited by Daniel Drezner in the Ideas Industry, presents a vivid account of the frantic pace at which the economist Jeffery Sachs has tended to work. This intensified work, fitting as much action as possible into each day, will appear to his detractors as a desperate lust for influence. His […]

  • What we mean when we talk about the Platform University

    Via Janja Komljenovic

  • The #Undisciplining Meta-Conference

    Now that I’ve recovered from last week, it seemed the right moment to do a round up of the live blogging project Pat Thomson and myself initiated at The Sociological Review’s Undisciplining conference. There were 43 posts from 13 live bloggers over four days. This is a pretty substantial outpouring of thought and reflection over […]

  • Why quote tweeting as a form of reply is creepy

    I’ve edited the final two paragraphs of this post for clarity because an awful lot of people read it and thought I was criticising quote tweeting rather than one particular use of it.  Imagine you were sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend. You greeted each other warmly when they arrived, you ordered coffees […]

  • Fast and slow writing in the accelerated academy

    What does it mean to write? For a long time, it carried a sense of total immersion for me, letting the world recede in order to lose yourself in the production of a text. This is ‘binge writing’ and it was my standard mode for the six years I spent doing a part-time PhD. I […]

  • Some brief thoughts on chronopolitics

    It occurs to me when confronted with this that there are ever more contexts in which contemporary capitalism undermines the ability to plan ahead. This is striking because much of financialised capitalism is predicated on ensuring the calculability of the future through instruments like futures and securities which lock in certain expectations of future outcomes […]

  • Expertise and the politics of discipline

    In the last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on a remark Susan Halford made at this event about the difference between expertise and discipline. If I understand her correctly, her point was that capacities for knowing and acting in the world (expertise) can have their reproduction organised socially in different ways (discipline) […]

  • CFP: Imagining Radical Futures, Princeton Oct. 5th

    An interesting CfP I’m saving for my future reference *Imagining Radical Futures: Anthropological Potentialities?* Princeton Anthropology Graduate Conference October 5th, 2018 Princeton University *“The facts, alone, will not save us. Social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework* *all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society” (Benjamin 2016)* Anthropology has […]

  • The Political Ontology of Platforms

    These notes are for the fifth and final week of the CPGJ platform capitalism intensive reading group. One of the themes running through the readings over the five weeks has been the political valence of platforms and its relationship to our analysis of them. My own instinct is that valorising platforms in an a priori […]

  • The slow university

    Saved here for later reading: https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/the-slow-university-work-time-and-well-being/ https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/16/ii-scholarship-in-a-public-university/ https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/iii-strategies-and-alliance-building-to-slow-down-the-world-of-work/ https://irelandafternama.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/iv-the-lived-time-of-the-university/

  • Call for Papers: Capitalism, Social Science and the Platform University

    December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to […]

  • Against slow scholarship

    In preparation for next week’s Accelerated Academy, I found myself reading the Slow Scholarship Manifesto for the first time in a few years, as well as Heather Mendick’s brilliant critique of it. Taking explicit inspiration from the slow food movement, it calls for ‘slow scholarship’ as a response to ‘hasty scholarship’: Slow scholarship, is thoughtful, […]

  • Platform capitalism and the future of education

    In this week’s CPGJ platform capitalism reading group, we turn towards education for the first time with a paper by José van Dijck and Thomas Poell looking at the influence of social media platforms on education, particularly within schools. Much of the literature has addressed social media as tools, with varying interpretations offered about how these […]