I just came across this wonderful extract in a book I’m reading. I feel slightly silly quoting from a play I’ve not seen but it so perfectly expresses a thought I’ve struggled to articulate that I don’t mind: “The best moments in reading,” Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys, “are […]
I feel slightly ridiculous about this fact but I’ve spent the last twenty minutes agonising over how to change my e-mail signature. For a long time I’ve had a pretty simple and self-explanatory e-mail signature: e-mail: mark@markcarrigan.net twitter: @mark_carrigan web: www.markcarrigan.net But I’m also in the middle of doing lots of e-mailing as […]
Second Call for Papers ‘Troubling Narratives: Identity Matters’ The Institute for Research in Citizenship and Applied Human Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Thursday 19th and Friday 20th of June 2014. Confirmed keynote speakers for the conference are: Ann Phoenix, University of London Ken Plummer, University of Essex This conference builds on the University […]
It’s pretty great when you stumble across people discussing your work on the internet. All the more so when they ask thought-provoking questions which make you reconsider arguments you’ve made in the past and encourage you to explore their limitations: Asexual elitism is an elitist attitude where some asexuals don’t consider […]
In this series of posts I’ve been looking at Margaret Archer’s account of first-order and second-order emotions. In the previous post I discussed the process through which an individual comes to deliberate on their first-order emotions – represented schematically as discernment –> deliberation –> dedication. It is through this process that […]
A couple of years ago I did a conference presentation called “The Difficulty of Working Out Who You are: Sexual Culture, Sexual Categories and Asexuality”. Or at least I gave a presentation this title. In reality it didn’t actually do what it said on the tin because I’d rather jumped […]
After the initial section of my first round of PhD interviews (discussion of different deliberative mental activities) I asked participants what Porpora (2003) calls ‘the caterpillar’s question’: “who are you?” I had two intentions in asking the question. Firstly I hoped that it would frame the subsequent discussion (centring around […]
In this podcast I talk to Katherine Davies, a researcher in the Morgan Centre at Manchester University, about her work on sibling relationships and personal identity. Despite the obviously somewhat common experience of sibling relationships, it’s an area that’s largely been ignored within social science, which has tended to focus on […]
