Tag: les back
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The loneliness of knowledge production during a pandemic
We need to recognise the pandemic doesn’t have an ‘off’ switch, but rather will fade through a gradual process of normalising for increasingly large swathes of people alongside an ever present background of resurgent threat. This means that we won’t have a return to ‘normality’, but rather a slow, precarious and contested transition into a new reality.
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Bev Skeggs discusses the contemporary sociological imagination with Les Back
In this lovely dialogue hosted on the Goldsmiths website, thanks to Dave Beer for flagging it up, Bev Skeggs discusses the contemporary sociological imagination with Les Back. To begin they discuss discomfort and dislocation as an integral aspect of the sociological imagination, engendering an inability to take the familiarity of things for granted, instead prompting a […]
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Academic scribes, their writing and their unsociability
The paradox is that we academic scribes are not always very sociable. We cling to the library like bookish limpets that, like Kierkegaard, find real human beings too heavy to embrace. We speak a lot about society but all too often listen to the world within limited frequencies. I am proposing an approach to listening […]
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A discussion of the craft of giving (bad) presentations needs to consider avoiding slides entirely
This presentation by Nick Hopwood seems to have circulated quite widely this morning. It’s a satirical presentation attached to this post, visually illustrating all the presentational mistakes he observes in the attached article. It makes a lot of useful points in a very effective way, though given Nick is presumably vaguely aiming this at PhDs […]
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Digital Sociologist #2: Les Back from @SociologyGold
In this podcast I talk to Les Back from Goldsmiths about his Academic Diary project. So what is the Academic Diary? How did the idea for the project come about? What did the process of crafting it entail? Was the experience of producing it different to that of a more traditional publication?
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Rethinking sociological craft in an age of austerity – an interview with Les Back
In this interview I talk to Les Back about the opportunities for sociology in a time of crisis. He argues that there has never been a greater opportunity to rethink the craft of sociology than there is at present. He’ll be speaking on these themes at the first BSA Digital Sociology event in a couple of months […]
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Les Back on Sociology’s Promise
Les Back’s talk ‘sociology’s promise’ from the C Wright Mills session I organised at the BSA conference in Leeds. Will go up on Sociological Imagination once I’ve finished editing the session and gathering the related material I want to post up with it. There are two books Les mentions in the talk which are fantastic. […]