Social Media and Doing a PhD: what do you need to know?

I organised a Sociological Review workshop at the weekend with Jenny Thatcher, Pat Thomson and Inger Mewburn. I’m sufficiently snowed under at the moment that I don’t have the time/energy to reflect on it properly but here’s a sneak preview of the graphic produced by Julia Hayes (below), links to live blogging by Tyler Shores below and live tweeting by Zoe Walshe on the #socialmediaphd hashtag. I’ve also attached some photos of the charts participants produced which I want to come back to later and think about properly.

What can sociology learn from its archive? In asking this question, I mean archive in the broadest sense, far beyond the formal outputs of the discipline. I spent much of yesterday in the Foundations of British Sociology archive at Keele University, gifted to the university by the Institute of Sociology when it dissolved in 1955. This was the precursor organisation to The Sociological Review, founded at LePlay House in 1930, when the original editor of the journal Victor Branford and his partner Sybella Gurney gifted their estate to the earlier Sociological Society. There’s a vast array of material in the archive and I’ve only reached the vaguest understanding of this institutional history. It contains papers from the following organisations and people:

Sociological Society

Regional Association

Civic Education League

LePlay House

Institute of Sociology

The Sociological Trust

LePlay House Press

The Sociological Review

LePlay Society

Victor Branford

Sybella Branford

Alexander and Dorothea Farquharson

The archive is filled with historical curiosities which shed light on the history of the discipline, revealing the many changes but also the startling continuities. While the co-operation with the Eugenics Society seems startling from a contemporary point of view, it’s even more jarring to encounter concerned discussions about the style of the journal (insufficiently empirical and with literary pretensions that detract from sociological science) which could be encountered almost verbatim a century later.

However what really fascinates me is the question of how Sociology can be inspired by its own archive: what practical initiatives have been undertaken in the past which we can learn from in the present? To give one example, the Memorandum on Tours summarises the public interest in the many regional surveys which were undertaken. These strange hybrid explorations of geography, anthropology and sociology apparently proved popular with a certain subset of the broader public:

These Tours have aroused considerable interest amongst people to whom the ordinary Tourist Agencies offer no particular attraction. Quite a number of travellers have repeatedly joined the different parties setting forth from LePlay House during the past four years. Each Tour is accompanied by one or more persons distinguished for their knowledge of the history, ethnography, etc. of the particular country to be visited; also an unusual and pleasing feature of these Tours has been the cordial manner in which the University Authorities and other eminent men and women in the different Continental Cities have received the visitors and afforded them facilities for studying social life, customs and places of interest usually closed to the ordinary

It struck me when reading this how the sociological walks organised for The Sociological Review’s conference next year could be seen as a tentative recovery of this tradition. What else can we find in there? What can we learn from it now? What practical projects might it inspire? These questions have been circling in my mind since visiting the archive yesterday and it has left me pondering something between cultural entrepreneurship and action research inspired by this archive. The undisciplining of Sociology, at least in the UK, proves eerily familiar when we read about the context within which the Sociological Society and the Institute of Sociology operated. The same is true of the sense of social and political urgency which motivated their work:

But in the present disturbed state of the public mind there would seem to be open to the Society, two wider opportunities of public service. One is to promote an impartial and detached habit of mind in regard to current movements. The other is bring to bear on the manifold problems of Reconstruction, Civic, National and International such established truths as the present state of the psychological and social sciences affords. Hence an endeavour is being made to extend the Review to a wider circle of readers.

I am convinced that Sociology can find inspiration in its archive. Get in touch if you’re interested in looking for it with me.

Early Career Researcher Event: Sociological Review Writing Retreat

The Sociological Review Foundation is delighted to announce that we have commissioned Rowena Murray to deliver a Writing Retreat for sociologists.

Murray has devised and delivered structured writing retreats to support academics by providing dedicated writing time done in a group setting. To find out more about this approach see:http://www.rowenamurray.org/aims/references/

The retreat is for academics at all stages of their career, but we especially encourage early career scholars to apply.

The retreat venue is the Black Bull Hotel in the village of Gartmore, near Aberfoyle, in Scotland. All writing sessions and meals (provided) are in the hotel. Minibus transport will be provided between Glasgow train station and the hotel.

14 places are available. The retreat will be free of charge, and there are a number of travel bursaries available for early career researchers.

As places are limited attendance will be by application. We invite applications via this online form:http://goo.gl/forms/WB2LDFXPa1

Please note that due to the cost of each place, successful applicants will be required to make a refundable deposit of £50 to secure their place. ECR means PhD students or postdocs (within 3 years of award of doctorate)

Contact

For academic inquiries related to this event, please contact Brigit McWade (b.mcwade@lancaster.ac.uk)

For any other queries, please contact Jenny Thatcher (events@thesociologicalreview.com)

Important Dates

Call for applications: 1st March
Applications deadline: 30th April
Notify successful candidates: 30th May

call for contributions: digital sociology and the future of the discipline

In recent years Digital Sociology has emerged as an increasingly prominent trend within the discipline at an international level. But it remains unclear precisely what this tendency represents, provoking enthusiasm and skepticism in equal measure. In this special section for The Sociological Review’s website, we invite short blog posts (1500 words or less) addressing digital sociology and the questions it raises for the future of the discipline. This could include but is by no means limited to:

What does the ‘digital’ in digital sociology really mean? Is there a risk that digital sociology fetishises the ‘digital’?
Should digital technology lead us to reconceptualise the social?
What, if anything, distinguishes digital sociology from fields of inquiry such as cyber cultures, web studies and the sociology of the internet?
How does digital sociology relate to parallel trends in cognate disciplines e.g. digital anthropology, digital geography and the digital humanities?
How should we conceptualize the ‘offline’, the ‘online’ and the relationship between them? Should we reject this dichotomy entirely?
What role can digital sociology play in an intellectual landscape increasingly dominated by data science and computational social science?
Does digital sociology change the relationship between sociology and other disciplines?

Please contact Mark Carrigan with submissions or any questions relating to the special section: mark@markcarrigan.net. The deadline for contributions is December 1st 2015.