Tag: theorising

  • Why is learning theory important?

    I had a conversation earlier today which clarified why I see learning theory as inherently useful, even if this promise is rarely realised in practice. There’s an indispensability to theoretical reasoning which I see as an obvious feature of social inquiry in the sense that describing or explaining anything involves the use of concepts which […]

  • Theorising as self-work: the case of heuristics

    My notes on Betta, M., & Swedberg, R. (2018). Heuristics and Theorizing as Work on the Self. Sociologica, 12(1), 21-25. Heuristics are commonly seen as either rules of thumb, simple tricks used under conditions of uncertainty, or tools for discovery, practical steps facilitating knowledge about what was previously concealed. However in this short paper, Betta […]

  • The Hegelian sociology of Gillian Rose

    My notes on Latz, A. B. (2015). Gillian Rose and Social Theory. Telos, 173, 37-54. and Fuller, B. W. (2018). Back to Hegel? On Gillian Rose’s critique of sociological reason. The British journal of sociology, 69(2), 265-285 The figure of Gillian Rose was a continual presence in the Sociology department at Warwick in the time […]

  • Barbara Adam on the practice of theorising

    In her keynote at the Accelerated Academy, Barbara Adam explains how she came to her concept of timescapes. It began with the study of social theory of time, leading her to recognise how “everyone used the same word but they didn’t talk about the same thing” because this was “a multiple compound concept, not a […]

  • social theorising is more important than social theory

    I really like this idea – see the full post here. I was always quite taken with the method for social ontology which Dave Elder-Vass elaborated for what I think were quite similar reasons. There’s far too much attention paid to theory and far too little attention paid to theorising. Following this, Swedberg suggested that learning to theorise can […]