The Sociological Imagination

Recent Posts

• Fidel Castro: A Quasi-Personal Perspective

  By Steve Fuller on November 26, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Fidel Castro was one of the political giants of the 20th century. Indeed, he was a ‘Great Man’ of politics. However, the greatness of politicians can be easily lost if we look at their careers from where they end rather… Read More ›

• Donald Trump’s Words of Power

  By Mark Carrigan on November 26, 2016 • ( 0 )

  In an old essay about Heidegger’s conception of language, the philosopher Charles Taylor invokes the notion of ‘words of power’ to explain the power of Hitler’s rhetoric. Once we move away from a sense of language as an expression of… Read More ›

• Evgeny Morozov & David Harvey on the end of neoliberalism

  By Mark Carrigan on November 25, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A fantastic discussion, via Stuart Elden:

• CfP – Digital Media and the Spatial Transformation of Public Contention

  By Mark Carrigan on November 23, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Please see below for the call for papers of the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on “Digital Media and the Spatial Transformation of Public Contention”. The full description of the workshop can be found here: https://ecpr.eu/Events/PanelDetails.aspx?PanelID=4836&EventID=104 CFP: The proposed workshop explores… Read More ›

• The Uberficiation of the University

  By Mark Carrigan on November 22, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A fascinating short book by Gary Hall, available open access at the Coventry University repository: https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/4b7671d5-371f-438b-83c7-9275935550f8/1/ubercomb.pdf 

• Conference Funding for ECRs from @TheSocReview

  By Mark Carrigan on November 21, 2016 • ( 0 )

  See here for full information and how to apply

• The Everyday Life of Incipient Fascism

  By Mark Carrigan on November 20, 2016 • ( 0 )

  I’ve long been fascinated by the question of what the descent into fascism feels like for those living through such a transition, how daily life changes (or fails to do so) as the fabric of the old order begins to unweave. There’s… Read More ›

• Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age: The Factory and the Machine

  By Mark Carrigan on November 19, 2016 • ( 0 )

  By Hamish Robertson Introduction In this piece I ask the reader to consider the rise of the factory and its associated processes and systems as not just centres of early capitalist production or engineering and technical development, but as knowledge… Read More ›

• The Practice of Public Sociology, Nov 24th in Manchester

  By Mark Carrigan on November 18, 2016 • ( 0 )

  We’ve recently had some cancellations for the forthcoming event, The Practice of Public Sociology: Sociological Review Early Career Event.  If you would like one of these places, please registered here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-practice-of-public-sociology-sociological-review-early-career-event-tickets-28652394082  The Practice of Public Sociology Manchester Digital Laboratory, November… Read More ›

• Sociological Imagination & Financial Utopias

  By Mark Carrigan on November 18, 2016 • ( 0 )

  ‘Reclaiming Utopia: Challenging the Financial Imagination’  What types of imagination drive today’s dystopian political & economic programmes? Why do counter-utopias lag behind (neo-)liberal and financial utopias? Come to the Council Room, King’s College London at 5pm on the 25th November, and… Read More ›

• The Return of the Unabomber

  By Steve Fuller on November 18, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Twenty years ago Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained maths prodigy obsessed with technology’s destruction of nature, was given eight consecutive life sentences for sending letter bombs in the US post which killed three people and injured 23 others. Generally known as… Read More ›

• How the Pentagon imagines the future of cities

  By Mark Carrigan on November 17, 2016 • ( 0 )

  This is absolutely fascinating:

• 12-month postdoc: digital ethnography of climate change

  By Mark Carrigan on November 16, 2016 • ( 0 )

  12-month postdoc position now available on the Making Climate Social project at University of Sheffield. Details are here <https://jobs.shef.ac.uk/sap/bc/webdynpro/sap/hrrcf_a_posting_apply?PARAM=cG9zdF9pbnN0X2d1aWQ9NTgwODZCRDlCOTQwMDA4OUUxMDAwMDAwQUMxRTg4NzgmY2FuZF90eXBlPUVYVA==&sap-client=400&sap-language=EN&sap-accessibility=X&sap-ep-themeroot=/SAP/PUBLIC/BC/UR/uos#>. Excellent candidates are sought with a background in sociology, STS or similar disciplines. The role will be focused on ethnographic research,… Read More ›

• Four year post doc on crowd sourcing #digitalsociology

  By Mark Carrigan on November 15, 2016 • ( 0 )

  The Technical University Berlin seeks a: Research Associate (Post-Doc) – Salary Grade 13 TV-L Berliner Hochschulen Part-time employment may be possible. The Institute for Sociology is starting a research group on „Entrepreneurial Group Dynamics“, that is funded in the Freigeist-Programme… Read More ›

• Social Media and Open Research: What Does ‘Open’ Mean?

  By Mark Carrigan on November 14, 2016 • ( 1 )

  In the not too distant past, the use of social media in higher education was seen as a curiosity at best. Perhaps something to be explained or inquired into but certainly not something deemed relevant to scholarship. Yet it’s now increasingly… Read More ›

• The Philosophical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu

  By Mark Carrigan on November 13, 2016 • ( 0 )

  I’m at an interesting workshop being given by Loic Wacquant on the practical application of Bourdieu’s social theory. An aspect that has really stood out to me so far is Wacquant’s presentation of Bourdieu’s work as a philosophical sociology. The point… Read More ›

• Towards a Pirate Sociology

  By Mark Carrigan on November 12, 2016 • ( 0 )

  While this phrase summons up images for me of C. Wright Mills in a pirate costume, it’s important to be clear about the sense of ‘pirate’ invoked. As Gary Hall puts it in his Pirate Philosophy, the etymology predates our… Read More ›

• Digital Sociology vs STS

  By Mark Carrigan on November 11, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A joint Digital Sociology Study Group and STS Study Group Event at the Oxford Internet Institute Wednesday 13 December 2016, 13:00 The Oxford Internet Institute 1st Giles Oxford, OX1 3JS The concept of Digital Sociology has been in circulation for… Read More ›

• The 2016 US Presidential Election Was Less about Populism than a Vote against Democracy

  By Steve Fuller on November 11, 2016 • ( 5 )

  Three facts are striking about the US presidential election: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, though she lost the Electoral College, which decides the presidency. Voter turnout was much lower than initially expected, and this meant that especially Black voters… Read More ›

• CfP: Theorizing the Web 2017

  By Mark Carrigan on November 11, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Call for Papers *Theorizing the Web 2017* *April 7–8 in New York City* At the Museum of the Moving Image, in Astoria, Queens The submission deadline is January 22, 2017 (11:59 p.m. EST) Started in 2011, Theorizing the Web is… Read More ›

• CfP: Habit and Experience at the crossroads between Pragmatism, Neurosciences, and Social Ontology

  By Mark Carrigan on November 10, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Call For Papers Conference: The Pragmatist Turn and Embodied Cognition: Habit and Experience at the crossroads between Pragmatism, Neurosciences, and Social Ontology, 6-7 April, 2017, University of Parma, Italy Invited Speakers: Vittorio Gallese (University of Parma) Richard Menary (Macquarie University) Daniel Hutto… Read More ›

• Academia.edu: How to reproduce inequality in several easy steps

  By Milena Kremakova on November 9, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  A study waiting to be done. Somebody? Here is the trigger: So: how is academia.edu reproducing and reinforcing inequality? By spatially positioning the male academic above; By choosing an older male academic and a younger female; By listing the male as… Read More ›

• Conference Funding for ECRs from @TheSocReview

  By Mark Carrigan on November 8, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  See here for full information and how to apply

• Inspiring Sociology

  By Mark Carrigan on November 8, 2016 • ( 0 )

  This year I took over convening the Goldsmiths MA in Social Research. This degree has provided the place where we think about the craft of research. Initially, it was a degree set up by David Silverman and focused on qualitative… Read More ›

• Critical Realism & the Generative Structuralism of Bourdieu

  By Mark Carrigan on November 8, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Bourdieu has now become the hegemon in the field of social theory. Everybody knows the concepts of field, habitus, practice and symbolic violence by now. The common language even allows for discussion among colleagues and among disciplines. Commentaries on Bourdieu’s… Read More ›

• Dating on the Left

  By Mark Carrigan on November 7, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A really interesting discussion of emotional labour and power dynamics within communities that regard themselves as politically radical:

• Social Media and Open Research: What Does ‘Open’ Mean?

  By Mark Carrigan on November 6, 2016 • ( 0 )

  In the not too distant past, the use of social media in higher education was seen as a curiosity at best. Perhaps something to be explained or inquired into but certainly not something deemed relevant to scholarship. Yet it’s now increasingly… Read More ›

• Some recent articles about the accelerated academy

  By Mark Carrigan on November 5, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Academic Capitalism and the Accelerated Academy by Liz Morrish The Shifting Sources of Hostility to the Accelerated Academy by Steve Fuller One more time with (structures of feeling) by Jana Bacevic Big data, new skills: how the accelerated academy hinders the… Read More ›

• Upcoming @BalanceNetwork events

  By Mark Carrigan on November 4, 2016 • ( 0 )

  An update on forthcoming events from this fascinating interdisciplinary research network: THREE CAFÉS: EXPERIENTIAL ARTISTIC RESEARCH EXPLORING INTER-RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND WELLBEING – 23 November & 28 November, Cambridge Anglia Ruskin University’s Marina Velez, Davide Natalini, and Debby Lauder… Read More ›

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