I’m currently trying to collate a wide selection of examples of university advertising in the UK at the Accelerated Academy Instagram feed. Would you like to take part? Just ping me an e-mail with a photo of advertising for UK… Read More ›
Accelerated Academy 
CfP: Accelerated Academy
Accelerated Academy #4 Academic Timescapes: Perspectives, Reflections, Responsibilities May 24-25, Villa Lanna, Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences After meetings in Prague, Warwick and Leiden, the fourth Accelerated Academy conference calls for a more nuanced perspective in order to advance our… Read More ›
From a politics of speed to a political sociology of speed
In the last few years, I’ve become a little obsessed with speed. It seems this often leaves me coming across like an accelerationist. I occasionally flirt with the idea that I’m a slightly peculiar form of left-accelerationist, but it’s more for… Read More ›
A Modest Proposal to Raise the Academic Game: The Google Test
I’ve always been a big supporter of bursaries to ‘English’ (understood as a transitive verb) the dissertations of students for whom English is a second language. These students often have interesting things to say and deserve to have their ideas… Read More ›
The transformation of academic writing and the challenge of ephemera
What does social media mean for academic writing? Most answers to this question focus on how such platforms might constrain or enable the expression of complex ideas. For instance, we might encounter scepticism that one could express conceptual nuance in 140 characters… Read More ›
The ennui of the academic celebrity
In Solar, by Ian McEwan, we encounter the weary figure of Michael Beard, the nobel laureate and serial womaniser who has long lived off his early contribution to theoretical physics. By the time he approaches his 60s, he is a… Read More ›
Anticipatory Urgency
Earlier this morning, I found myself impatiently waiting in my local petrol station to purchase a drink before I went swimming. The woman in front me in the queue was rather slow. Initially seeming surprised that money would be required for the transaction,… Read More ›
Slavoj Žižek presents
It was only a matter of time really. A new front has just been opened in the Žižek publishing machine:
Do academics write badly because they’re rushing?
I saw the science journalist Simon Makin give an excellent talk yesterday on how social and natural scientists can make their writing clearer. He offered some excellent tips to this end, including assuming your reader is exactly as intelligent as you are, but has absolutely none… Read More ›
Keeping the conversation going in an age of scholarly abundance
In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the notion of ‘the literature’ and how it is invoked by scholars. I’m now rather sceptical of the way in which many people talk about ‘the literature’ and the role it plays… Read More ›
The Uberfication of the University: the Digital Studienbuch and the 21st Century Privatdozent
In my copy of The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, the editors helpfully annotate Weber’s description of the occupational realities of the German academic. From pg 2: German students used to have a Studienbuch, a notebook… Read More ›
The Central European University in Budapest Under Threat of Closure
by Giovanni Picker The Central European University (CEU) is an English-speaking, postgraduate private university in Budapest, Hungary, specialising in the humanities and social sciences. It was established in 1991 by, among others, George Soros, its most important donor. The university… Read More ›
Does Sociology need more systematic review?
A really interesting discussion here from Patrick Dunleavy: There are also now some very specific and increasingly influential methods for re-aggregating and re-understanding what whole literatures tell us. ‘Systematic review’ is an especially key approach now across the social sciences,… Read More ›
The Sociology of Predatory Publishing
In a recent article on Derivace, Luděk Brož, Tereza Stöckelová and Filip Vostal reflect on the case of Wadim Strielkowski, whose over-enthusiastic game playing was the subject of extensive debate within the Czech academy. There are many factors which have, as a… Read More ›
Academic exceptionalism and the black-boxing of academic labour
This introduction to Conflict in the Academy, by Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert, nicely captures something I’ve been preoccupied by recently. From loc 63: we would like to suggest that tired clichés of ‘ivory towers’ and ‘dreaming spires’, or even… Read More ›
The turn to end all turns
The upwards trajectory of publication poses an obvious problem for the aspiring academic. It is one familiar from other fields of cultural production. How to be heard above the din? If ever more publications are being produced each year, commanding ever… Read More ›
The challenge of writing in the accelerated academy
In the nine years since I first entered a Sociology department, I’ve had a deep interest in academic writing that has only increased with time. In my past life as a philosophy student, writing had never occurred to me as… Read More ›
Chronosolidarity
In Work’s Intimacy, Melissa Gregg pays much attention to the challenge faced by part-time workers in knowledge industries. Many of her participants within this category reported regularly finding themselves checking e-mail outside of their paid hours, something they saw as necessary… Read More ›
Social Media and Open Research: What Does ‘Open’ Mean?
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
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 ›
The Shifting Sources of Hostility to the Accelerated Academy
The hostility to speed in the ‘accelerated academy’ predates the current fashion to complain about it and blame it on neo-liberalism. I was already reviewing a book by the Dutch sociologist and public intellectual, Dick Pels, on ‘fast science’ for… Read More ›
Ambient intimacy and cultures of overwork
In a recent book about the neoliberal superstar turned aspiring world saviour Jeffrey Sachs, a quote from his wife caught my attention. On loc 2909, she describes how Sachs only sleeps for four hours a night and works constantly throughout his waking… Read More ›
Some thoughts on fast and slow science in the accelerated academy
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how the social sciences are proving too slow in catching up to developments in digital technology. This means that engagements with new possibilities are often piecemeal and ad hoc, pushing the threshold of innovation in methods while… Read More ›
CfP: The Accelerated Academy
30th November to 2nd December 2016, Leiden, the Netherlands From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual… Read More ›
How waking up every day at 4.30am can change your life
This slightly disturbing TED talk speaks volumes about contemporary cultures of sleep: It’s spirituality for aspirant TED heads. This is a phrase used by Linsey McGoey in her No Such Thing as a Free Gift: amiable entrepreneurs and executives who congregate at… Read More ›
The Accelerated Academy
30th November to 2nd December 2016, Leiden, the Netherlands From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual… Read More ›
Social media and academic labour
In recent years, we’ve begun to see social media move from the periphery to the mainstream of academic practice. But what does this mean for academic labour? While much of the discussion concerns the possibilities for scholarly communication, what about… Read More ›
Call for Papers: The Accelerated Academy
From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual researchers to that of entire universities, serving to make… Read More ›
What’s so bad about book chapters? Nothing, really.
This is a semi-personal, semi-professional post from one of our editors: I keep hearing warnings about how book-chapters are bad for your research career. Well, our current publishing and peer-review system makes so little logical sense that I’m not inclined… Read More ›
The Accelerative Ethos of Steve Jobs
From the Commencement address Steve Jobs gave on June 12, 2005: When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It… Read More ›