This week, Dr. Piper Harron, mathematics professor based at the University of Hawaii, and a vocal feminist and supporter of under-represented groups in the academic mathematics community, published a provocative blogpost on the website of the AMS (American Mathematical Society), in… Read More ›
Fragile Movements 
TODAY: Teach-in on Violence in Universities in India at Columbia University
Teach-in on Violence in Universities in India In Solidarity with Delhi University Room 227, Mudd Building, Columbia University Sunday, March 5, 2017 3:00 – 4:30 PM On February 22, the teachers and students of Ramjas College in Delhi University were… Read More ›
Social media and populism
This excellent essay by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books raises an important issue about the forms of political mobilisation facilitated by social media: Trump has called himself the Hemingway of the 140 characters. He has ‘the best… Read More ›
Creative Dark Matter Rising? Struggling Over the Future of Alternative Cultural Spaces in the City of Geneva
by Robert Hollands When I recently mentioned to some friends that I was going to Geneva, Switzerland to conduct some sociological research into alternative cultural spaces, most shook their heads in disbelief. ‘All I think of when I hear the… Read More ›
CfP: Manchester Social Movements Conference
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE – FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS Dates: Conference 10th-12 April Abstracts by Monday 2oth March Papers by Friday 31st March From 1995 to 2016, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on ‘ALTERNATIVE… Read More ›
BREAKING NEWS: Social Science Faculty at Humboldt-University Berlin occupied!
Well, this is not breaking news. The occupation of the Social Science Faculty of the HU-Berlin started last Wednesday, 18 January, but I only found out about it today. Although I work in an institute which is part of the… Read More ›
The growing climate of political repression in the uk
As anyone who follows party politics in the UK will have noticed, the home secretary’s rhetoric on ‘extremism’ has been getting increasingly bellicose in recent months. While it remains an open question as to what extent she believes this, as… Read More ›
Judith Butler on the Performativity of Assembly
A collection of lectures relating to her new book Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly.
#icanhazpdf
This new way of finding articles is cool. Three people sent me this link in the last few days (two mathematicians and one social scientist). It’s not new, but it is the first sign of organisation spreading beyond social scientists’… Read More ›
The Politics of Discretionary Effort
Since first encountering the notion of discretionary effort, I’ve been fascinated by it. This is a definition I found on page one of Google: Discretionary effort is the level of effort people could give if they wanted to, but above… Read More ›
Over-Reach By Unelected Technocrats
This is the debate which the Financial Times says has been prompted by Mark Carney’s intervention on climate change earlier in the week. His point seemed rather incisive to me, observing that “Since the 1980s the number of registered weather-related loss events has tripled” and… Read More ›
The agonistic politics of anonymous
I’ve recently been writing about the fragility of many contemporary movements: the organisational weakness that can emerge from digitally mediated assembly because the logistical labour formerly necessary to bring people together provided an important foundation for collective reflexivity. Collective projects become harder… Read More ›
The Iron Cage in Binary Code
This superb post by Tressie McMillan Cottom considers the algorithmic shaping of life chances under digital capitalism: Whether or not i know these ads are scams is entirely up to my individual cultural capital. Basically, do I know better? And… Read More ›