I originally wrote the following in October 2012, just after the European Union was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union makes the most sense when you consider the front-runners, which included Julian… Read More ›
Sociologists of Crisis 
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 ›
“Brassing off” Against Post-Democratic Non-Citizenship. Or, What to Learn from the Second Line Culture of New Orleans
By Lambros Fatsis Following the Brexit referendum and the recent US presidential election, our current political and socio-cultural climate has often been described as quintessentially ‘post-truth’. This newly coined term, much like the phenomenon it describes, rapidly gained traction as… Read More ›
The 2016 US Presidential Election Was Less about Populism than a Vote against Democracy
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 ›
Why I’m not Afraid or Ashamed of Cosmopolitanism
This piece is another one of my several articles inspired by Brexit. Here I bring together two issues that Brexit has placed in harsh juxtaposition: Cosmopolitanism as a distinct ideology – whose ‘elitism’ Peter Mandler and Ross Douthat have recently cast… Read More ›
CfA – Announcing the new SOYUZ Article Prize!
The Soyuz Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies announces the opening of its first Article Prize competition for the best article related to the culture, history, politics of postsocialism by a junior scholar. This prize recognizes significant contributions to the advancement of scholarly understandings of postsocialism, broadly defined. Articles published… Read More ›
Max Weber’s triad – status, class and party – in light of Brexit: A call to party harder
Max Weber famously presented three principles of social ‘stratification’ (‘organization’ would be better): status, class and party. The ongoing saga of Brexit brings to light some interesting features of the last category, which otherwise tends to be neglected or treated… Read More ›
Are Politicians Liars? Taking a Step Back from Brexit
Among the most striking features of the aftermath of the Brexit vote has been the speed with which the victorious politicians promoting Brexit have rowed back from their more extravagant promises about the extra funds and fewer migrants which would… Read More ›
The Emerging Lessons of Brexit for Aspiring Democracies
The following first appeared on Al Rasub, a Dubai-based news website. *** The recent referendum resulting in a 52-48 vote for the UK to leave the European Union (‘Brexit’) is causing substantial political and economic ripple effects across the world,… Read More ›
Brexit Shows That ‘Generation’ Needs to Be Added to Race, Class and Gender
Shortly after it was announced that those in favour of leaving the European Union had won the UK referendum, I was among the first to pounce on the fact that attachment to the European Union directly varied with age cohort:… Read More ›
RIP Alvin Toffler, sociologist of the future
I first read Alvin Toffler’s books Future Shock (1970), The Third Wave (1980) and Powershift” (1990), the last two co-authored with his wife Heidy Toffler, in an samizdat-type Bulgarian translation in 2000, as a first year student at the Sofia University…. Read More ›
Humanity on a Budget, or the ‘Value-Added’ of Being Human
This piece is dedicated to Stefan Stern, who picked up on – and ran with – a remark I made at this year’s Brain Bar Budapest, concerning the need for a ‘value-added’ account of being ‘human’ in a world in… Read More ›
The sociology of climate change (in blues format)!
by Bill Carroll In January 2015, scientists recorded atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million on a regular basis – the first time such a level had been reached so early in the calendar year. It… Read More ›
A Proposal for a Public Understanding of Sociology Chair
This morning Mark Carrigan opined on twitter that it would be great to have at least one chair in Public Understanding of Sociology, given how such chairs have benefited not only the natural sciences, where they began around 1990, but… Read More ›
Dying for the Right of Free Expression: A Reflection on the Charlie Hebdo Massacre
The clearly calculated mass murder that occurred yesterday at the headquarters of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, is an affront to basic standards of human decency. However, the ensuing outrage has been spun in terms of various diagnoses: Did… Read More ›
In Defence of Obama’s Handling of Ferguson
I have been struck by the on-line antagonism to US President Obama’s relatively muted response to the civil unrest in Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, Missouri, which followed the shooting of a black youth by a white police officer…. Read More ›
What is the Capability Approach about?
The capability approach (CA), developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and other social theorists is a broad, human-centred normative framework for the evaluation of individual and group well-being, quality of life and social justice. Sen and Nussbaum’s ideas have influenced… Read More ›
Let’s hope America is not returning to ‘normal’: We may need another ‘American Century’
Nowadays I run across two groups of intelligent people who feel they understand why the United States seems to have lost its mojo. One group of people (typically on the right but invariably libertarian) believe that the US political class… Read More ›
Lacuna – a new online magazine which commits sociology
We would like to introduce you to a new favourite online magazine of ours – Lacuna. “Lacuna is an online magazine that challenges indifference to suffering and promotes human rights. Its aim is to fill the gap between the short-term… Read More ›
Dark Ecology, the Higher Misanthropy and Object-Oriented Ontology
For those who don’t already know, actor-network theory isn’t just a useful tool for getting grant money by guilt-tripping funders about all the various things in the social world they’re not attending to. It’s also a platform for philosophical innovation,… Read More ›
A strike or a shot in the dark? An antithesis in eleven theses
In the midst of an ongoing campaign against privatisation in Higher Education at the University of Sussex, Prof. Luke Martell and I were kindly invited to join a debate on the subject for the University’s student TV Station (UniTv), as… Read More ›
Bill Carroll: Grassroots organizations as alternatives in the global economy
William Carroll is a Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Victoria (Victoria, Canada). In this video from the 2012 Global Studies conference, he talks about his research on global politics, and looking at grassroots organizations as alternatives in… Read More ›
The responsibility of being nice: An idea, a method and a personal utopia on suicide. A conversation with Dr. Ben Fincham
I. News that stale Having interrupted the flow of the Sociologists of Crisis series for a timely intervention on the issue of the Golden Dawn trials in my native Greece, it seems timely to return to a matter that was… Read More ›
Gone and busted, done and dusted? Notes towards a moral and political grammar of ‘civil dawn’
What happened? While preparing the fourth instalment of the Sociologists of Crisis on the issue of suicide, life via death took over and in the face of a tragic event, I had to get my editorial, moral, political and sociological… Read More ›
“A vain EU-topia seated in the brain?”: A conversation about Europe with Gerard Delanty
‘A vain Eutopia, seated in the brain’; Thus concludes The Moral of Bernard Mandeville’s 1705 poem The Grumbling Hive, a six-penny pamphlet which owes its fame to the 1714 edition of Mandeville’s most known oeuvre, The Fable of the Bees…. Read More ›
Ring the alarm! The sound of crisis: from ‘language games’ to… ‘politricks’
(…continuing from last month’s post) I To suggest that language may appear as a problem for a country that is teetering on the edge of financial, moral and political collapse, could be easily mistaken for virtually inviting a debt-ridden population… Read More ›
Introducing a special feature: the ‘Sociologists of Crisis’ series
I Sociology and crisis often appear linked together, trapped in each other’s embrace sometimes as ‘intimate bedfellows’ and sometimes as an ‘odd couple’ too. What binds the one to the other is the very nature of their unusual relationship which,… Read More ›