Archive for October 2010
Richard Dawkins vs Steven Rose
A fascinating debate between the world famous Richard Dawkins and the somewhat less famous Steven Rose. While the former is renowned as a populariser of Darwinian theory, the latter is a proponent of systems biology (non reductive and emergentist approaches to… Read More ›
Indigenizing Approaches to Research
What does it mean to see the world through Indigenous eyes, to come to understand the ontological worldview that Indigenous peoples assert as an essential component of their existences? These questions have more than just theoretical relevance; for Settler peoples,… Read More ›
“An Area of No Man’s Land”: Policing Protest in Australia’s Capital
Canberra, as the home of Federal Parliament since 1927, has been a focal point for demonstrations and other forms of political protest, primarily on the lawns outside Parliament House (and Old Parliament House). Particularly since the political and cultural radicalism… Read More ›
A tiered university system
In the aftermath of Lord Browne’s review on higher education, we are all left wondering the overall impact it will have on higher education in England. Some commentators suggest that Lord Browne’s recommendations will led to a tiered higher education… Read More ›
The bloody streets of Kashmir have spoken
Not their criminal politicians who’ve betrayed their people and the folks on the streets know that. The youth, the lower middle classes and the workers – they’ve got the idea right that the only way to fight is with your… Read More ›
Dancing your… PhD?
Writing a doctoral thesis can often turn into a solitary affair, perceived by everybody (sometimes even by the author) as a terribly complicated and neverending excercise. This project offers a fun way of bringing PhD theses from various disciplines –… Read More ›
Browne’s plans will drive whole fields of knowledge into decline
The Guardian, Friday 22 October 2010 The Browne report on higher education funding and student finance is wide of the mark in every respect (Universities: Shock at big cuts in teaching budgets, 21 October). The proposal to scrap the present… Read More ›
Beyond Immigration – the impact of the permanent cap on Higher Education
Over the past few months, Tory-LibDem Higher Education policies have been under the spotlight, mainly due to the controversial issue of students’ fees. However, there are also other, less apparent, aspects implicit in the political plans of the coalition which… Read More ›
Demo against education cuts – November 10th
NUS and the University and College Union (UCU) are jointly organising a national demo, ‘Fund Our Future: Stop Education Cuts’ on Wednesday 10 November 2010, in central London. The demo is part of our strategy to influence the Coalition Government…. Read More ›
Jon Snow, Revolting Student turned Blogger
In a climate of far reaching cuts in every sector the government can get its hands on, Higher Education in Britain is in for a battering over the coming years. Decreased research funding, decreased teaching budgets, and a lifting of… Read More ›
SI Interviews – Karen Throsby on autoethnography and swimming the channel
As part of her research into channel swimmers, Dr Karen Throsby recently swam the English channel herself and was kind enough to talk to the Sociological Imagination about it as the first in a new series of podcasts. As Karen put… Read More ›
I Am Redneck, Hear Me Roar
Y’all call me Bubba. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money, and nothing particular to interest me in Southeast Missouri, I thought I would move away, get an education, get a job,… Read More ›
Social Scientists Go To a Robotics Lab
Steve Fuller, Nick Lee, Frances Griffiths and Ann Adams at the University of Warwick are conducting a project within the ESRC-funded programme “Understanding Individual Behaviour”. Their project Mimetic Factors in Human Behaviour: Health and Well-Being focusses on the human ability… Read More ›
Reclaiming Learning – concluding thoughts
Here at this point of conflict inside the spiral process of knowledge as ideas, concepts, principles and insights are fought over, we begin the process of positioning ourselves, a stage in the struggle for self development. This is a point… Read More ›
Reclaiming Learning – beginning again
Learning then is that process in which the material world crashes into my consciousness, it is a space of both stress and possibility, a profoundly active process in which I continually contest who I am, where I may have come… Read More ›
Reclaiming Learning – the dialectic of learning
All thinking, a valuable dimension in the process of learning, sort of kick starts things, starts by abstracting or isolating certain features of a practice or process ,we concentrate on these features to the exclusion of others (Lenin 1972). So… Read More ›
Reclaiming Learning – a return to Vygotsky
We are confronted by and complicit in war, misery, poverty and that acute and chronic crisis, climate change. The complex inter relationship of these chronic crises is a material basis for the acute crisis that could lead to species extinction…. Read More ›
Reclaiming Learning – introduction
The Challenge: “Given that structures function to give persons powers, the specific use that agents make of these structural capacities is not pre determined by the nature of the structures themselves. Alternative courses are open to agents: they may simply… Read More ›
Food Adjectives (an exercise in deconstruction)
If someone had told me twenty years ago that some day I would yearn for the simplicity of socialist consumption, I would have laughed. In 1988, I was seven, the country’s economy was crumbling down, electricity was rationed (a scheme… Read More ›
The Sausage Factory
Yesterday saw the publication of the latest Really Open University offering ‘The Sausage Factory’. It was a direct response to the Browne Review of UK higher education funding and offered a critical reading of the recommendations proposing a lifting of… Read More ›
University of Sanctuary
What is the idea of the university? Perhaps the university should be the creator of knowledge, the repository of ideas, the temple of learning? These may or may not chime with your idea of the university, and if they do… Read More ›
Browne Report Recommends Lifting Cap on Tuition Fees
The much anticipated university finance review by Lord Browne has been published today and does indeed recommend that the current £3,290 cap on tuition fees be abandoned, as many speculated it would. It proposes a free market approach to tuition… Read More ›
Here Comes Everybody: the power of organising without organisations
How is social media reshaping social organization? In this short lecture Clay Shirky attempts to answer this complex and pertinent question. This website itself can be taken as an interesting example of social media, as affordable internet hosting and content management… Read More ›
“Skirting” Academia: The Return of Peacockery*?
* All images used with the kind permission of Fashion For Nerds In recent years, blogging became increasingly popular all over the world (well, predominantly, but not exclusively, all over its European and North-American parts), exploding traditional ideas of news… Read More ›