After writing an article and revising another (and doing admissions for my department), I’ve returned to writing the book I started in April. I’ve been trying to write in the morning and do teaching and admin in the afternoons. To… Read More ›
Archive for July 2013
Does Sociology still have a demand problem?
Mark Carrigan asks, after an essay by Wolfgang Streeck, why there is so little sociology in public discourse? Streeck argues that there might be a demand problem, since although there are numerous sociologists plying their trade, we still seldom see sociology… Read More ›
How to write 1000 words a day and not go bat shit crazy (at least not within the first two weeks)
A few weeks ago I encountered this interesting post, from which this one takes its title, on the Thesis Whisperer which I tweeted from various accounts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the post proved popular. I was quite taken with the idea and thought I’d… Read More ›
Žižek vs Chomsky: Is a pointless spat becoming a meaningful debate?
A quick round up of this spat which was entirely a creation of the internet – the opening salvos were entirely asynchronous, throwaway remarks in public talks that were plucked from obscurity by diligent web editors seeking to avoid their… Read More ›
CfP: The Sociological Craft Project
In this new feature the Sociological Imagination invites short (2500 word max) contributions reflecting on any aspect of sociological craft. We use the term ‘craft’ in the broad sense conveyed by Richard Sennett: Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a… Read More ›
The Ethnographer, by Jorge Luis Borges
Below is one of Idle Ethnographer’s favourite stories about ethnographers which she’d like to share with you on her birthday, in lieu of cake. The Ethnographer Jorge Luis Borges Translated by Andrew Hurley I was told about the case in… Read More ›
The shifting language of research ‘participation’
The relation of people like us–researchers in the social sciences–to the people we gathered data on and wrote about was beginning to worry us all. We had left behind the innocence of being happy when we used the tricks we… Read More ›
CfP: Making Trans Count
Call for Submissions for Transgender Studies Quarterly 2.1: Making Transgender Count As a relatively new social category, the very notion of a “transgender population” poses numerous intellectual, political, and technical challenges. Who gets to define what transgender is, or who… Read More ›
Alienated and alienating writing (by alienated and alienating social scientists)
The problem for social scientists is that our jargon, like that of the natural scientists, is heavily biased towards nouns and noun phrases. Our big words are nearly always nouns, such as “re-ethnification”, “mediatisation”, “deindividuation” and all the other “isations”… Read More ›
Marx Reloaded
An extremely timely film (via Progressive Geographies)
The Sociology of Intellectual Faddishness Part 2
This really interesting comment by Benjamin Geer on yesterday’s Sociology of Intellectual Faddishness post meritted reproduction in its own right: 1. Long-term academic employment is hard to obtain, but once you’re in, it’s not difficult to keep your job indefinitely… Read More ›
Public Scholarship and Working With The Media
In this podcast from the LSE Impact Blog’s Social Science in the Public Sphere event, Tim Newburn talks about his involvement in the Reading the Riots project, which involved a collaboration with the Guardian to undertake research into the riots of August 2011 at a… Read More ›
“We’re going to go out there and violate some rights”
(HT Upworthy)
The Sociology of Intellectual Faddishness or, Why it’s unfair to blame everything on Foucault
We’ve hosted an ongoing argument here about the nature of sociology. Having initially been rather rude, Max Parkin offered what I thought was a perfectly reasonable response which I thought I’d reproduce here because, leaving aside the needless unpleasantness, it’s turned into… Read More ›
There’s going to be a riot down in Trumpton tonight: on public scholarship and private commitment
In 1983 at the close of the miners strike two big, bad things vied for my fourteen year old attention: music and politics, and my attention was caught even more when they were entwined in the music of the Clash,… Read More ›
The 2014 ISRF Essay Competition – Theory of Social Behaviour
The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JTSB) intend to award a prize of 7,000 CHF for the best essay on the topic ‘The research investigator as instrument across the human sciences’. This is a topic, not a title…. Read More ›
“But isn’t that what the psychologists do?”: the dangers of disciplinary boundary work
To respond to this particular crisis of measure, economics and psychology are being forcibly re-married. Behavioural and experimental economics have their earliest origins in game theory in the 1940s, which allowed economists and psychologists to compare normative rational choice-making—that is,… Read More ›
Intellectual Craftsmanship As Refusal
Today, we laborers in the groves of academia are pitted against one another in a quest for increased productivity. Academic departments and units compete against one another for increasingly scarce goods, such as the right to hire faculty; individual scholars… Read More ›
Why are conspiracy theories popular?
This article on the LSE politics blog was a thought-provoking discussion of conspiracy theories and the increasing weight of social scientific evidence concerning their emergence and dissemination. This is a topic that’s fascinated me for years and one which, until I started… Read More ›
The Empty ‘Posturing’ of Žižek and Lacan?
This interview (via Open Culture) will perhaps divide opinion. It follows on quite nicely from John Searle’scomments about Foucault, Bourdieu and continental obscurantism which I found recently. Before I express a view, let me offer a preamble: I own and have read a… Read More ›
BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought
BSA Realism Study Group Seminar: Contemporary Issues in Realist Thought Friday 6 September 2013 BSA Meeting Room, London. As the new convenors of the BSA realism study group we are pleased to announce a seminar to debate contemporary issues in… Read More ›
The Great University Gamble
Understandably, headlines focused on this dramatic rise in price and its apparent expense for graduates, while obscuring the greater burden placed on the publicly backed student loan scheme, which requires an increase in upfront government borrowing. In the medium term,… Read More ›
Baking an idea in the unconscious mind
My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which… Read More ›
An interview with David Jay: Why Asexuality Matters For The Future of Sexual Culture
In this podcast I talk to David Jay about the future of the asexuality community, the implications of its increasing visibility and its relevance for sexual culture more broadly.
Caught Between Zombies and Chavs? The aesthetics of the crowd in an age of austerity
I love book shops. There are few things in life that give me greater pleasure then entering a book shop to choose a book at random. While I occasionally buy some utter crap through the enthusiastically scattergun approach I take… Read More ›
Rethinking the vision of sociology one might want to argue for
it may be time to re-think how to situate our ourselves and our commitments in relation to, not only what one is against, but also what vision of sociology one might want to argue for. It is not a mattter,… Read More ›