Dear All, Following the success of the Summer Clinic on the sociological theory of agency we are offering the opportunity to further develop our investigation and review of the concept over the coming academic year. We propose monthly sessions on… Read More ›
Archive for September 2013
Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea
In this interview from the Platypus Axel Honneth talks about his book Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. His discussion of the history of reification as a concept and the politics surrounding it was particularly interesting: Axel Honneth:… Read More ›
An Illustrated Guide to Academic Blogging
The Just Publics @ 365 blog recently posted a wonderful guide to academic blogging. It has some fantastic advice from a range of experienced academic bloggers – it also has cartoons! Check it out here.
Gabriel Tarde and Anthropology
In recent years the work of Gabriel Tarde has attracted renewed attention. This individualistic rival of Durkheim, long marginalised in the recent history of sociological thought, owes much of his newfound popularity to the promotional efforts of Bruno Latour and… Read More ›
This Week’s Most Popular Posts
The Dangers of Academic Blogging 28 reasons why you should blog about your research Charles Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination and why we fail to match it today Why sexual people don’t get asexuality and why it matters Maslow’s Hierarchy of… Read More ›
The Sociology of Gossip
In this video from TEDxVancouver Elaine Lui, writer of a popular celebrity gossip blog, talks about what exactly ‘gossip’ is and why people care. She makes an interesting case about the complexity of the ecosystem surrounding modern celebrity. What’s perhaps… Read More ›
Are you a fox or a hedgehog?
There’s a wonderful section of one of the posts we just linked to about the dangers of academic blogging which discusses the way different intellectual personalities approach academic blogging. The post makes an important (and personally quite sobering given how clearly… Read More ›
The Dangers of Academic Blogging
As you might have noticed, we’re quite keen on academic blogging here. So it was interesting to stumble across this thoughtful post (HT Alistair’s Adversaria) reflecting on some of the dangers associated with academic blogging. This point in particular stood… Read More ›
The Sociology of Daydreaming
People who build castles in the air do not, for the most part accomplish much, it is true; but every man who does accomplish great things is given to building elaborate castles in the air and then playfully copying them… Read More ›
“I’m a cyborg? I thought I was just wearing glasses”: technology, agency and ontology
This is a quick attempt to elaborate on a thought which kept coming back to me during the Quantified Self seminar on Tuesday. It seems obvious to me that one of the key conceptual questions encountered in studying technology which… Read More ›
What Does It Mean to be an Intellectual Today?
The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective has an interesting interview with Steve Fuller about what it means to be an ‘intellectual’ in contemporary circumstances. There’s a range of important points in this interview but these really caught my attention:… Read More ›
Social Movements Network at the Council for European Studies Conference
Call for Abstracts: Social Movements Network at the Council for European Studies Conference Washington, March 2014 The Council for European Studies’ research network on social movements, now two years old, comprises 180 scholars in over 20 different countries and as… Read More ›
Evelyn Ruppert on Digital Sociology
In this podcast from the BSA Digital Sociology Group’s July 16 seminar Evenlyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths) talks about Digital Sociology.
Network analytic approaches to the production and propagation of literary and artistic value
Daniel Allington, The Open University www.danielallington.net 1 October 2013 Centre for e-Research Anatomy Museum Space King’s Building (6th Floor) King’s College London The Strand London According to Bourdieu, the value of art, literature, etc is a form of belief that… Read More ›
BSA Activism in Sociology Forum Inaugural Meeting
Saturday 9 November 2013, 10:30am-4pm BSA Meeting Room, London Invitation and Call for Papers The BSA Activism in Sociology (ASF) has been established to increase the contribution of sociology and sociologists to challenging injustice and inequality by connecting those already working… Read More ›
Does Facebook make people more polite?
For those of us who are cheerily hostile to Facebook, it might seem counter-intuitive to associate the platform with people being relatively civil to each other. However this research being conducted at the University of Kent, reported on the Democratic… Read More ›
The Books I’m Currently Reading
It’s fun to read about books. So in this new feature we’re hoping to feature lots of books on the site. If you’d like to share your ‘to read’ pile and a short discussion of the books you’re reading then… Read More ›
The Quantified Self Research Network (QS, Self-Tracking and Wearable Computing)
The first meeting of the Quantified Self Research Network took place last week at the University Leeds. This was established by myself and Chris Till in order to help encourage interdisciplinary dialogue amongst people working on different aspects of Quantified… Read More ›
An Invitation to Digital Public Sociology? Some initial thoughts
What does ‘public sociology’ entail in a world of facebook, twitter, youtube, slideshare, soundcloud, pinterest and wordpress? What affordances and constraints do these tools entail for the task of “taking knowledge back to those from whom it came, making public issues out… Read More ›
BSA Presidential Event: The Challenge of Big Data
BSA Presidential Event: The Challenge of Big Data Friday 25 October 2013, 09:30-16:45 British Library Conference Centre, London Speakers include: Evelyn Ruppert (Goldsmiths), Ken Benoit (LSE), Emma Uprichard (University of Warwick), Alan Warde (University of Manchester), Abby Day (Goldsmiths), Emer… Read More ›
Building an Africana Sociology
As a sociologist-in-training and a grad student it is my job to eat, breath, and live sociology, the study of human interaction and social institutions. I spend most of my week either reading sociological pieces, listening to lectures and talks,… Read More ›
Steve Fuller on The Proactionary Imperative
While I’m a bit sceptical about the ‘beyond left and right’ terms in which this is being framed, it’s nonetheless an extremely interesting idea:
CfP: Theory Stream for BSA Annual Conference 2014
This stream welcomes abstracts on any aspect of theory as well as abstracts for the following Study Groups: · Bourdieu · Historical and Comparative Sociology · History of Sociology · Realism and Social Research · Weber The Realism and Social Research… Read More ›
Between Two Worlds: The story of a first-year sociology student
Between Two Worlds. A challenging student life and a demanding degree: could we bring those two universes together? ‘Reality? What is that? Is it an idea or just a convention? It’s how we define that particular threat, which pushes our… Read More ›
Public Sociology and Writing For The Media
We’ve posted a few times this month about what public sociology means in practice. If we agree that it’s a worthwhile thing then how should we set about doing it? One obvious way to do this is to try and get… Read More ›
Is virtual ethnography an oxymoron?
Attempts to conceptualise the sociological study of behaviour on the Web often involve juxtaposing the words ‘virtual’ or ‘digital’ to ‘ethnography’ or blend ‘ethnography’ with ‘Internet’ to create ‘netnography’. Rightly or wrongly ethnography for me connotes old school anthropology –… Read More ›
The Identity Crisis in Cybernetics
This post-conference reflection on Mark Johnson’s blog raises a really interesting issue for traditions of intellectual inquiry which fall beyond or between disciplinary boundaries: At my University over the summer, we hosted the annual conference of the American Society for… Read More ›
Are most countries in Europe democratic? Post-politics, technocracy and populism
The LSE EUROPP blog has a great interview with the political theorist Chantal Mouffe in which she discusses her understanding of European politics as being in a post-political situation. Her understanding of ‘post-political’ is similar to what the political sociologist Colin Crouch… Read More ›
Combining towards effective research design in digital sociology
I am currently trying to devise a workable research design for a two and a half year project. Its absence, needless to say, isn’t stopping me jumping into the field for what I call the ‘landscape mapping’ phase of the project – which I half… Read More ›
The Sociology of Hipsters
An interesting post on Sociology Lens yesterday made a useful contribution to the online debate about the sociology of hipsterdom which I briefly became completely obsessed with last summer: This week in a local Massachusetts newspaper a columnist made a… Read More ›