I was expecting to like this film but it completely exceeded my expectations. Largely because it was such an interesting and accomplished exploration of a particular mode of being-in-the-world. Llewyn Davis is a struggling folk singer in Greenwich Village of the early 1960s,… Read More ›
Archive for March 2014
Not Your Typical Call for Papers
With the 2014 Volume, the Berkeley Journal of Sociology will focus its efforts on writing a “history of the present.” The journal will no longer publish academic research articles. Instead, we seek compelling essays, insightful commentaries, critical analyses, and topical symposiums on… Read More ›
Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil
(via Critical Theory)
Graham Harman on Speculative Realism
Graham Harman, American philosopher, talking about speculative realism, philosophy, natural sciences, fine art, correlational circle, object, plasma. In the lecture Graham Harman discusses the concepts of phenomenology, pre-socratics, quality, in relationship to Bruno Latour, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Heidegger, Whitehead,… Read More ›
Public Sociology and Sociological Writing
One of my favourite passages by C Wright Mills concerns the tendency of academics to “slip so readily into unintelligibility”. An “elaborate vocabulary” and “involved manner of speaking and writing” become props for a professional self-image which defines itself, in… Read More ›
The Art of Listening
This is a preface to the new Japanese edition of Les Back’s The Art of Listening, published by Serica Shobo and translated by Dr Takeshi Arimoto. It is republished here with permission. Since its publication in 2007, The Art of Listening has been… Read More ›
The ontology of books
I read a book a decade ago and struggle with it. I read it again now and find it astonishingly thought-provoking. How do you explain this? It seems I bring something different to the book on the second reading: concepts,… Read More ›
Some thoughts on DIY sociology
In a recent post Ros Edwards and Val Gillies described the Women’s Workshop on Qualitative Family and Household Research which has been meeting independently for a quarter of a century. It began as a “nameless informal support group of five women who… Read More ›
Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze, Morphogenesis, and Population Thinking
Manuel Delanda, contemporary philosopher, discusses Deleuze, materialism, morphogenesis, and the first of three reasoning styles, population thinking. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland. 2011… Read More ›
The Paradox of Civility, or, “why is this place filled with such rude assholes?”
There was a strange and compelling article on Medium this week, reflecting on the author’s experience of being a devotee of Whole Foods, the self-certifying purveyors of ‘natural’ produce who will surely expand in the UK at some point. The author was at… Read More ›
(Re)Producing Pistorius: Patriarchy, Prosecution and the Problematics of Disability
Introduction Reeva Steenkamp was a South African model. She grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and began modelling at 14 after she was “spotted” while out shopping. Steenkamp, a law graduate, advocated on “women’s issues” such as rape and… Read More ›
Upcoming event: Max Weber, Markets and Economic Sociology, Warwick University, 7 May 2014
An event organized by the Max Weber Study Group of the British Sociological Association and the Social Theory Centre at the University of Warwick In the wake of the recent financial crisis, there is an urgent need for social scientists… Read More ›
“Looking for a husband with an EU-passport”
We are posting this again because the video was not visible in the original post. Thanks to Sadia Habib and Yolanda van Wyk for alerting us – and sorry that fixing it took so long! Tanja Ostojić, a Serbian feminist… Read More ›
In Search of the Chinese Parsons
When Pitirim Sorokin was brought to Harvard to found its Sociology Department in 1930, ‘sociology’ was still very much seen in the United States in the Comtean mould as a macro-policy science. Sociology would focus on the ‘big picture’ and… Read More ›
Some thoughts on the sociology of animals
One of many likeable things about the renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne was his relationship with animals. In an intellectual context soon to be overcome with Cartesianism, with its mechanistic understanding of non-human animals, Montaigne exhibited an admirable degree of sensitivity to the… Read More ›
How to write a good sociology essay (and not panic)
Dear stressed student, Here are a bunch of useful resources from yours truly, the Idle Procrastinator Ethnographer for writing essays and papers: Start small: this is perhaps the most useful of all links posted here: a post about how to… Read More ›
What have we done to universities?
Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free… Read More ›
4D Research: Early experiences of Designing, Debating, Doing and Disseminating Social Research
4D Research: Early experiences of Designing, Debating, Doing and Disseminating Social Research. 7th ENQUIRE Postgraduate Conference, 14th November 2014 Call for Abstracts This conference aims to bring together post-graduate researchers from a variety of disciplines to facilitate shared critical engagement with… Read More ›
Social Movements in the Neoliberal Age
This year’s annual lecture at the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) featured Michael Burawoy speaking on social movements in the neoliberal age. You can find the audio of the lecture on Adam David Morton’s blog. In keeping… Read More ›
Emma Uprichard on the challenge of Big Data
Anything that helps us to see the world a bit differently […] can potentially help to nurture a healthy ‘sociological imagination’. But the frame will remain on the relative present – the ‘plastic present’ to use a phrase I’ve used… Read More ›
Social Media for Academics
Are you an academic? Are you interested in social media? Given you’re reading a blog post with the title ‘Social Media for Academics’ then I’ll assume that you are. In which case I hope you’ll be interested in the book… Read More ›
What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?
What’s the point of academic publishing? It’s such an integral part of the academic role in the contemporary university that it can be jarring to step back and ponder a question like this. It was addressed by Sarah Kendzior in a great article… Read More ›
10 reasons why you need social science
This interesting list of reasons by Audrey Osler was published by the Campaign for Social Science. Read the descriptions for each reason here. Social scientists help us imagine alternative futures Social science can help us make sense of our finances… Read More ›
Raise university tuition fees to improve education… or not? The German approach
What can England learn from Germany’s approach to financing higher education? “During the past eight years, university tuition fees were introduced into most west German federal states. Yet in a few months, every single state will have abolished them. These… Read More ›
Rajani Naidoo: Why the “ranking fetish” is bad for universities
Rajani Naidoo reflects on “ranking fetish” of higher education from Aarhus Universitet on Vimeo. In this video, Dr. Rajani Naidoo of the University of Bath explains how higher education is becoming increasingly market driven, thus becoming less interested in the… Read More ›
New book – “Undoing property?”
Exciting-sounding (fairly) new book! Undoing property examines complex relationships inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production, and the public realm today. In its pages artists and theorists address aspects of computing, curating, economy, ecology, gentrification, music, publishing, piracy, and much… Read More ›
Being a link between the academic world and local communities
by Lisa McKenzie Coming into Higher Education as a 30 year old mum was daunting to say the least. I arrived at the University of Nottingham in 2000 as an under-graduate on the joint honours course of Sociology and Social Policy…. Read More ›
Bullshit jobs
Today I came across another good article by David Graeber about why there are so many really bad jobs around: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have… Read More ›