This powerful article in Fast Capitalism by Henry A. Giroux considers the overlaps between the ‘reform’ agenda in secondary education and higher education. It’s a little depressing but it does end on a positive note. Read it in full here. Public and… Read More ›
Archive for April 2014
Sociological Writing and the Causal Power of Ideas
I’ve always tended to write in a fragmented way. This post is incredibly rare in that I’ve started writing it at what seems, at least for now, to be the beginning. I’ll usually jump in with an idea, elaborate it until… Read More ›
PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?
What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the… Read More ›
Review of Punk Sociology
I actually liked the ‘punk’ bit of this book less than I expected to. I’m a big fan of Nick Crossley’s work – though I disagree with him on a lot of things, engaging with it was really important for developing the… Read More ›
CfP: What are conferences for? The Political economy of academic events
The Sociological Imagination invites short articles ( words) critically reflecting upon the prevailing forms of intellectual meeting within the contemporary academy. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How could they be done differently? What are the sociological implications… Read More ›
Reflections on My British Sociological Association Keynote
8 September 2014: My keynote address is now on-line I delivered the first keynote of the British Sociological Association annual meeting this year. I was especially honoured to learn that I was a popular choice, because what I had to… Read More ›
The Centre for Social Ontology
The Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) was established in 2011 at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. Now based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, its main focus is the Morphogenetic Project. The Morphogenetic Project produces an annual volume as part… Read More ›
CfP: 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 ›
PhD Workshop: What’s the point of social ontology?
What’s the Point of Social Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has an ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the… Read More ›
The continually shrinking conference presentation
This blog recently featured a call for papers that reflect on ‘forms of intellectual meeting within the contemporary academy’. I thought that this was a timely request, which resonates with different concerns we can identify around how some academic events are run…. Read More ›
Charles Tilly on Causal Mechanisms
An interesting interview by Daniel Little as part of his Understanding Society project:
Review of the Critical Pedagogy Reader
Critical Pedagogy as an educational philosophy refers to education that advocates the liberation of oppressed communities through developing a critical consciousness among teachers and students so that they are able to critically interrogate the inter-relationships between culture, economics, ideology and… Read More ›
Ann Oakley: women, childbirth and the invention of gender
Ann Oakley‘s work was the first serious academic study of housework (The sociology of housework, 1974; Housewife, 1974, and Woman’s Work: The Housewife, Past and Present, 1976). Previously we had posted an interview from 2013 in which she spoke of her… Read More ›
Trying to “evade the academic literature”
There’s a wonderful discussion in the midst of this review essay of Bernard WIlliams’s collected essays, which incidentally sound fantastic, in which the author defends Williams against accusations of lazy scholarship. I’ve written about this issue in the past (particuarly here and here) and it’s… Read More ›
CfP: What are seminars for? What are conferences for? Towards DIY academic events
The Sociological Imagination invites short articles ( words) critically reflecting upon the prevailing forms of intellectual meeting within the contemporary academy. What are their strengths? What are their weaknesses? How could they be done differently? What are the sociological implications of these… Read More ›
On Improvisation
‘So what would an improvisation-friendly academia look like? Certainly standards of public performance would shift. We would become more tolerant of people who speak crudely without notes, if they can improve as they take questions from the audience. But we… Read More ›
“Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind”: Jack Kerouac, creativity and academic writing
I just came across this wonderful list by Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, in the Beats anthology I’m slowly making my way through: Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy Submissive to everything, open, listening… Read More ›
Richard Dawkins, Twitter and the dangers of thinking aloud Edit
There’s a great Brendan O’Neill post on Telegraph blogs* in which he reflects on the self-destruction of Richard Dawkins** online and its roots in the nature of Twitter as a medium. He’s probably correct that, with the exception of a cadre… Read More ›
Wilhelm Reich’s 6 Rules for Creative Sanity
Following rather nicely from Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, which I came across a couple of days ago, Brain Pickings has posted these 6 Rules for Creative Sanity offered by Wilhelm Reich: Keep one’s life financially independent. Continue unabated to exercise one’s power of… Read More ›
PhD Comics: Les (Really) Miserables – “I Dreamed a Dream”
Does this strike a chord with anyone else…?
PhD Workshop: What’s the Point of Ontology?
What’s the Point of Ontology? PhD Workshop at the University of Warwick 18th June 2014, 10am – 5:30pm Ontology can often prove a contested and confusing issue within social research. Everyone has on ontology, explicit or otherwise, but the process… Read More ›
An Ultimate Warrior and an Ultimate Mother: The Gendered Response to Celebrity Deaths
Public reaction to the recent spate of celebrity deaths has been interesting to watch. Social media has led to an increase in the amount of “virtual mourners” who are able to flood the web with displays of grief, the sincerity… Read More ›
How to be a blogger without having your own blog
It’s a common assumption that ‘bloggers’ and ‘blogs’ are unavoidably intertwined. There’s a sense in which it’s true but it can also be slightly misleading. It’s possible to be a blogger without having your own blog. In fact, there are… Read More ›
Porn Studies is Released
Routledge Journals Publishes Porn Studies March 2014 – Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group) publish the first double issue of Porn Studies, the premier dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic and their cultural, economic, historical,… Read More ›
A Modest Proposal for Making Actor-Network Theory More than Academia’s All-Purpose App
As someone who suffers the misfortune of having committed to an academic life when very young, my institutional memory is somewhat older than my chronological age. For me the 1960s and 1970s remain very much part of living memory, which… Read More ›
Groups: Challenges for Contemporary Political Philosophy
Groups: Challenges for Contemporary Political Philosophy University of Rennes 1, November 19-21, 2014 Call for Papers Groups matter in political philosophy, most would now agree – but precisely how they matter is contentious. Group-related issues emerge in various contexts of debate: the redressing… Read More ›
Using Slideshare and Prezi to disseminate your work
One of the most obvious forms that digital scholarship can take is making ‘outputs’ public that would otherwise remain private. So for instance making slides available online after a talk or lecture. When I use slides, which is pretty irregular,… Read More ›
Only Lovers Left Alive, or what is it like to be a meta-reflexive vampire?
I’m not someone who is interested in vampires, either in the highbrow terms you’ll sometimes find in English Literature departments or the lowbrow terms that modishly respond to their asinine revival in popular culture (also sometimes found in English Literature… Read More ›
A Modest Proposal for All Future Keynotes
For about ten years now, I’ve been arguing about the benefits of improvisational performance in academia, not simply as an experience for the audience but more importantly as a way of getting ‘experts’ and ‘luminaries’ to speak unguardedly on what… Read More ›