In Margaret Archer’s work on Reflexivity, this faculty is seen as mediating between structure and agency. Our capacity to ‘bend back’ upon ourselves, considering our circumstances in light of our commitments and vice versa, constitutes the point at which structural… Read More ›
Archive for November 2014
We are experiencing a “pre-” that we can’t name yet
This is the claim made by Matthew Barzun, US ambassador to the UK, in an intruiging piece for the New Statesman. He attacks the view that the world is sliding into anarchy, offering a counter-narrative that is every bit as sweeping and… Read More ›
Romanticizing the Enlightenment
I am increasingly being asked to reflect on my self-development. This is neither as boring nor self-aggrandizing as it might first sound. You may actually learn something about yourself in the process. I was someone who read philosophy from quite… Read More ›
Seven reasons why blogging is academically valuable
This is a good list by John Danaher. Read it in full here: 1. It helps to build the habit of writing: 2. It helps to generate writing flow states: 3. It helps you to really understand your area of… Read More ›
Book Review: Liminality and the Modern, Living Through the In-Between by BjØrn Thomassen
Book Review by Bradley Williams With Liminality and the Modern, BjØrn Thomassen has provided an invaluable resource for researchers of all types of ritualistic processes in different social settings. As Thomassen notes, the concept of liminality is under-utilized in anthropology… Read More ›
Critical Realism, Gender and Feminism
Special Issue of the Journal of Critical Realism (15:5, 2016) Edited by Angela Martínez Dy, Lena Gunnarsson and Michiel van Ingen Email: An increasing number of gender scholars have become familiar with critical realism, finding it a robust alternative… Read More ›
Exploring Gender: Man Meets Woman by Yang Liu
A beautifully presented book with bold and binary pictograms illustrating gender issues of contemporary times is the perfect stimulus to use for discussion with undergraduates interested in issues of sociology, sociolinguistics, and particularly gender roles and relationships. Some of the… Read More ›
How to get started on a sociological essay
Are you clear about what the question is asking? If you’re uncertain about what the terms mean or how they fit together then it’ll be difficult to know how to start writing. Try and clarify issues like these before you… Read More ›
Book Review: Experiments in Knowing – Gender and Method in the Social Sciences by Ann Oakley
by Gwen Redmond An interest in the methodological debate between qualitative and quantitative research methods, as well as an inclination to read methodological approaches with a feminist perspective, drew me to reading Ann Oakley’s Experiments in Knowing. Published in 2000,… Read More ›
Junior Theorist Symposium August 2015, Chicago, IL CFP
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 13, 2015 We invite submissions for extended abstracts for the 9th Junior Theorists Symposium (JTS), to be held in Chicago, IL on August 21st, 2015, the day before the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA)…. Read More ›
Nightcrawler: or, the possibility of a vocation in late capitalism
Lou Bloom is a petty thief, prowling Los Angeles by night while seeking some purpose in his life. He exists on the fringes of society, stealing to survive while also offering himself as an employee prepared to work under any… Read More ›
The intellectual legitimacy of academic blogging
One of my favourite academic blogs is Understanding Society. Written by the philosopher Daniel Little, it covers a diverse range of topics across the social sciences while continually coming back to a number of core theoretical questions that fascinate me. Reflecting on its seventh… Read More ›
The psychology of your future self
This talk by Daniel Gilbert is excellent. He argues that human beings exhibit a pervasive tendency to see their present selves as the culmination of a process of becoming who they are. In doing so they tend to vastly underestimate the amount of change they… Read More ›
Thomas Piketty: New thoughts on capital in the twenty-first century
TED have come to the rescue of those who, like me, only got 50 pages into Piketty’s Capital before getting distracted: French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality:… Read More ›
How to ensure the democratic dividend of academic capitalism
I recently tweeted that the Anglo-Indian welfare economist Amartya Sen has received 90+ honorary degrees. Speaking as someone who sees Sen as a net positive influence on contemporary political economy, I have nothing against the idea that some academics may… Read More ›
Creating an ‘idea index’
In a recent interview Maria Popova, curator of the wonderful Brain Pickings blog, explained how she reads books. Cal Newport summarises on his blog: Around thirty-one minutes into the interview, Popova explains how she takes notes on books: As she… Read More ›
Why are some interactions energising while others are not?
We subsume such a wide array of phenomena under the category of ‘interaction’ that we sometimes risk obscuring the diversity within this category. One important way in which interactions differ is in how energising, or otherwise, they are to the participating actors. Some interactions… Read More ›
Powerful song by UK Hip Hop artist Swiss
UK Hip Hop artist Swiss interrogating the widespread use of “Nigger”. Powerful messages: I don’t change colour, but they call me a coloured man! The language of Black: blackmail, black-hearted, black sheep, blacklist, black magic! Skin-bleach because wanting to be… Read More ›
“Every white girl’s father’s worse nightmare or nah?”
School students at Book T Washington High School in Norfolk, Virginia (USA) walked out of school in protest after nothing was done when they reported a racist retweet by a staff member at the school. Read more at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/11/black-students-walk-out-over-school-officials-tweet-every-white-girls-fathers-worse-nightmare/… Read More ›
Do we need to shake up the social sciences?
In July 2013 Nicholas Christakis, sociologist and physician, published a provocative opinion piece in the New York Times arguing for the need to shake up the social sciences. We’ve blogged about it in the past and Christakis certainly provoked a lot… Read More ›
Reader survey: what’s your connection to sociology?
We’re really interested in who actually reads our blog. More specifically, we’re interested in whether our readers currently do or have formerly had a connection to sociology in an institutional sense. [poll id=”2″]
Internal Conversation in Gone Girl
I was surprised how much I liked Gone Girl. I liked the film so much I went out and bought the book. I’ve been ever more surprised by how interesting I’ve found the contrast between the two. One interesting difference… Read More ›
An existential analytics of speed
Integral to Harmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration (all references are to this book) is an understanding of cultural responses to acceleration and the role they play in intensifying the acceleration of the pace of life. This is not simply a matter of the valorisation… Read More ›
Call for contributions: Power, Acceleration and Metrics in Academic Life
There is little doubt that science and knowledge production are presently undergoing dramatic and multi-layered transformations accompanied by new imperatives reflecting broader socio-economic and technological developments. The unprecedented proliferation of audit cultures preoccupied with digitally mediated measurement and quantification of… Read More ›
Queerly Theorising Higher Education & Academia: Symposium Registratio
Queerly Theorising Higher Education & Academia: Interdisciplinary Conversations Half-day International Symposium Monday 8th December 2014, 12 noon – 7:30pm, followed by a drinks reception Room 802, Institute of Education (IOE), 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL This half-day international symposium brings… Read More ›
The obsolescence of things
I love this old Ikea advert. It illustrates the point that Harmut Rosa is making about the acceleration of production and the implications of intensified disposability for our sense of security and continuity. It also shows what I dislike about Rosa’s account: specific… Read More ›
Social Acceleration
It is a common sentiment that life is getting faster. However is it accurate and, if so, what does it mean? To talk of life, or social life, speeding up necessitates some working definition of ‘social life’ and what it would… Read More ›
Towards a sociology of endings
There’s a particular kind of sociological theorising which I’ve always been drawn to that concerns itself with the identification of epochal shifts in social life. When I was an intellectually frustrated philosophy student, the work of Giddens on Late Modernity… Read More ›
An introduction to blogging and twitter for social researchers
My course at Nat Cen has been moved to December. You can book online here. Given the increasing pressure to demonstrate the impact of social research, it is inevitable that researchers are looking towards the opportunities offered by social media. This… Read More ›
Book Review: Doing Critical Research – A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth
Doing Critical Research: A Conversation with the Research of John Smyth (2014) By John Smyth, Barry Down, Peter McInerney, and Robert Hattam This book discusses in great detail the internationally recognised collaborative and critical nature of the educational research conducted… Read More ›