INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF ANALYTICAL SOCIOLOGISTS We are happy to announce the call for papers for the 8th Analytical Sociology Conference – June 12 and 13, 2015 in Cambridge, MA. Theme: “Causal Inference and Mechanism-Based Explanation: Friends or Foes?” Organizers: Mary… Read More ›
Archive for December 2014
On the Future of Face-to-Face Academic Interaction, or Why We Need to Talk about Gemeinschaft
Oh, how I hate Gemeinschaft! But as with so many things one hates, there are some deep things worth cherishing, preferably in some other form. For the benefit of non-sociologists, this German term belongs to a foundational moment in the… Read More ›
An Agenda for Digital Sociology
I see Digital Sociology as an open-ended integrative project, concerned to assemble the disparate strands of sociological engagement with digital technology within a more or less shared intellectual space: not in the sense of striving for unanimity but rather to… Read More ›
‘Rank and Yank’ in Higher Education
From What about Me?: the struggle for identity in a market-based society by Paul Verhaeghe: Enron, an American multinational, introduced this practice at the end of the previous century, dubbing it the ‘Rank and Yank appraisal system’. The individual performances of… Read More ›
The temporal horizons of sociology
I just came across a passage by James Meek in which he describes being drawn to, the obscure realm of events that are too fresh for history, but too old for journalism; the murky gap of popular perception that covers… Read More ›
The Sociology of Civilizational Collapse
How do we envisage our future? To ask this question usually invites reflections upon personal biography. More rarely does it address ‘our’ in a civilizational sense – I use the term loosely here to refer to the totality of organised human… Read More ›
Transhumanism as the Heir of Ethical Modernism — or Against Virtue
Anyone who takes transhumanism seriously is almost by default an ‘ethical modernist’. The position is easiest to state in terms of the history of philosophy. It is someone who believes that Kant and Bentham in the late 18th century set… Read More ›
Three ways to speed write
This typically helpful post by patter suggests three ways to speed write – it suggests that the relationship between speed and slowness in academia isn’t necessarily zero sum. Slow planning can facilitate fast writing: The usual way to write fast is… Read More ›
The sociology of christmas cards
In this 1971 article from Trans-action (now published as Society) Sheila K. Johnson reflects on the practice of sending and receiving christmas cards, arguing that it is an archetypical case of a phenomenon susceptible to sociological explanation: Anyone who has ever composed a Christmas card… Read More ›
The wisdom of sociology
Can Sociology be life changing? That’s what Sam Richards argues in this thought provoking TED talk which explores how the discipline can lead us to reimagine our circumstances and see those connections which we otherwise miss – it reveals hidden commonalities and… Read More ›
The cultural politics of brunch
This is rather interesting if you can get past the grumpiness with which it’s written. It’s worth reading the article in full here: But now that I have a young daughter, brunch is completely impractical. By noon I’ve been up… Read More ›
Cyber athletics
The US government now grants “athlete visas” to gamers and competitive gaming is shown on the ESPN channel. This fascinating New Yorker article explores the rise of the ‘cyber athlete’ – read it in full here: “It’s not a sport,”… Read More ›
The agency moment
This thoughtful New York Times column by David Brooks reflects on what he terms “the agency moment”: I’ve been thinking about moments of agency of this sort because often you see people who lack full agency. Sometimes you see lack… Read More ›
The ‘boardroom liberalism’ of Barack Obama
It can seem as if American politics is significantly far to the right of party politics in the UK. But is this an accurate description? It seems to convey a linear political spectrum in which party politics in the USA… Read More ›
Cognitive triage in higher education
A few months ago I wrote about the notion of ‘cognitive triage’ put forward in Kevin Roose’s book about young recruits on Wall Street. He suggests that the intensity of the situational demands placed upon them necessitates attending only to… Read More ›
Translating the Social Sciences
This episode of the Office Hour’s podcast interviews Emily Bazelon about the challenges of translating the social sciences: In this episode we speak to Emily Bazelon. Emily is former senior editor at Slate, a New York Times Magazine staff writer, and… Read More ›
Why your mind is not a computer
This is an engaging exploration of an idea that has endured for decades: the notion that we can understand the mind as a particular sort of computer. It’s an intriguing mix of panelists and one of many great discussions that are… Read More ›
Millwall Football Club: Pathologization of the White Working Class
Last week The Telegraph newspaper reported that a college in Brighton were planning a field trip to observe “working class culture” in action at a football match: “To anyone else, a trip to a football match would merely be a… Read More ›
Sociological Science and the future of the qualitative sociology
This interesting reflection on Org Theory asks what the success of the innovative open access journal Sociological Science, which leans heavily towards quantitative sociology, means for the future of qualitative research within the intellectual landscape of the discipline. Read it in full… Read More ›
London in data maps
This great feature on the BBC News website collects 12 data maps which represent different characteristics of London. See the full feature here to explore the maps (the one embedded below shows commuter routes into London) A new collection of data maps of… Read More ›
Social Theory Re-Wired
We just discovered this interesting resource produced by Routledge: Social Theory Re-Wired. A rich collection of web-based materials—including interactive versions of key texts, open spaces to write and reflect on readings, biographical sketches of authors, and dozens of supplementary sources—that transports… Read More ›
Why is my curriculum white?
This powerful video was produced by the UCL student union. They explain the background to the project here: In the NUS Black Students Campaign National Students Survey, it was found that, ’42 per cent did not believe their curriculum reflected… Read More ›
What is social policy?
That’s the question answered in this excellent video from the Social Policy Association. There’s another two that have been produced as part of this series:
The Sociology of Living and Dying Optimally: Towards a Transhuman Necropolitics
[This post is inspired by a twitter exchange with Mark Carrigan over this post, which reveals Foucault’s latent neo-liberal sympathies. Emilie Whitaker and I then had an exchange over this exchange, in which she coined ‘transhuman necropolitics’, capturing what I’m… Read More ›
Devouring your data
As someone who only a year ago was drowning in the mountains of interview transcripts that I was (stupidly) somewhat surprised to find that longitudinal qualitative interviewing had produced, this post by patter offering advice on ‘devouring your data’ really… Read More ›
Technology and Human Nature
In their Webcam, Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinanan offer what they describe as a theory of attainment. While I’m not sure they’d accept my terminology, I read this as an attempt to theorise the causal powers of technology in relation to the causal powers of… Read More ›
The myth of ‘us’ in a digital age
In his A necessary disenchantment: myth, agency and injustice in a digital world, Nick Couldry argues that transitions in media infrastructure are facilitating the emergence of a new myth of collectivity: A new myth about the collectivities we form when we use… Read More ›
Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0
In this 2007 paper David Beer and Roger Burrows suggest that “by the time you get to read this paper in its published form, even in the hypertextual pages of Sociological Research Online, what it describes may well have become part of… Read More ›
Cats are our captive domesticated aliens
This wonderful article in Wired seeks to explain how, to their cats, any human being is “a huge, unpredictable ape”. They are “our captives, domesticated aliens with no way of explaining their customs, or of interpreting ours” and we don’t know how to listen… Read More ›