Archive for February 2015

JG Ballard’s High-Rise recreated in lego

By Mark Carrigan on February 28, 2015 • ( 0 )

JG Ballard’s High-Rise is one of my favourite novels. It’s easy to see why sociologists would like it and it seems I’m not the only one this is true of. So I’m not sure what to make of High-Rise recreated… Read More ›

Discourse, Power, Resistance 15 – Conference at Goldsmiths in April

By Sadia Habib on February 26, 2015 • ( 0 )

DISCOURSE, POWER, RESISTANCE 15 CREATIVE SPACES FOR COLLECTIVE VOICES GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, UK We have for some time been looking into the effects of neoliberalism on culture, identity, and institutions – effects that have included ‘audit culture’ (Marilyn… Read More ›

Understanding academia through food

By Mark Carrigan on February 26, 2015 • ( 0 )

Is it a meme? Is it a research project? Does it matter? We aim to understand academia through food. Do you have a picture of an academic event or function where food is provided? Who was there and what was… Read More ›

Name-Dropping vs Name-Checking as Academic Vices

By Steve Fuller on February 25, 2015 • ( 1 )

When I was a student, teachers used to warn against ‘name-dropping’ as a scholarly faux pas. This is when you suddenly provide a string of names in place of a substantive argument. The implication is that if you read the… Read More ›

Higher Education and The Temporal Conditions for Critique

By Mark Carrigan on February 25, 2015 • ( 0 )

I’m aware that I probably come across like I hate Slavoj Zizek but there are many aspects of his work which I really like. My favourite is his account ofneoliberal ideology which I understand to be an argument about how subjective disavowal… Read More ›

The dogs of the Moscow metro

By Mark Carrigan on February 24, 2015 • ( 0 )

Can you think of a space more emblematic of urbanism than a metro? I can’t and perhaps that’s why I’m so preoccupied by Moscow’s metro dogs: it’s a reminder that cities are sites of ecological novelty, rather than human constructions… Read More ›

David Cameron as neoliberal prophet

By Mark Carrigan on February 23, 2015 • ( 0 )

I recently heard these prophetic words from UK Prime Minister David Cameron on the radio: if you’re not good or outstanding, you have to change. If you can’t do it yourself, you have to let experts come in and help you… Read More ›

Routines and Reflexivity – March 10th @SocioWarwick

By Mark Carrigan on February 22, 2015 • ( 0 )

Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) March 10th , R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar… Read More ›

CfP: Thinking Beyond Capitalism, Belgrade, June 24-26, 2015

By Mark Carrigan on February 22, 2015 • ( 0 )

International Conference Thinking Beyond Capitalism, Belgrade, June 24-26, 2015 Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory How is it at all possible to make sound statements about contemporary capitalism? How does one adequately diagnose the current state of the economy? Clearly… Read More ›

Coping with Acceleration

By Mark Carrigan on February 21, 2015 • ( 5 )

I wrote recently about cognitive triage in higher education and its ramifications for personal reflexivity. My claim is that an inflation of situational demands leads subjects to prioritise the urgent, moving immediately from one necessity to another, in a way which crowds… Read More ›

The Promise of Sociology in 2015

By Mark Carrigan on February 20, 2015 • ( 1 )

Earlier this month, I spoke to Nicholas Gane (Warwick) and Les Back (Goldsmiths) about an article they published in Theory, Culture & Society. It was called C. Wright Mills 50 Years On: The Promise and Craft of Sociology Revisited and, as you can… Read More ›

Applying for postdocs – what are your tips?

By Mark Carrigan on February 19, 2015 • ( 0 )

This Guardian Higher Education articles offers 18 tips for applying for postdoc jobs. There’s some really useful advice supplied for each one, which you can read in full here: Get advice from your PhD supervisor Start building your networks early… Read More ›

Lean in and die trying. A lesson in how to obscure instead of solve a problem

By Sadia Habib on February 18, 2015 • ( 0 )

By Ralf Wetzel Today’s chauvinists live in difficult times. Waving the flag of equality, women successfully conquered most domains of modern life decades ago, with no regard for the consequences for their poor male counterparts. That’s nothing new. They found… Read More ›

The price of modernity: Disentangling the source of modern terror

By Sadia Habib on February 18, 2015 • ( 0 )

By Ralf Wetzel The bloody advent of Al-Qaeda and, more recently, the so-called Islamic State has incited much and heated debate about the sources that evoke and feed modern terror. The main suspect so far has been religion, especially a… Read More ›

Ghosts of Sociologists Past in the Accelerated Academy

By Mark Carrigan on February 18, 2015 • ( 0 )

I’m currently reading Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures by Mark Fisher. It’s an interesting book which explores a condition in which “life continues, but time has somehow stopped”. His claim is that this “stasis has been… Read More ›

The Fetishisation of Intelligence Under Neoliberalism

By Mark Carrigan on February 17, 2015 • ( 3 )

An interesting exchange on Twitter last year about how intelligence is represented in film and TV has stayed with me since it occurred. Watching Hannibal with a friend who was a big fan of it, I found myself obsessed by… Read More ›

An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving in the UK – TOMORROW @SocioWarwick

By Mark Carrigan on February 16, 2015 • ( 0 )

Balihar Sanghera (Kent) Tuesday, February 17th 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.04 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick This paper examines how charitable giving is an outcome of different interacting elements of lay morality. Charitable giving reflects people’s capacity for fellow-feeling… Read More ›

Being a link between the academic world and local communities

By Mark Carrigan on February 15, 2015 • ( 0 )

This podcast is a talk by Lisa Mckenzie (twitter.com/redrumlisa) given at a Politics of Public Engagement in January 2014. You can read Lisa’s post for us here. Her new book has just been released.

International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) 2015 Annual Meeting

By Mark Carrigan on February 14, 2015 • ( 0 )

“Critical Realism: Reimagining Social Science” July 28-30, 2015 Notre Dame, IN (USA) “What difference does critical realism make for how we do our empirical work?” That is the question that many social scientists who hear about critical realism initially ask,… Read More ›

Sociological Perspectives on Digital Health

By Mark Carrigan on February 13, 2015 • ( 0 )

This seminar organised by the Quantified Self Research Network brought together a range of thinkers to discuss sociological perspectives on digital health. Dr. Conor Farrington (Cambridge) – The Sensemaking Spectrum: Understanding User Interactions with the Artificial Pancreas The artificial pancreas (AP) is a… Read More ›

The Philosophy of Data Science

By Mark Carrigan on February 12, 2015 • ( 0 )

I conducted this series of interviews for the LSE Impact Blog: Sabina Leonelli: “What constitutes trustworthy data changes across time and space” Rob Kitchin: “Big data should complement small data, not replace them.” Evelyn Ruppert: “Social consequences of Big Data… Read More ›

Reflexivity and an interdisciplinary approach to the ‘structuring of agency

By Mark Carrigan on February 11, 2015 • ( 0 )

This podcast by Graham Scambler was recorded at a Centre for Social Ontology event in November 2014. Margaret Archer’s recent contributions to our understanding of reflexivity in late capitalist society provide useful resources for theorizing across the substantive domains of… Read More ›

‘Questioning Technology’: The Importance of Empirical Work and Ontological Philosophy

By Sadia Habib on February 10, 2015 • ( 0 )

by Declan Mcdowell-Naylor There’s little question that, for at least two decades, technology has been a centre piece of enquiries across the humanities and social sciences. Nearly every field has made valuable empirical contributions, addressing plenty of normative questions ‘about technology’…. Read More ›

1 2 Oldest ›

The Sociological Imagination

Committing Sociology Since 2010