This snippet from an interview with the new Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, intrigued me: Pichai has said that he’s attracted to computing because of its ability to do cheaply things that are useful to everyone, irrespective of class or background. “The thing… Read More ›
Archive for August 2015
Mobile work-life arrangements: exploring conceptual challenges
OPEN CALL MOBILE WORK-LIFE ARRANGEMENTS: EXPLORING CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES. An Interdisciplinary Late-Summer School 9-18 October, 2015 University of Freiburg, Germany Convened by: COME (Research Group Cultures of Mobility in Europe) and ANTHROMOB (EASA Anthropology and Mobility Network) Anna Lipphardt… Read More ›
CAMRI Research Seminars Autumn 2015
CAMRI Research Seminars Autumn 2015 University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2HW http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/visit-us/directions/regent-street http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars Graham Murdock: The Political Economy of Crisis and the Crisis of Political Economy October 15, 17:00 http://www.westminster.ac.uk/camri/research-seminars/graham-murdock-the-political-economy-of-crisis-and-the-crisis-of-political-economy-the-challenge-of-sustainability Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/graham-murdock-political-economy-of-crisis-crisis-of-political-economy-tickets- Movie: The Internet’s Own Boy… Read More ›
Viral media and unionisation
I’ve been interested in Upworthy for a long time. It was founded by Eli Pariser, author of the Filter Bubble and key figure in MoveOn.org, in order to leverage the dynamics of viral media to promote ‘meaningful’ and progressive content…. Read More ›
Call for Papers: Regulating the ‘Sharing Economy’
Call for Papers for Special Issue of Internet Policy Review on *Regulating the ‘Sharing Economy’* http://policyreview.info/node/371 Special Issue editors: Kris Erickson, Research Fellow, CREATe, University of Glasgow & Inge Sørensen, Research Fellow, CCPR, University of Glasgow. You are ‘the new infrastructure’, an entrepreneur… Read More ›
The self and the selfless
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40 reasons why you should blog about you research
We recently had some new submissions to this post. I had thought it was finished but seemingly there are more reasons yet to be shared… can we get it up to 50 reasons to blog about your research?
Book Review: Organizations, Strategy and Society: The Orgology of Disorganized Worlds
by Bradley Williams In Organizations, Strategy, and Society, Rodolphe Durand draws attention to the ways in which organizations affect and provide meaning to peoples’ public and private lives. Organizations are not merely temporary groups of individuals or groups of aggregate… Read More ›
Judith Butler explained with video games
HT Critical-Theory
The fiction future of faculty: an afternoon of sociological design fiction
I’m organising a design fiction event in Manchester on September 16th, with James Duggan and Joseph Lindley. It’ll be great. You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-fiction-future-of-faculty-an-afternoon-of-sociological-design-fiction-tickets- The ability of storytelling to help us envision and discuss a gamut of plausible futures, from… Read More ›
Why we should be shoppers – not disciples – in intellectual matters
However much it offends their narcissistic natures, most academics are disciples of one or maybe 2-3 masters. This applies across all the disciplines, though the nature of the discipleship differs among them. In the human sciences, which tend to collapse… Read More ›
2015 Quantified Self Europe Conference – Sept 18-19, Amsterdam
A reminder from QS Labs: I wanted to send along a quick email to invite you all to the 2015 Quantified Self Europe Conference. On September 18th and 19th we’re continuing our tradition of community-supported, peer-to-peer learning conferences with our fourth… Read More ›
The case for a philosophical sociology
by Daniel Chernilo (featured in the newsletter of the European Sociological Association, Summer 2015 Issue 38) In this short intervention, I offer a plea for sociology’s reengagement with philosophy. To be sure, the extent to which their ties have severed… Read More ›
The moral discourse of the ‘reasonable technocrat’
An excellent piece on Democrat Audit looking at the role of the ‘reasonable technocrat’ in the unfolding of the crisis in Europe. It’s important to analyse the moral underpinnings of technocratic discourse, looking at what makes it plausible and important to those… Read More ›
CfP: The Role of Quantified Self for Personal Healthcare
######### QSPH’15, Washington D.C., USA, November, 2015 ########### Second International Workshop on The Role of Quantified Self for Personal Healthcare (QSPH’15) Workshop held in conjunction with IEEE BIBM 2015 in Washington D.C., USA http://qsph-workshop.dai-labor.de ####################################################### The aims of the workshop… Read More ›
The politics of data science
A special issue of Discover Society I recently edited: FOCUS: The Emerging Contours of Data Science William Housley, (Cardiff University) Read More VIEWPOINT: The Politics of Data Visualisation Joanna Boehnert Read More ON THE FRONTLINE: What is the Data in Big… Read More ›
Who’s more popular on twitter? the UK’s top research universities or academic blogs and viral feeds?
Comparing the follower counts for Twitter feeds based on the 2014 REF results (i.e. I mean ‘top’ in a very narrow sense) and an unsystematically chosen selection of the Twitter feeds I’ve been scrutinising this morning as I finish off the book. Oxford University: 231,000 Cambridge… Read More ›
Blogging as an outboard brain
This superb post by Cory Doctorow, novelist and editor of Boing Boing, offers a philosophy of blogging extremely similar to what I’ve described in the past as continuous publishing. I really identify with what he’s saying here and it goes some way to explaining why… Read More ›
Petition to form an analytical sociology section within ASA
Over the last couple of years, there have been discussions about the possibility of forming an analytical sociology section within the ASA. Growing representation not only in leading sociology journals but also in journals like the Proceedings of the National… Read More ›
Call for papers: Medicine, Health and Self-Tracking
This special issue focuses on the topic of self-tracking as it is used for health and medical purposes. Self-tracking has recently been incorporated into a range of health and medical domains. These include voluntary health promotion and fitness monitoring, fertility,… Read More ›
On not writing from the PhD
This was originally published on patter: On March 26th 2014 I finally submitted my thesis for the PhD I had begun almost six years earlier. The event itself was somewhat anticlimactic after a false start the day before when ebullience… Read More ›
The further micro-politics of noise
By Jeff Vass in response to this post Firstly, in view of the way you have problematised the individualistic vs relational self in connection with the noise issue I’d like to make a distinction between ‘descriptive and prescriptive ‘selves’ in… Read More ›
Marginalisation of Muslims and organisations like CAGE
Katy Sian’s brilliant response to Max Farrar’s attempts to vilify human rights organisation CAGE: “Alas Max Farrar, the difficulty of your approach is that you consistently fail to accept that collective identities are not predetermined and that the process of… Read More ›
Oppression and self-promotion on social media
This is a really important post by Eric Grollman that has helped me rethink a part of Social Media for Academics that I was struggling with. The systematic generation of imposter syndrome within the academy is a crucial mechanism through which the costs… Read More ›
Celebrity, Publicity and Self-Branding in Web 2.0
If you like this lecture by Alice Marwick, you’ll enjoy her excellent book Status Update.
Our most popular posts this month
A feminist leaves the neoliberal university Congrats, you did not cite any feminist work! CfP: Beyond the Master’s Tools Connected and disconnected writing The place of sociology in the Second Machine Age The Fetishisation of Intelligence Under Neoliberalism PREVENT will… Read More ›
Hibben Prejudice: Can Prejudice be Defended?
by Oliver Bonnington In 1911, John Grier Hibben, who was for twenty years President of Princeton University, wrote A Defense of Prejudice and other Essays; a ‘forgotten’ philosophical text, rarely cited, though recently reprinted. The republishing of a book can… Read More ›
Using snapchat in higher education
I’ve struggled to see how Snapchat could be used within higher education. I could imagine why academics might end up using it in an entirely personal capacity, but I found it difficult to imagine how it could be used by them professionally…. Read More ›
Social media and solidarity in higher education
There’s a great article on the THE, in which Caroline Magennis reflects on the success of the conversation she started recently about being an academic from a less privileged background: What are the challenges of being an academic from a less privileged background? Questions… Read More ›