Archive for July 2016
Why I’m not Afraid or Ashamed of Cosmopolitanism
This piece is another one of my several articles inspired by Brexit. Here I bring together two issues that Brexit has placed in harsh juxtaposition: Cosmopolitanism as a distinct ideology – whose ‘elitism’ Peter Mandler and Ross Douthat have recently cast… Read More ›
Ford’s Sociological Department
A fascinating snippet from No Such Thing as a Free Gift, by Linsey McGoey, loc 932: The Ford Motor Company established its own Sociological Department, employing an initial team of fifty and then a total of 160 ‘investigators’ tasked with circulating… Read More ›
Symposium: Anxiety and Work in the Accelerated Academy
Friday September 23rd at the University of Warwick, 9:30am to 6:00pm The culture and organisation of knowledge production are undergoing dramatic transformations. Neo-managerialist models for the management of research and teaching, the expansion of audit and academic rankings, and the… Read More ›
CfA – Announcing the new SOYUZ Article Prize!
The Soyuz Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies announces the opening of its first Article Prize competition for the best article related to the culture, history, politics of postsocialism by a junior scholar. This prize recognizes significant contributions to the advancement of scholarly understandings of postsocialism, broadly defined. Articles published… Read More ›
Murmuration and Complex Systems
Watching this is enough to make me temporarily rethink my long standing hostility to ‘global brain’ speculation. It’s remarkable what beautiful order can arise in a purely aggregative way and it’s something I’ve tended not to recognise in my theorising of… Read More ›
How waking up every day at 4.30am can change your life
This slightly disturbing TED talk speaks volumes about contemporary cultures of sleep: It’s spirituality for aspirant TED heads. This is a phrase used by Linsey McGoey in her No Such Thing as a Free Gift: amiable entrepreneurs and executives who congregate at… Read More ›
Sunspring: a film written by algorithms
Thanks to Ana Canhoto for sharing this fascinating film. Read more about it here. It’s weirdly powerful. But it’s interesting to consider how much interpretive effort must have been necessary to turn this raw script into something cogent. This could be taken as… Read More ›
The Hard Stop – Documentary
In August 2011, 29-year-old Mark Duggan was shot and killed whilst being arrested by armed police in Tottenham, London. This incident ignited a riot that escalated into a week of the worst civil unrest in recent British history. This… Read More ›
The Accelerated Academy
30th November to 2nd December 2016, Leiden, the Netherlands From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual… Read More ›
What happens in an internet minute?
HT @simonlindgren
The size of social networks and the size of nation states
A really interesting way of looking at this:
Grief – Psychological or Sociological?
by Debra Bassett During a recent PhD upgrade interview at the University of Warwick I was asked to defend my assumption that the study of death, dying and grieving was sociologically based. This took me aback as I had not… Read More ›
The Big Data Trap
A really interesting reflection on the limitations of ‘big data’ from the FT’s Tim Harford:
Trumpism 101
HT to Steve Fuller for this introduction to Trump syllabus put together by the Chronicle of Higher Education: This course will explore the phenomenon that is Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. We will take an interdisciplinary approach, gathering insights from history, literature,… Read More ›
Using @IFTTT and Twitter to curate material for research projects
Two new projects I’m in the early stages of working on both necessitate engagement with phenomena that are developing rapidly. This poses an obvious question: how to identify relevant material and then archive it in a useful way? I’ve written… Read More ›
“I am not afraid to speak” – Victims of Violence
by Lisa Gaufman The Russian and Ukrainian language segments of the Internet are being rocked by hashtags #небоюсьсказати #небоюсьсказать – I am not afraid to speak that were started by a Ukrainian activist Anastasia Melnychenko. Under these hashtags women share… Read More ›
The Tourist: Uncalled for observations and gross generalizations – PART 3
by Jonathan J.B. Mijs In service I saw her today and it was freaking scary A Thursday afternoon at JP Licks She was not even smiling but her voice closely followed all prescriptions of the customer service professional, American standard:… Read More ›
Vintage social media
A lovely graphic by John Atkinson, via the Visual Social Media Lab:
Call for blog posts: the lived experience of interdisciplinarity in social research
Following on from our succesful workshop at Social Media & Society 2016, the Digital Social Science Forum is seeking blog posts describing and reflecting on the lived experience of interdisciplinarity in social research. The workshop itself sought to explore conceptual… Read More ›
Know your terrorist credit score!
I can’t recommend this talk highly enough. It was the most thought provoking thing I saw at this year’s re:publica.
I Daniel Blake
How amazing does Ken Loach’s new film look?
A brilliant job for those interested in social media and higher education
The LSE Impact Blog is recruiting for a new editor: The LSE Impact Blog is an award-winning, highly popular blog aimed at academics, researchers, and HE professionals. It publishes regular blog posts on scholarly publishing, research methods, and maximizing the… Read More ›
Three computational sociologies
An interesting post by Fabio Rojas on the different ways in which the label ‘computational sociology’ has been used: Statistics – for the baby boomer generation of social scientists, “computing in socioal science” meant applied statistics. Remember, it requires a… Read More ›
CfP: Countercultures of Data
Call for Papers for *Philosophy and Technology*’s special issue on Countercultures of Data Guest Editor Anna Lauren Hoffmann, School of Information – University of California, Berkeley About the Issue 25 years ago, Sandra Harding—in her influential book *Whose Science? Whose… Read More ›
7 Propositions about Transformative Horizons
Our perception of transformative possibilities is culturally constructed. Certain ranges of possibility are foregrounded and others backgrounded. Our sense of viability is the most cognitive dimension to this, informed by implicit and explicit ontological assumptions about how the social world… Read More ›
“Platform Health” and digital privatisation
A couple of weeks ago I went to a conference about the UK government’s new digital strategy which is spearheaded by a department of the civil service called the Government Digital Service. Central to the strategy is a new “platform” system… Read More ›
Social media and academic labour
In recent years, we’ve begun to see social media move from the periphery to the mainstream of academic practice. But what does this mean for academic labour? While much of the discussion concerns the possibilities for scholarly communication, what about… Read More ›
Max Weber’s triad – status, class and party – in light of Brexit: A call to party harder
Max Weber famously presented three principles of social ‘stratification’ (‘organization’ would be better): status, class and party. The ongoing saga of Brexit brings to light some interesting features of the last category, which otherwise tends to be neglected or treated… Read More ›
Social media for academics and the risk of becoming ‘TED heads’
One of the anxieties I’ve regularly encountered about social media for academics is that it might lead to a devaluing of academic culture. What if I were to tell you that the spectre haunting the imagination of academics is the… Read More ›