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 ›
Archive for August 2016
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 ›
What are you favourite academic memes?
A great suggestion made by Deborah Lupton on Twitter last month: @mark_carrigan @TheSocReview We need a repository of GIFs/memes featuring real academics – that would be fun! — Deborah Lupton (@DALupton) July 26, 2016 If you have any suggestions, tweet… Read More ›
Social Media and Academic Labour
It is increasingly hard to move without encountering the idea that social media is something of value for academics. The reasons offered are probably quite familiar by now. It helps ensure your research is visible, both inside and outside the… Read More ›
Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age: Botany and the Garden Part 2
by Hamish Robertson Introduction In the first part of this essay I alluded to the garden as a developmental engine of knowledge that canvassed both a deep cultural history and a highly modernist locus for new, innovative knowledge production. In… Read More ›
Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age: Botany and the Garden Part 1
by Hamish Robertson Introduction This is the second in a series of short essays exploring what I have called ‘engines of knowledge’ in the first quantitative, ‘big data’ information age (there have been others), which emerged in the early 19th… Read More ›
The Spook Who Sat By The Door
By Hamish Robertson This year has seen an extraordinary upswing in revelations about the kinds of violence that are seemingly endemic in American society. In particular, the persistence of an often deadly mixture of readily accessible weapons and prevailing racism,… Read More ›
Using micro-podcasts to profile participants at a workshop
I recently helped out with an event by the Survivor Research Network which was being supported by The Sociological Review. We were keen to profile participants at the event in a way that gave a sense of the range of people involved, as… Read More ›
The Sociology of ‘Streaming’
by Mark Johnson and Jamie Woodcock The popularity of “streaming” – the practice of broadcasting live gameplay across the internet to an audience – is a rapidly growing social and cultural phenomenon. If any readers are in doubt about the contemporary… Read More ›
An exciting new journal: Frontiers in Sociology
A really exciting launch: Frontiers in Sociology: Frontiers in Sociology is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal launched in February 2016. The first social-sciences journal of the “Frontiers in” series, Frontiers in Sociologywill foster cross-disciplinary work as well as fairness, transparency,… Read More ›
Biographical Approaches to Studying Digital Capitalism
In the early pages of Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he offers a cogent analysis of how initial public offerings lock tech companies into a growth imperative which ultimately proves destructive of the value they create. As he puts… Read More ›
The Importance of Disappointment
There’s a lovely passage by Olivia Lang, quoted in this review of her recent book, which reminds me of what Ian Craib called the importance of disappointment: There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that… Read More ›
The ideological function of open data
I was at an interesting symposium on Big Data hosted by Sage earlier this year where a number of participants discussed the limitations on implementation of the government’s open data initiative: data is often published in an unhelpful or even outright… Read More ›
The coordinates of the austerity consensus are disintegrating
From Corbyn: Against All Odds, by Richard Seymour, pg 22. There’s a huge opportunity for the Labour left but also a huge risk, as momentum has built for an anti-austerity platform that might no longer be relevant: “It is not… Read More ›
We need to understand why it is the beach is full of dying kids
His young life was as delicate as the wing of a butterfly And as fragile as a spider’s web For him we cry Because when he dies We all do Did Ahmed not deserve a life? Ahmed never hurt a… Read More ›
Book Review: Social Media for Academics
by Andy Tattersall, originally posted on the LSE Review of Books Academics engaging in social media as a means to communicate their research and interests have a variety of experiences. There are those who have taken to it like a… Read More ›
CfP: 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 ›
The tragically incompetent elites of the centre left
This critique by Thomas Frank, on loc 2729 of his Pity the Billionaire, applies as well to proponents of the ‘third way’ within the Labour Party as it does to the leaders of the Democratic Party in relation to whom… Read More ›
Academic video blogs: 5 tips for getting started
A really useful resource produced by jobs.ac.uk: If you’ve made videos like this and you’d like us to share them, leave a URL in the comments box below and we’d be very happy to take a look.
A fantastic podcast discussion about social media for academics
This is one of the best discussions about social media for academics I’ve heard: Episode 58 of This Week In Health Law. Fresh from ASLME’s Health Law Professors’ Conference in Boston: a special TWIHL!Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman joins a cavalcade of past… Read More ›
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 ›
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 ›
The idiocy of corporations on Twitter
A lovely feature by John Oliver about the idiocy of corporations on Twitter: For a deeper analysis of corporations on Twitter, see this great essay on weird corporate twitter: We all know that a corporation’s Twitter account is managed by a social-media worker (despite… Read More ›
The Big Deal about Big Data
A rich and thought-provoking lecture by Gary King about the implications of big data for the social sciences:
The Myth of Elite Cosmopolitanism
A rapidly developing discourse which contrasts elite cosmopolitanism with insular populism should be treated more critically than is being done so at present. This interesting article by Ross Douthat takes issue with this supposed cosmpolitanism: Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort… Read More ›
Call for Papers: The End of the World as We Know It?
The End of the World as We Know It? 2017 Annual Meeting EASTERN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown February 23-26, 2017 CALL FOR PAPERS The online abstract submission system for the ESS annual meeting is now open at https://www.meetingsavvy.org/ess or… Read More ›
The Return of the Riot
From Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot pg 2. He argues that the return of the riot reverses a long term trend observed by Charles Tilley, in which the riot had given way to the strike as the foremost tactic in… Read More ›
Call for papers: Moral Economies of the Digital
Call for papers Special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory Moral Economies of the Digital Digital technologies have opened up new opportunities for novel forms of economic practice and for the economic empowerment of individuals and communities. But… Read More ›
Our most popular posts in the last three months
Sociologists and anthropologists reflect on the craft of writing The Most Cited Publications in the Social Sciences Public Sociology An Interview with Sociologist Patricia Leavy How to write essays for A Level Sociology exams Steve Fuller’s Guide to Reading Social… Read More ›