Work, employment and society Associate Board Call for Applications Deadline: Thursday 10 November 2016, 17:00 (GMT) Dear colleagues, Work, employment and society invites applications to join its Associate Board. Successful candidates will become members of the Board from January 2017,… Read More ›
Archive for October 2016
A Digital Capitalism Reading List
An initial compilation of material explicitly invoking the concept of ‘digital capitalism’: Understanding Digital Capitalism (series of articles) Digital Capitalism: Stagnation and Contention Digital capitalism produces few winners Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System The Critique of Digital Capitalism Marx in the Age… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Distraction: A Conversation With Damon Young
In this podcast I talk to Damon Young about the nature of distraction, how it changes over history and the existential challenge it poses to human beings. Read his superb book! www.routledge.com/Distraction/Youn…ok/
BSA Early Career Forum Regional Events 2017 – Call for Proposals
Call for BSA Regional Early Career Event Proposals 2017 Launched in 2009, the BSA Early Career Forum (ECF) recognises the distinct set of challenges facing early career sociologists in the current academic and employment climate and aims to provide support… Read More ›
The Practice of Public Sociology
The Practice of Public Sociology Manchester Digital Laboratory November 24th, Manchester, For over a decade public sociology has been a mainstream topic of discussion within the discipline. While practiced prior to the 2004 address by Michael Burawoy to the… Read More ›
Call for Abstracts: Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging
BSA Sociological Futures Proposal Youth, Place and Theories of Belonging Edited by: Garth Stahl, PhD Sadia Habib, PhD Mike Ward, PhD This proposed edited collection draws on interdisciplinary perspectives of space and place in order to investigate young… Read More ›
CfP – Contemporary Boys’ Literacies / Boys’ Literatures
Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal Special Issue Contemporary Boys’ Literacies / Boys’ Literatures For the Fall 2017 issue of Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Volume 10), the editors invite original contributions to the wide and dynamic fields of contemporary boys’… Read More ›
Essay Competition: Crossing Disciplinary Borders and Into the Future
The Sociological Review is running an essay competition for early career researchers. See here for more details.
The Shifting Sources of Hostility to the Accelerated Academy
The hostility to speed in the ‘accelerated academy’ predates the current fashion to complain about it and blame it on neo-liberalism. I was already reviewing a book by the Dutch sociologist and public intellectual, Dick Pels, on ‘fast science’ for… Read More ›
The exciting future of personal communications
From Fantastic Four #52 (July 1966):
Marx Reloaded
Marx Reloaded is a cultural documentary that examines the relevance of German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx’s ideas for understanding the global economic and financial crisis of 2008-09. The crisis triggered the deepest global recession in 70 years and prompted… Read More ›
Call for papers: archives & traces of the past
A one-day conference will be held at the University of Edinburgh on Friday 13 January 2017, to explore the impact of new technological, conceptual and methodological ideas on how archives and their contents are now being used to ‘research the past’, and… Read More ›
An Introduction to NodeXL for Social Scientists
An Introduction to NodeXL for Social Scientists 9 January 2017 (1-4pm) Leslie Silver Building G28, Leeds Beckett University Confirmed speakers: Wasim Ahmed BSA members – £15 Non-members – £20 Visit the BSA events page to register: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/bsa-digital-sociology-group-workshop/ This workshop will introduce… Read More ›
CfP: Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: ACADEMIC LABOUR, DIGITAL MEDIA AND CAPITALISM SPECIAL ISSUE OF TRIPLEC: COMMUNICATION, CAPITALISM & CRITIQUE http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/announcement/view/27 GUEST EDITORS: Thomas Allmer and Ergin Bulut Modern universities have always been part of and embedded into capitalism in political, economic and… Read More ›
Debate on Debate: Foucault v. Chomsky (1971) and the EU Referendum (2016)
By Rosie Smith In 1971 a Dutch Television company ran a series of discussion panels with noted intellectuals on a wide range of issues both contemporary and philosophical. One of the most famous debates was between French philosopher Michel Foucault… Read More ›
Weapons of Math Destruction
A fascinating series of podcasts on this great new book Weapons of Math Destruction: New Yorker Radio Hour (starting at 25:40) Slate Money: Shadow Courts edition EconTalk: Cathy O’Neil on Weapons of Math Destruction Harvard Biz Review: When Not To Trust… Read More ›
When YouTube bought Google
A fascinating snippet of tech history. The founders of YouTube talk about their recent sale to Google, back in 2006, back when each were seen as something other than the slightly menacing giants they are today:
The Practice of Public Sociology
The Practice of Public Sociology Manchester Digital Laboratory November 24th, Manchester, For over a decade public sociology has been a mainstream topic of discussion within the discipline. While practiced prior to the 2004 address by Michael Burawoy to the… Read More ›
From TINA to TATIANA
A great rebuttal of the neoliberal insistence that There Is No Alternative, from loc 3840 of the recent book by Yanis Varoufakis: We were not naive enough to think that our blueprint would be implemented on the strength of its rationality…. Read More ›
The Death of Yugoslavia
A powerful and comprehensive documentary series:
I Read Some Marx (And I Liked It)
We posted this a few years ago but it obviously merits reposting:
‘Will of the People’ or ‘Population Snowflake’: Why Not Just Say That People Didn’t Know What They Voted For in Brexit?
I find Brexit an endless source of invention – perhaps that’s my unconscious reason for wanting it drag out as long as possible, what I’ve called ‘Fabius’ Delight’. I shall get to the phrase ‘Population Snowflake’ toward the end of… Read More ›
Historical parallels to the right-wing turn in British politics
A brilliant rant by James O’Brien on the government’s proposal to force firms to publish lists of foreign workers:
Fabius’ Delight: When Everyone (If Only in the UK) Benefits by Delaying Brexit
The famed strategy of the Roman general Fabius to defeat Hannibal, the North African general trying to conquer Rome in the 3rd century BC, was simply to wait for Hannibal to get within easy range of his troops and then… Read More ›
Deadline in 2 days: Consuming Gender
Call for Papers – Special Issue, ‘Consuming Gender'<http://www.assuminggender.com/p/call-for-papers.html> This special issue of Assuming Gender – an online, peer-reviewed academic journal from Cardiff University – seeks to explore the way gender is both presented and consumed through popular media and advertising…. Read More ›
Big data, new skills: how the accelerated academy hinders the interdisciplinary collaboration we need
Underlying many of the issues we’re discussing today is the fundamental problem of speed. We’ve seen rapid developments at the level of platforms, devices, practices and methods but this rapidity has made it difficult for methodological and theoretical deliberation to catch… Read More ›
The history of data-as-rhetoric
From Daniel Rosenberg’s essay in Raw Data Is An Oxymoron, loc 916. What further developments are we beginning to see in the meaning of ‘data’ in a digitalised context? The author’s point is that data is not associated with veracity,… Read More ›
De/Humanisation and Organization at EGOS
Please consider submitting a short paper to the EGOS2017 sub-theme on ‘De/humanisation and Organisation’. The purpose of this sub-theme is to explore the dehumanising effects of contemporary organisations but also the potential of organisations to rehumanise social relations. Deadline: 9 Jan 2017,… Read More ›
Ambient intimacy and cultures of overwork
In a recent book about the neoliberal superstar turned aspiring world saviour Jeffrey Sachs, a quote from his wife caught my attention. On loc 2909, she describes how Sachs only sleeps for four hours a night and works constantly throughout his waking… Read More ›