By Jana Bacevic Last Friday in April, I was at a conference entitled Universities, neoliberalisation and (in)equality at Goldsmiths, University of London. It was an one-day event featuring presentations and interventions from academics who work on understanding, and criticising, the… Read More ›
Archive for May 2017
Aspiration Anxieties: Developing Middle-Class Masculinities among Black African boys in London
By Derron O. Wallace In post-Brexit Britain, who considers the impact of the aspiration agenda on ethnic minority young people –particularly Black boys? What is the role of Black boys in building the ‘aspiration nation’? Better still, what is the… Read More ›
Policy Logics, Counter-Narratives, and New Directions: Boys and Schooling in a Neoliberal Age
By Konstanze Spohrer and Garth Stahl In this chapter we argue for approaches to researching and imagining aspiration that reflect the complexities of masculinities. We suggest that future academic work on boys’ aspirations adopts an intersectional approach to considering the… Read More ›
“Gotta get that laziness out of me”: Negotiating masculine aspirational subjectivities in the transition from school to university in Australia
by Sue Nichols and Garth Stahl Aspiration is centrally concerned with becoming, and inherently frames the present in terms of the future desired self. The moment at which a young person graduates from school is a nexus point for aspirational… Read More ›
Conference: Social Mobility, Aspirations, Education and White Working-Class Youth: Urban, Rural and Coastal Contexts
A BSA Sociology of Education Study Group One-Day Conference in association with the Faculty of Education, Canterbury Christ Church University. 5 July 2017 At Canterbury Christ Church University, UK PROGRAMME This one-day conference, supported by the BSA’s Education Study Group, focuses… Read More ›
What’s the difference between academia and politics?
In his wonderful memoir, Adults In The Room, Yanis Varoufakis reflects on the frustrations of politics and how they compare to academia. From loc 5504: Possibly because of my academic background, this was the Brussels experience I least expected and found most frustrating…. Read More ›
Call for Participants: The Practice of Social Theory
First Cambridge summer school in social theory University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology, 4-6 September 2017 Conveners: Jana Bacevic (University of Cambridge) and Mark Carrigan (The Sociological Review) Passionate about social theory? Want to learn more about how it is… Read More ›
CfP: Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web
Call for Papers – Edited Collection Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web Editors: Dr Karen Lumsden (Loughborough University) and Dr Emily Harmer (University of Liverpool) The Internet plays a vital role in many aspects of our social,… Read More ›
Making an Impact with Social Media, July 5th in Manchester
Social media offers for exciting opportunities for generating impact and communicating research beyond the academy. However, 500 million tweets and 3 million blog posts that are generated in a single day, as well as over a billion websites, pose an obvious challenge: how… Read More ›
A conversation with Daniel Chernilo about Philosophical Sociology
In this podcast I talk to Daniel Chernilo about philosophical sociology. This is a subject that has long fascinated me as someone who moved from philosophy to sociology as a postgraduate. Find out more in his new book.
Making an Impact with Social Media
Many researchers are excited about the potential social media offers for making an impact with their work. However 500 million tweets per day, 3 million blog posts per day and over a billion websites poses an obvious challenge: how can… Read More ›
The causal powers of media
In The Mediated Construction of Social Reality, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp take issue with the primacy of face-to-face interaction that has so often been assumed within social thought. Our embodied interaction is taken to be primary, often assumed to be… Read More ›
Adventures in Peer Review Land: The Micro-structure of Academic Intellectual Property Transfer
I serve on the editorial board of several journals. In one such journal, the custom is to circulate all the articles that passed the external review process so that the board can officially give its approval for publication. We get… Read More ›
Special Issue on Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data
Call for Papers: Special Issue on Computational Propaganda and Political Big Data We welcome manuscripts from scholars across the social and computer sciences, and are particularly interested in research from teams of authors from both domains of inquiry. Please submit… Read More ›
A conversation with Dave Elder-Vass about the Digital Economy
In this podcast I talk to Dave Elder-Vass about his new book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy. Find out more about his research here.
Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy
What does it mean for policy to be insulated from politics? That’s the question we ultimately confront when investigating the putative depoliticisation of the economy. Matters which should be publicly resolved, through organised processes of contestation, instead get decided privately…. Read More ›
What will Macron be like in government?
I happened to be reading this page of Yanis Varoufakis’ political memoir a few moments before Macron’s near certain victory was announced. From loc 3398: Emmanuel Macron listened actively and engaged directly, his eyes radiant and ready to display his… Read More ›
Do you want your research to produce more impact?
Do you want your research to produce more impact? Many researchers are excited about the potential social media offers for generating impact but with 500 million tweets per day, 3 million blog posts per day and over a billion websites… Read More ›
Undisciplined Methods at the University of Brighton
Come and join us down by the seaside for two days of methodical undisciplining. 31st May – 1st June at the University of Brighton. We will be investigating alternative ways of creating and understanding with words, images and bodies through… Read More ›
Critical Perspectives in the Age of Big Data
Call for Papers ECREA Symposium Digital Democracy: Critical Perspectives in the Age of Big Data 10-11 November 2017, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden Joint Conference of two ECREA Sections: Communication and Democracy; and Media Industries and Cultural Production Abstract Deadline 1… Read More ›
How can Arendt and Heidegger help us think about distraction?
In his Debating Humanity, Daniel Chernilo compares the approaches taken by Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt to the question of thinking. Both began with the philosophical tradition’s opposition between thinking and action: in this sense it implies withdrawal in some sense, relative to… Read More ›
The Liberated Mathematician Stands Up to Gender and Race Inequality in Academia
This week, Dr. Piper Harron, mathematics professor based at the University of Hawaii, and a vocal feminist and supporter of under-represented groups in the academic mathematics community, published a provocative blogpost on the website of the AMS (American Mathematical Society), in… Read More ›
The Politics of Agency
Ever since I was a philosophy student, I’ve been interested in how we conceptualise individuals and groups. The two are connected in my mind because, if groups are composed of individuals, our concept of individuals is going to condition our… Read More ›
Help us forge UK applied sociology
by Nick Fox and Marguerite Regan For the past 18 months, the British Sociological Association (BSA) group Sociologists outside Academia (SOA) has been focusing on the potential for careers working as applied or practical sociologists, beyond the traditional remits of… Read More ›
Public Engagement and Social Media
There’s a really important piece in the LSE Impact Blog by Philip Moriarty describing his experiences using social media for public engagement. In many ways he has been the embodiment of the engaged academic, driven by a sense of responsibility… Read More ›
“I Want To Be a Soccer Player or a Mathematician”: Fifth-Grade Black Boys’ Aspirations at a “Neoliberal” Single-Sex School
By Joseph Derrick Nelson For over a decade, amid widespread neoliberal education reform in the United States, single-sex schools for boys of color have increased in popularity among urban school districts. The growing interest in this school model is… Read More ›
(Re)masculinizing “Suzhi Jiaoyu” (Education for Quality): Aspirational Values of Modernity in Neoliberal China
By Xiaodong Lin and Mairtin Mac an Ghaill In December 2016, China published a gender specific textbook for boys, aiming to help male pupils understand their gender roles in society. It emphasizes the issue of masculinity and addresses the question… Read More ›
Where now for the random probability survey?
Face to face survey fieldwork is widely perceived to be in crisis. Do ever-dwindling response rates signal the end for traditional probability methods, and if so can alternatives such as quota sampling or probability panels take their place? This event… Read More ›
The transformation of academic writing and the challenge of ephemera
What does social media mean for academic writing? Most answers to this question focus on how such platforms might constrain or enable the expression of complex ideas. For instance, we might encounter scepticism that one could express conceptual nuance in 140 characters… Read More ›
Will social media lead to the return of the general intellectual?
In his detailed study of Sartre’s rise to prominence as an authoritative public intellectual, Patrick Baert argues that the general intellectualism embodied by Sartre depended upon social conditions which no longer obtain. Such intellectuals “address a wide range of subjects… Read More ›