The organisers of the Data Economy workshop (to be held at the Internet Science Conference 2017) kindly invite you to submit research full papers (10-20 pages) presenting new results and short papers (6-9 pages) with disruptive ideas and work-in-progress, shedding… Read More ›
Archive for July 2017
Agnotology, Science and Public Engagement
One of the clear themes which emerged for me when reading Merchants of Doubt, a detailed exploration of corporate propaganda by historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, concerns the politics of public engagement. What might in other circumstances seem like anodyne… Read More ›
“So you thought about it one day and started the next morning?”
This is a question which Zeynep Tufekci recalls in her Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, posed to a group of young Turkish activists about 140journos, a crowdsourced citizen journalism project which they started. As she writes… Read More ›
Denaturalising digital capitalism
One of the most pressing issues we confront when analysing the digital economy is a pronounced tendency towards oligopoly which makes a lie of an earlier generation’s utopian embrace of the Internet as a sphere of free competition and a… Read More ›
CFP: (Re)producing Insecurities, Uni of Sheffield, 29 September 2017
Call for Papers: (Re)producing insecurities The recent EU referendum campaign and resultant vote for the UK to leave the EU is creating new insecurities for EU citizens within and prospective migrants to the UK. At the same time, the European… Read More ›
The Swedish Theory of Love
An interesting extract from Swedish documentary The Swedish Theory of Love.
The legacy of Zygmunt Bauman
I’ve been looking forward to this book for months. The author wrote a fantastic review essay in The Sociological Review. This is the author’s account of his book from the BSA Theory mailing list: Members of the group may be interested… Read More ›
CfP: Social Research in a Sceptical Age
Conference title: ‘Social Research in a Sceptical Age’ Conference date: 6 December 2017 Venue: British Library in London Call deadline: Monday 7 August The workshop sessions at the conference are a great opportunity to share and discuss your work… Read More ›
The disruptive presidency of Donald Trump
One of the more irritating framings of Donald Trump’s rise to power has been to stress his ‘disruptive’ credentials*. Such accounts often focus on the role of Jared Kushner, who has been granted a dizzying array of responsibilities in the… Read More ›
A playbook for merchandising doubt
I’m currently reading Merchants of Doubt, a fascinating study of the tobacco industry’s deployment of academic experts to cast doubt on the harm caused by cigarettes. Being in the mood to read the book in an ultra-cynical way, here’s my playbook… Read More ›
Brand Corbyn and Brand Trump
What do Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump have in common? On the face of it, two people could not be more dissimilar but I’m curious about what might be their analogous position in relation to mainstream political culture. After all,… Read More ›
Ways of Being in a Digital Age – A Review Conference
Ways of Being in a Digital Age – A Review Conference* Dates: 10th and 11th of October 2017 Location: University of Liverpool, UK Key Dates: 300 word abstracts: 21^st July 2017; Acceptance by 25th August 2017; This conference will close… Read More ›
Public Intellectuals and the Shock Doctrine
In the last year, I’ve been preoccupied by the relationship between periods of political flux and public intellectualism. These aren’t longer term processes, in which the coordinates of an established consensus begin to disintegrate, but rather short term periods of intense public… Read More ›
What does public sociology have to say about sociologists who are ‘merchants of doubt’?
What does public sociology have to say about sociologists who are ‘merchants of doubt’? This is the question I’m slightly obsessing over after discovering that Peter Berger, famous for his work on social construction and the sociology of religion, worked… Read More ›
Politico-environmental crisis
In Naomi Klein’s new book No Is Not Enough, there’s a lucid overview of the intersection between political and environmental crisis. The role of drought in fermenting the conditions for the Syrian civil war was something which Marc Hudson first explained… Read More ›
CFP: ‘What’ and ‘How’ of Critique: Styles, Issues and Confrontations in Critical Social Theory and Research
Wednesday, 20th September 2017, Duurham University Keynotes: Professor Peter Fleming (City University London), Dr Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (University of Bath) The way power operates in contemporary societies is changing and critical reflection and action is as relevant now as ever…. Read More ›
CfP: “Truth, facts, and fake: The shifting epistemologies of news in a digital age”
Special issue of New Media & Society and related online workshop Truth, facts, and fake: The shifting epistemologies of news in a digital age Co-editors: Mats Ekström, University of Gothenburg Seth C. Lewis, University of Oregon Oscar Westlund, University of… Read More ›
The data warriors and the electoral wars they wage
One of the most interesting issues raised by the rise of data science in party politics is how to untangle corporate rhetoric from social reality. I have much time for the argument that we risk taking the claims of a… Read More ›
The Personal Stories of a Methodology Study Group: An independent learning and support mechanism for postgrads
by Karen Cooper, Louise Oliver, Mananya Podee & Joanna Thurston (Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Bournemouth University, UK) Supervisor’s Notes: Three postgrad students whom I supervise had varying degrees of difficulties with their Transfer Vivas, and particularly with defending… Read More ›
Two modes for becoming who we are
The self as painting: we become who we are through repetition and representation. Encumbered only by our imagination and the culture in which we find ourselves, we craft ourselves through iterated projects of self-representation. We might find the materials available… Read More ›
Emotion and affect in datafied worlds – workshop in Helsinki, 1st of Nov
1st of November 2017, University of Helsinki, Finland Feeling data: emotion and affect in datafied worlds – workshop Scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of ‘critical data studies’ have begun to address the effects of ‘datafication’ – understood as the… Read More ›
The University Without Academics, by @johnbrissenden
by John Brissenden In September 2027, England’s first super-universities opened their doors to students. Of course, these doors were as much virtual as physical, since the majority of students studied entirely remotely, from around the world. But the defining feature… Read More ›
Outflanking Platitudes: We should be excited but cautious about Platform Cooperativism
In the first episode of Outflanking Platitudes, Mark Carrigan argues we should be excited but cautious about the promise of Platform Cooperativism. This 2 minute 8 second provocation was recorded at the Centre for Social Ontology Book Launch event on… Read More ›
Social morphogenesis: five years of inquiring into social change
Postmodernity. Second modernity. Network Society. Late modernity. Liquid modernity. Such concepts have dominated social thought in recent decades, with a bewildering array of claims about social change and its implications. But what do we mean by ‘social change’? How do… Read More ›
CFP: Global Digital Media Cultures and “Extreme Speech”
CFP WORKSHOP Global Digital Media Cultures and “Extreme Speech” 23-24 February 2018 Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich Abstracts due: 31 August 2017 Convenors: Sahana Udupa (LMU Munich) Matti Pohjonen (Africa’s Voices Foundation) Recent political upheavals in Europe and the US have… Read More ›
The revenge practices of plutocrats
What do we think of when we imagine elites exercising their power? There are many ways we can approach such a question, with varying degrees of abstraction. But reading The Divide: American Injustice In The Age Of The Wealth Gap,… Read More ›
What is Graphic Social Science?
Earlier this month I co-organised an event exploring how graphic novels can be used to communicate research. My interest in research communication and love of the medium had long left me fascinated by this possibility, something which I began to explore… Read More ›
The relative value of journalism and social philosophy
Practitioners of social philosophy regard what they do as valuable, imbuing it with a sense of importance which is reflected in the often scholastic way in which readers cite and engage with such work. How seriously should we take this… Read More ›
From a politics of speed to a political sociology of speed
In the last few years, I’ve become a little obsessed with speed. It seems this often leaves me coming across like an accelerationist. I occasionally flirt with the idea that I’m a slightly peculiar form of left-accelerationist, but it’s more for… Read More ›