Over the weekend, Steve Fuller published a blog post which has understandably been the object of many complaints. Steve is one of a number of people who have accounts which enable them to post directly on the site, without the… Read More ›
Archive for August 2017
The populist right are demotic, rather than democratic
In an important essay earlier this year, Jan-Werner Müller identifies a dangerous tendency for leftist critics to take the claims of right-populist demagogues at face value. Suddenly vindicated in their struggle with the ‘third way’ that has dominated the centre-left, the claims… Read More ›
The Surplus of Objects
In Immaterialism, Graham Harman offers a provocative critique of Latour’s social theory, praising Actor-Network Theory as “the most important philosophical method to emerge since phenomenology in 1900” (pg. 1) while also regarding its account of objects as philosophically deficient. While he accepts the… Read More ›
Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age: The Library and the Text
By Hamish Robertson Introduction This is the final piece in this series for The Sociological Imagination and it comes full circle by focusing on one of the most obvious, even foundational, ‘factories’ of knowledge – the library. More specifically, the… Read More ›
Academic Autism: Its Institutional Presence and Treatment
Over the weekend, Steve Fuller published this blog post which has understandably been the object of many complaints. Steve is one of a number of people who have accounts which enable them to post directly on the site, without the… Read More ›
Ontology Etc
Philosophy often operates at such a high level of abstraction it is difficult to see how it can be useful to practicing social scientists. The work of Roy Bhaskar is no different. Renowned for its difficulty, its technicality, and its… Read More ›
Computational social science and the promise of a reflexive, empirically robust activist-sociology
By John-Paul Smiley What is the role for sociology going forward? What should it look like as a discipline? Discussions of this topic have become commonplace (see, for example, Flyvberg: 2001: Rutzou: 2016). The failure of the majority of researchers in… Read More ›
The poverty of student experience
By Jana Bacevic One of my favourite texts back from the time when I was writing my Master’s thesis is the Situationist International’s On The Poverty of Student Life (De la misère au milieu étudiant). Written in 1966 and distributed in 10.000… Read More ›
Call for chapter proposals – Different Bodies: Disability and the Media
Book edited by Jacob Johanssen and Diana Garrisi (Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster) Following on from the conference ‘Different Bodies: (Self-) Representation, Disability and the Media’ which was held at the University of Westminster in June, we… Read More ›
Call for Participation: Sociology and Social Media, Problems and Prospects
A Sociological Review Foundation Workshop Goldsmiths, University of London Saturday 2nd December , followed by wine reception The Sociological Review is delighted to announce the opportunity to take part in a one-day workshop on Sociology and social media. This workshop will be taking… Read More ›
The Problem of Order on Planes
From pg 24 of Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Teargas: You could not, for example, squeeze more than a hundred chimpanzees into a thin metal tube, sitting knee-to-knee and shoulder-to-shoulder in cramped quarters, close the door, hurl the tube across the sky at… Read More ›
Boundaries and barbarians: ontological (in)security and the [cyber?] war on universities
By Jana Bacevic Prologue One Saturday in late January, I go to the PhD office at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge’s New Museums site (yes, PhD students shouldn’t work on Saturdays, and yes, we do). I… Read More ›
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ and the future of academic social media
A really interesting Google Hangout discussion. I’ll be taking part in a follow up later this month:
CFP: The Will to App: Digitising Public Health
Call For Papers Media International Australia no. 171 (May 2019) The Will to App: Digitising Public Health Theme Editors: Kath Albury, Paul Byron and Frances Shaw Overview This themed issue of MIA proposes to engage with the digitisation and mediatisation… Read More ›
The content density of a cultural producer
An interesting snippet on pg 164 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Thingssuggests a metric of content density which could be extremely interesting to explore: Digiday looked at the race for what some are calling peak content. What it found… Read More ›
The Digital University in a Neoliberal Age
The Digital University in a Neoliberal Age Speakers: Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan, Gary Hall, and Liz Morrish Wednesday 8th November 2017, 1-6 PM Register (for free) here 1 – 1.30 reception and buffet lunch 1.30 – 2.30 Gary Hall – ‘Data Commonism versus ÜberCapitalism… Read More ›
CFP: All Things in Moderation: The People, Practices and Politics of Online Content Review – Human and Machine Dec , UCLA
It’s my great pleasure to announce the following event and related CFP. On December , UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, part of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, welcomes participants to a two-day conference on commercial… Read More ›
Towards a sociological curatorial journalism
In Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Zeynep Tufekci discusses the emergence of curatorial journalism and contrasts its function with that of traditional journalism. From pg 41: Traditional journalism tries to solve a problem of scarcity:… Read More ›
The rhetoric and reality of user generated content
On pg 102 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, he highlights email exchanges between YouTube’s founders, released in a court case, which suggest the invocation of ‘user generated content’ might be a matter of branding rather than a meaningful… Read More ›
To Blog or Not to Blog: Research Projects, Centres and Networks
October 27th 2017, 1:30pm to 5:00pm, Manchester UK In only a matter of years, blogging has become a mainstream part of academic practice. Research projects, networks and centres regularly maintain blogs, with the intention of promoting their work and building… Read More ›
The fortress city and what it may portend
A couple of months ago, I shared a disturbing extract from John Urry’s final book about what he termed the ‘fortress city scenario‘. There’s a powerful section in Naomi Klein’s recent book, No Is Not Enough, which illustrates the basis of… Read More ›
The Digital Sociology podcast series
An interesting new project by occasional SI contributor Chris Till, following from his Digital Health series:
The question of the human in philosophy of technology
Over the next few years, I’ll be working on a collaborative project on trans- and post-humanism, building on the Centre for Social Ontology’s previous Social Morphogenesis series. My main contribution to this will be co-editing a volume, Strangers in a Familiar… Read More ›