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 ›
Tag Archive for ‘academia’
Squeezing Us ‘Till It Hurts: Motherhood, Discrimination, and Universities
by Deborah Talbot The Final Report of the Equalities Review, published by Equalities Commission in 2007, reviewed a range of persistent inequalities including those that affect women. It argued that, ‘…new research reveals clearly that there is one factor that… Read More ›
Sociological Catalysts and Operationalising Theory in Practice
by Yusef Bakkali Life as an academic can be a lonely and alienating calling at the best of times; lots of time spent inside one’s own head reflecting on a world playing out someplace beyond the indiscernible turrets and bulwarks… Read More ›
Academia.edu: How to reproduce inequality in several easy steps
A study waiting to be done. Somebody? Here is the trigger: So: how is academia.edu reproducing and reinforcing inequality? By spatially positioning the male academic above; By choosing an older male academic and a younger female; By listing the male as… Read More ›
Creativity inside and outside universities
by Deborah Talbot The Alternative Academia Network held its second meeting on the 14th February 2016. The aim is to discuss how creativity works inside and outside universities. The following are notes from the presentation by Deborah Talbot, which explores… Read More ›
Plagiarism
by Michael Palkowski Professor Steve Fuller, an eminent sociologist at the university of Warwick recently published a provocative blog post on the ways in which academia deals with plagiarism, titled “Plagiarism: Observations on Academia’s Self-Induced Moral Panic”. In this article,… Read More ›
CfP: My Day Job: Politics and Pedagogy in Academia
2016 Annual Meeting EASTERN SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIETY CALL FOR PAPERS My Day Job: Politics and Pedagogy in Academia The Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers, March 17-20, 2016 The online abstract submission system for the ESS annual meeting is now open… Read More ›
PREVENT will have a chilling effect on open debate, free speech and political dissent
The Independent carries a letter from academics collectively critiquing (the already many times discredited) Prevent strategy which has now become a statutory duty directly affecting places of education. “In an unprecedented intervention, 280 academics, lawyers and public figures… Read More ›
Collective Cleanliness: Meta-Discursive Study of Academic Tearoom Culture
Read the full paper here. Courtesy of Jennifer Upchurch.
Book Review: Ann Oakley’s Father and Daughter – Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science
By Gwen Redmond Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science by Ann Oakley (Policy Press, 2014) I am not sure how an academic like Oakley would respond to my referring to her book as ‘unputdownable’, but there you have… Read More ›
The price of a citation, or How did King Abdulaziz University get in the world’s top 10?
[reblogged from Matters Mathematical] According to a great recent blogpost by Berkeley academic Lior Pachter, there is something very fishy about university rankings. In last week’s global university ranking published by the US News and World Report (USNWR), the top 10 universities listed… Read More ›
Six principles for organising academic conferences in the 21st century
by Steve Fuller After my recent keynote at the 2014 meeting of the British Sociological Association, I was interviewed about my views on the conference. Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, I said that a large professional conference such as this one is… Read More ›
What have we done to universities?
Is it inevitable that the university will be reduced to the function of providing, with increasingly authoritarian efficiency, pre-packed intellectual commodities which meet the requirements of management? Or can we by our efforts transform it into a centre of free… Read More ›
Rajani Naidoo: Why the “ranking fetish” is bad for universities
Rajani Naidoo reflects on “ranking fetish” of higher education from Aarhus Universitet on Vimeo. In this video, Dr. Rajani Naidoo of the University of Bath explains how higher education is becoming increasingly market driven, thus becoming less interested in the… Read More ›
Doing it for ourselves: the women’s workshop
by Ros Edwards and Val Gillies As the academy becomes further marketised and institutionalised, it grows harder to envisage operating academically outside of traditional organisational forms. Yet the resulting pressures, hierarchies and exclusions are leading many to look for alternatives. Can… Read More ›
Lorde, spoof Facebook posts and the future of academic knowledge
by Sumi Hollingworth I’m finding more and more friends posting ‘news’ articles and the like on Facebook that (depending on the post) attract a flurry of excited or outraged comments and interaction, and then turn out to be ‘hoaxes’ or… Read More ›
What gender equality? Family and careers in high-skill jobs
Let’s take the example of historians. How equal are their career paths of women and men historians, our fellow social scientists (humanities scholars)? According to Alexis Coe, writer and journalist based in San Francisco, being married helps professors, but only… Read More ›
Yesterday… (an ode to essay marking)
Yesterday* Yesterday, all the students seemed so far away. Now a bunch of essays block my way, My desk is now in disarray. Suddenly, I avoid the university, There’s a shadow hanging over me. The end of term came suddenly…. Read More ›
Null Set
IHAVENOIDEAWHATYOUARETALKINGABOUT D : (via Ache)
Sociology@Warwick
A quick flag up to any interested readers that the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick now has a blog and twitter feed. Although Sociological Imagination has no formal connection to the department, a number of people involved in… Read More ›
A New Model for Peer-Reviewing Monographs?
Earlier this month in London at the British Sociological Association Annual Conference, during a panel for early career researchers, I asked John Holmwood why the RAE/REF does not seem to rate scholarly monographs as highly as journal articles. Both a… Read More ›
Communication or Credentialing? On the Value of Academic Publishing
Nobody outside of the profession reads scholarly books and journal articles. It’s become a common complaint in the academic world, and among some disciplines such as sociology it’s also de rigueur to take the complaint a step further: Nobody listens… Read More ›
“We are no longer the post-ideological generation; we are now the generation at the heart of the resistance”
On 10th November 2010 an estimated 55,000 people marched in London against UK government plans to raise higher education tuition fees from £3200 to £9000 per student per year, while simultaneously cutting all public funding for social sciences, arts and… Read More ›
Cuts, Fees, and Solidarity: Why the Telegraph’s Janet Daley was wrong to say the demonstration was “self-serving”
The morning after the demonstration in London against education cuts the Today programme on BBC Radio Four carried an interview with two newspaper columnists – John Harris of The Guardian, and Janet Daley of The Daily Telegraph. A question posed… Read More ›
The significance of the ‘spending review’ and the true choice we will make now, whether we want it or not
What is at stake in the British government’s spending review announced some weeks ago, is not a question of so-called ‘cuts’, how massive they will be and whom will be most affected; that is a merely technical problem which takes… Read More ›
‘The End of the Public University in England’
I graduated from the University of Manchester in 1987 with no debt. I paid no fees and received a maintenance grant to earn a degree in Politics and Modern History. If my seventeen year old son were to follow in… Read More ›
Review of ‘Practising Public Scholarship: Experiences and Possibilities Beyond the Academy’ Edited by Katharyne Mitchell, Wiley-Blackwell. 2008
Post-PhD, my career as a sociologist has not been a conventional one. I’ve done much of what sociologists do on a daily basis: I’ve taught in universities, conducted research projects, published scholarly articles and books, applied (sometimes successful for grants),… Read More ›
Welcome to the Sociological Imagination
This magazine stands as a consciously tentative and perhaps fleeting first step towards a much larger and longer term aim. A vague idea became a concrete plan as a result of a BSA funded day school () which took place at the University of Warwick in January 2010.