On pg 106 of their Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social? Simon Winlow and Steve Hall describe the changing realities of work, as more and more jobs become “non-unionised, low paid, short-term, insecure and part time”: We should… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘craft’
Using social media to ‘inhabit the attentiveness of another writer’
There’s a lovely reflection in Les Back’s Academic Diary, released soon by Goldsmiths Press, concerning the role of Twitter in academic life. He suggests that Twitter sometimes facilitates our “inhabiting the attentiveness of another writer” by providing “signposts pointing to… Read More ›
On not writing from the PhD
This was originally published on patter: On March 26th 2014 I finally submitted my thesis for the PhD I had begun almost six years earlier. The event itself was somewhat anticlimactic after a false start the day before when ebullience… Read More ›
Connected and disconnected writing
By David Beer I recall watching a documentary about the popular crime novelist Ian Rankin. It’s a documentary that is well worth watching for any writer. The programme followed him through a year in his life. It began in January,… Read More ›
The busy academic’s guide to writing concisely
Thanks to Shit Academics Say for an image which is both funny and useful:
Are you a dandelion or a mammal?
This is a question Cory Doctorow introduces in his book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free: When my daughter was born, I became keenly aware of how much stock we mammals put into the copies we make of ourselves (yes,… Read More ›
Creative Work and Coercions of Circumstances
It was only with the success of shows like The Sopranos and The Wire that the reverence accorded directors in cinema began to be extended to creators of television. David Milch was the show runner for NYPD Blue and Deadwood…. Read More ›
Against word counts as part of a daily writing routine
As some people reading this might know, I’m an obsessive cultivator of habits. I’m preoccupied by them intellectually and spent 6 years writing a PhD about how who we are is shaped by the situated interplay between reflexivity and habit… Read More ›
The Promise of Sociological Fiction
It’s been far from obvious to me what I should say for my talk at the Design Fiction event at Goldsmiths on Wednesday. The motivation behind this event has been little more than “isn’t this interesting? let’s talk about it”… Read More ›
The Long Game of Creativity
(via Open Culture)
Using fiction to write about your research
I was fortunate to meet Tim Maughan at the Digital Sociology conference in New York last month. Along with Sava Saheli Singh, he’s been exploring how design fiction can be used to communicate sociological ideas. This is how Sava and… Read More ›
How to use @Artefact_Cards for academic writing
I finally received my Artefact Cards last week and I love them. They were a pain to get hold of due to a spectacularly inept delivery company but Artefact soon rectified this when I e-mailed them to complain. They’re probably… Read More ›
How to use @Artefact_Cards for academic writing
I finally received my Artefact Cards last week and I love them. They were a pain to get hold of due to a spectacularly inept delivery company but Artefact soon rectified this when I e-mailed them to complain. They’re probably… Read More ›
Productivity culture, cognitive triage and the pseudo-commensurability of the to-do list
For a couple of years I’ve been striving to empty my e-mail inbox on a daily basis. It doesn’t particularly bother me if I don’t succeed and I often don’t. I go through phases of doing this daily and then, for… Read More ›
The sociology of sociological writing
The denial of what Ben Agger calls ‘authoriality’ in sociological texts helps explain why concerns about the character of sociological writing have figured so prominently in recurrent anxieties about the status and future of the discipline. Its suppression involves a… Read More ›
Carol Smart: “ideas come about through the process of writing”
In this videocast released by the Morgan Centre, Carol Smart discusses the emotional challenge of writing. It’s a wonderful discussion, encompassing everything from the pains of writing to the origins of creativity in engaging with those difficulties. Smart suggests writing is not discussed because… Read More ›
Why politics needs arts & crafts
By Dr Anna Feigenbaum, lecturer in Media & Politics and contributor to the ‘Disobedient Objects’ exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Inflatable cobblestones, book blocs, musical pot lids. This week these objects joined the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection,… Read More ›
The Psychology of Writing
This typically fascinating post on BrainPickings reflects on the psychology of writing and its implications for the notion that a fixed writing routine is most conducive to creativity and productivity. The argument certainly seems plausible yet I remain ambivalent about… Read More ›
Computers and Intellectual Craftsmanship
by Jim Kemeny I still remember the large number of personnel needed to input and analyse data in the 1950s: “Computers were giant mechanical assemblages, big enough to take up an entire warehouse, programmed in advance with punch cards. In… Read More ›
Realist evaluation, mechanisms and theoretical minimalism
At IACR earlier today I heard two interesting talks about Realist Evaluation. I had previously had a vague idea about what this involved, largely through encountering citations from Pawson in other texts, without ever having really grasped what it was in a… Read More ›
Writing and your imagined audience
Do you imagine an audience when you write? I’ve become aware recently of how rarely I do this. The main reason for this has been the jarring experience of finding myself overly conscious about the particular audience I happen to… Read More ›
The academic blogosphere, scholarly craft and the end of ‘pluralistic ignorance’
One of many useful discussions in Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists concerns ‘pluralistic ignorance”. He argues that this social psychological effect manifests itself in academia in relation to writing. Academic writing is a private and isolated endeavour, in which adversity (rejections by… Read More ›
Improvisation in academic life
I really like Steve Fuller’s arguments about ‘improvisation’. He rehearsed them yesterday in a post for Sociological Imagination about the originality of conference keynotes: For about ten years now, I’ve been arguing about the benefits of improvisational performance in academia, not simply… Read More ›
“Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind”: Jack Kerouac, creativity and academic writing
I just came across this wonderful list by Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, in the Beats anthology I’m slowly making my way through: Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy Submissive to everything, open, listening… Read More ›
Howard Becker on the Craft of Sociology
This great podcast is from an event at Goldsmiths a few years ago. It’s introduced by Les Back and the talk covers a lot of ground. The video below shows Howard Becker engaged in a different craft. http://magiclantern.gold.ac.uk/movs/sociology/howie-the-craft-sociology.mp3
Public Sociology and Sociological Writing
One of my favourite passages by C Wright Mills concerns the tendency of academics to “slip so readily into unintelligibility”. An “elaborate vocabulary” and “involved manner of speaking and writing” become props for a professional self-image which defines itself, in… Read More ›
What are conferences for?
Heidegger thought that scholars should simply trade questions, but that would include the speaker first and foremost. I have watched conference presentations for more than three decades and never has a speaker offered a “new approach” that was in fact… Read More ›
#whereiwrite by @davidgbeer
There is a really interesting post here by Stuart Elden on his writing space, which links into another post on the topic and a related Twitter hashtag (#whereiwrite). My writing space has varied a bit over the last couple of years. I… Read More ›
The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell!
The pen is stubborn, sputters – hell! Am I condemned to scrawl? Boldly I dip it in the well, My writing flows, and all I try succeeds. Of course, the spatter Of this tormented night Is quite illegible. No matter:… Read More ›