@mark_carrigan ok! how to manage reading overload, finding a million relevant things, the sense there is always more to read, think about

— Natalie (@projectnat) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @Soc_Imagination That writing processes take time and can’t be rushed/squeezed like a lot of other work #phdchat

— iExpand (@IExpand) June 7, 2013

@VickiMcDermott @mark_carrigan @Soc_Imagination Importance of reflexivity and being honest with oneself to develop discipline.

— Alessia Williams (@AlessiaW) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @Soc_Imagination also using NVivo from the start of PhD – a filing cabinet for everything! Ideas, notes, images, articles…

— Vicki McDermott (@VickiMcDermott) June 7, 2013

@AlessiaW @mark_carrigan @Soc_Imagination yes & transition from work to PhD, structured to unstructured – takes a while to get comfortable

— Vicki McDermott (@VickiMcDermott) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @VickiMcDermott @Soc_Imagination Transition from being a student- everything is done for you- to PhD – you do it yourself.

— Alessia Williams (@AlessiaW) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @VickiMcDermott @Soc_Imagination The importance of time management skills.

— Alessia Williams (@AlessiaW) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan That it is not a life defining set of moments and that abstract ideas are no replacement for feelings. @Soc_Imagination

— Eoin O'Mahony (@eoinomahony) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan how important emotional support would be. Make sure you friends and family are there to help.

— Beth Singler (@BVLSingler) June 7, 2013

@DrDaveOBrien @mark_carrigan it's like rain on your wedding day, or something….

— Peter Matthews (@urbaneprofessor) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @projectnat doing a phd, in my opinion, is the best thing ever, it just might not feel like it at times

— Berenice Golding (@DrBGolding) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @VickiMcDermott @Soc_Imagination How isolating it was at times.

— Berenice Golding (@DrBGolding) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan When I started my #PhD I wish I'd known to hold on to knowledge broad enough for teaching: steep learning curve later!

— Dr Joanne Hill (@ontheblueyonder) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @SocioWarwick @Soc_Imagination Whn my Supervisor said move on2 nxt topic, I thort – but I haven't read all th books on ths 1!

— Finn Mackay (@Finn_Mackay) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @SocioWarwick @Soc_Imagination Whn my Supervisor said move on2 nxt topic, I thort – but I haven't read all th books on ths 1!

— Finn Mackay (@Finn_Mackay) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @Soc_Imagination there is so much! I don't know where to start!

— Vicki McDermott (@VickiMcDermott) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan #PhD? #PhDChat #Sociology mobile phones and the internet, communication btw fellow PhD doing similar work

— Jane Fleming (@fleming77) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan i'll stick with that one. it comes with a sense of guilt and anxiety. icky stuff. doesn't help when you're reading. cheers!

— Natalie (@projectnat) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan @SocioWarwick @Soc_Imagination That in many ways there is no right/wrong way 2 do it, u figure it out yourself as u go along.

— Finn Mackay (@Finn_Mackay) June 7, 2013

@mark_carrigan ok! how to manage reading overload, finding a million relevant things, the sense there is always more to read, think about

— Natalie (@projectnat) June 7, 2013

In elaborating on the problems this presents to sociology, not least because the discipline and its institutional home in Universities are also being subject to a process of marketization and financialization, John contrasted the Parsonian project to create a professional sociology immune to ideological distortion with the American Pragmatists that developed the notion of the social self in the process of a critique of liberalism (1). It was Mead at the turn of the 19th century that saw the increasing tendency for government to merge with business and the industrial world. Dewey maintained that government did not so much represent the public interest as those of corporations and markets. Then, as now, this has significant consequences for our notions of democracy and the political role of the public sphere. But, according to Mead, this presents opportunities to the ‘public’ that emerge from forms of resistance and moments of critique.

A conception of a different world comes to us always as the result of some specific problem which involves readjustment of the world as it is, not to meet a detailed ideal of a perfect universe, but to obviate the present difficulty ….  [The Working Hypothesis in Social Reform American Journal of Sociology, November 1899]

This has implications for the nature of sociology as a form of expertise and its role, according to John. It could be in the service of government and its partnership with the corporations and industry. Or it could serve the more public project of adjusting and coping with the effects and  consequences, intended and unintended, of neoliberal corporatist policies. This implies  a role for sociology in dialogue with  ’publics’ as they try to organise around the effects, to paraphrase C Wright Mills, that public issues have on private lives and communities. This may not sound radical or ‘activist’  enough for some but it is worth serious investigation and consideration. John makes the point that this is not an ‘emancipatory’ sociology. It is not a programme or project to bring into being ‘a detailed idea of a perfect universe’. However it does confront and critique the taken for granted assumptions of reality and the doxa that supports and reproduces it. It does expose the historicity and contingency of the taken for granted and demonstrates that other realities are imaginable. In serving the public rather than the dominant troika of government, industry and finance, sociology serves democracy in that it exposes and resists the multifarious processes and policies that combine to hollow out and neutralise democratic institutions. In a previous ‘radical moment’, in the 1960s and 70s, sociology could be seen as harnessed to a project of institutionalised reform and betterment operationalised by the welfare state and influenced by the new social movements focused on forms of equality and inclusive citizenship. But from that time on sociology has been squeezed between a neoliberal critique of the welfare state and citizenship rights and its denigration as a form of expertise in the service of a now derided and demonised programme of betterment and entitlement.  John concluded with the question, what is it to practice sociology in a profoundly undemocratic system where reform has been de-institutionalised and sociology has lost its institutional locus and legitimacy? One suggestion is that it should revivify itself in response to a new radical moment and in doing so can revisit and be informed by some of the lessons and messages of the American pragmatists of the early 20th century. Sociology can inform a defence of wider social values in the face of a declining democracy. It can do this by providing publics with new and alternative accounts of the present and possible futures. In the face of TINA (there is no alternative) it can be asserted there always were and still are. To this end sociology (and therefore sociologists and their practice) must occupy (with all its post financial crash connotations) public debate in the service of democracy (not markets) and make inequality matter.

A great deal of John’s paper seemed to chime in well with the rather modest and arguably realistic (pragmatic) claims Zygmunt Bauman makes for sociology. Like John in his paper, Zygmunt offers a  history of the development of sociology mapped onto key stages in the development of modernity and the state. In Zygmunt’s account this can be represented by his distinction between sociologists as legislators and, as this function is stripped away from them, as interpreters. He also offers a diagnosis of the current parlous state of democratic institutions based on a corporatist account of government and the separation of power from state politics as a result of economic aspects of globalisation. His conclusions for the contemporary role of sociological practice are similar too in that it should engage in dialogue with various publics in the service of wider social values, democracy and justice. I’m not claiming that John’s account and Zygmunt’s are reducible to one another. I’m sure there would be points of disagreement and differences in emphasis. I only draw attention to a similarity in their conclusions for the practice of sociology today.

There are two points of interest that I’d like to pursue. The first one is the notion that sociology develops in confrontation with ‘radical moments’ that are precipitated by social developments external to its discourse and therefore changes in the environment with which it has symbiotic and what might be called co-evolutionary relationships. The second is the notion that sociology should concern itself with and service democracy and wider social values such as those that are concerned with inequality and justice. I will return to the second point in another post but in the spirit of John’s return to the early American pragmatists I thought I would revisit an influential reflection on sociology at another radical moment in its history, the 1950s and 60s, by Alvin Gouldner. This will draw on two of his writings. The first is Anti Minotaur: The Myth of a Value Free Sociology (Social Problems, Volume 8, Number 3, Winter 1962, pp. 199 ff.) first given as a Presidential Address to the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in 1961. The second is The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State (The American Sociologist Vol. 3, No. 2, May, 1968, pp. 103-116). This was a critical reaction to the Presidential Address given by Howard Becker to the SSSP 6 years later entitled Whose Side Are We On (Social Problems, Vol. 14, No. 3, Winter 1967, pp. 239-247) where Becker advocated we should conduct our sociological practice from the point of view of the ‘underdog’. Both these articles are conveniently collected together as chapters 1 and 2 of Gouldner’s book For Sociology: Renewal and Critique in Sociology Today Allen Lane 1973. (I first looked at these readings in 1977 when I was doing A level sociology at an evening class and frankly hardly understood a word of it)!  This critique is quite damning and one wonders if Gouldner and Becker where friends! Gouldner’s critique of Becker’s attempt to side step the problem of values in sociology is instructive for thinking about the grounds upon which an engaged sociology should focus on social values concerned with inequality and justice as advocated by both John Holmwood and Zygmunt Bauman.

I’ll commence Gouldner’s discussion of the myth of a value free sociology with an extended quotation that mirrors very well some key concerns we, or some academics at least, still have today with respect to the role and practice of sociology.

 The problem of a value-free sociology has its most poignant implications for the social scientist in his (sic) role as educator. If sociologists ought not to express their personal values in the academic setting, how then are students to be safeguarded against the unwitting influence of these values which shape the sociologist’s selection of problems, his preferences for certain hypotheses or conceptual schemes, and his neglect of others? For these are unavoidable and, in this sense, there is and can be no value-free sociology. The only choice is between an expression of ones’ values, as open and honest as it can be [...] and a vain ritual of moral neutrality which, because it invites men (sic) to ignore the vulnerability of reason  to bias, leaves it at the mercy of irrationality.

In Gouldner’s view a value free sociology is impossible due to the unavoidable necessity of making choices between subject matters, research hypotheses, concepts and explanatory frameworks. To mistakenly claim and offer value free knowledge, however sincerely, is to obscure the inevitability of this process, the values that inform it and its knowledge productions. If it is claimed that social values can only distort knowledge when in fact they are an indispensable condition of its production, then all knowledge is distorted. Distortion in the sense of partial, selective, contingent, is inevitable. But the term ‘distortion’ can be left out of this characterisation of knowledge as it implies the possibility of an undistorted knowledge that is impartial, complete(able), absolute and universal. This is the modernist utopian vision of knowledge that underpins the post-political world of techno-managerialism and expertise. For Gouldner, claims of value freedom translate into moral and value relativism. This leads to the claimed ‘value free’ sociology being at best politically irrelevant and at worse it surrenders authority, legitimacy and power to the dominant discourses of the status quo in which it becomes complicit. It is in danger of becoming the hand servant of and harnessed to the technologies of domination, legitimation and obfuscation. ‘Nudge theory’ springs to mind here along with behavioural economics and sociologically informed tools of post-political techno-management. A purported value free professional sociology can be used to help sell cigarettes as well as advise those who wish to reduce smoking. The domain of the value-free morally neutral sociology is that of the “spiritless technician who will be no less lacking in understanding than they are in passion, and who will be useful only because they can be used”. Gouldner warns us that however blunt and dull these sociologically informed tools are they are capable of building a social technology “powerful enough to cripple us”. In his day prisoners of war and GIs were being systematically brain washed and compulsive consumerism was being driven by advertising and scientific marketing. As he observed, the social science technologies of the future will “hardly be less powerful than today’s”.

Within the institutionalised forms of sociology this can be experienced by its students and practitioners as isolating and alienating. In the words of Gouldner,  ”They feel impotent to contribute usefully to the solution of [society's] deepening problems and, even when they can, they fear that the terms of such an involvement require them to submit to a commercial debasement or a narrow partisanship, rather than contributing to a truly public interest”. There are two strategies for psychological accommodation for the institutionalised sociologist. One is to embrace relativism, particularistic anthropology or the post-modern turn, solving the problem of value-freedom by promoting it to an intellectual principle.  The other is to become a sociologist of sociology and engage in a learned and scholarly critique of its competing paradigms and methods. Both are ways of sheltering from the real world of political action and passion, uncertainty and messy pragmatism.  ”It evokes the soothing illusion, amongst some sociologists, that their exclusion from the larger society is a self-imposed duty rather than an externally imposed constraint”. It disguises the fact that to refrain from social criticism reflects the personal interests and insecurities of some sociologists rather than “reflecting a higher professional good”.

So two tendencies that Gouldner identified in the 50s and 60s are for some sociologists to either ‘sell out’ or ‘opt out’ neither of which sound particularly edifying as a job descriptions for young sociologists today. Arguably the  two tendencies are still alive and well but fortunately they don’t represent the only options available or for that matter already manifest. In his day Gouldner was not saying that the ‘critical posture’ is dead in American sociology, only that it was ‘badly sagging’. He cited several authors that were bucking the trend many of whom would be largely unknown today but C Wright Mills, Dennis Wrong, Lewis Coser, Bernard Rosenberg  and David Riesman may still stir the memory of some of us. Gouldner considered these to be intellectuals no less than sociologists, the larger tradition from which sociology evolved and which is itself founded on the assertion of the right to be critical of tradition. We have our own contemporary representatives of this contrary and troublesome breed.

For me, at least, a number of problems emerge from this. What is it to be critical? What is practically entailed in practising a sociology that engages in dialogues with various publics? On what basis do we choose the publics to engage with? What is the justification for adopting and focusing on values associated with inequality and justice? (2) Don’t financiers, bankers, the police,  torturers and hedge fund managers constitute publics and operate in their own universe of values? If we claim we should side with the victims, given a sociologist’s systemic sensibilities, are we not all victims one way or another? And in a world of unavoidable and irreducible uncertainty in which we have abandoned utopian visions and meta-narratives, political and scientific,  isn’t pragmatic adaptation and problem solving doomed to be absorbed and neutralised, even exploited, by the status quo to enhance its legitimacy and wealth and further secure its domination? As Zygmunt Bauman, John Holloway and Slavoj Žižek all say, in no particular order, there are no guarantees this will all end happily. Perhaps the best we can do is live in the limbo of a hopeful resignation. Perhaps it is, after all, quite rational to tend our own gardens, retreat behind the barricades of relativism and incestuous methodological flagellation? Or make alliances with the centres of unassailable power to minimise our own victim-hood?  I think there are positive, life enhancing and, yes, emancipatory answers to these questions. The next post will continue with Gouldner and examine his account of why we should side with the exploited and those that are subjected to an excess of suffering, given that to suffer to some extent is part of the human condition.

Notes:
(1) In another session devoted to an exploration of the relationship between economics and sociology it was pointed out that Parsons claimed that sociology is concerned with the residual problems left over by economics.
(2) It is not clear that a sociology that is informed by a concern with inequality and justice and that exposes the complex and contingent mechanisms that work ‘behind the curtain’, as Bauman and Kundera would have it, and therefore debunk the assertions of TINA cannot and will not be used to inform the policies and strategies, both explicit and hidden, of the dominant classes to preserve something like the status quo. This would mean that a body of critical knowledge would not be enough to produce a society that embodied the preferred social values of equality and justice. The knowledge would have to be translated into countervailing political and cultural processes and activities – a call for an engaged activist sociology  perhaps using ‘action’ forms of research and engagement.

Of possible interest is the post I did last year reflecting on the BSA conference in 2012 http://terrywassall.org/2012/04/14/reflections-on-britsoc12/

This post by Terry Wassall was originally posted on his personal blog. 

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labour; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist;  parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself. Social and economic conditions, however, often stand in the way of the craftsman’s discipline and commitment; schools may fail to provide the tools to do good work, and workplaces may not truly value the aspiration for quality. And though craftsmanship can reward an individual with a sense of pride in work, this reward is not simple. The craftsman often faces conflicting objective standards of excellence; the desire to do something well for its own sake can be impaired by competitive pressures, by frustration, or by obsession.

We envision a number of forms such contributions might take:

• Reflections on particular academic roles (e.g.review editor).  
• Reflection on the process of writing for particular forms of publication (e.g. journals, monographs, logs)
• Reflections on the craft of research (the tools utilised, your relationship with them, the messiness of the process)
• Reflections on where you work, the devices you use, how the ambiance shapes your writing
• Reflections on undertaking research, managing time, negotiating conflicting demands.
• Reflections on routines and writing practices which are integral to your craft
• If you were brave enough to send us a picture of your workspace  we’d love to include it!

However these are only examples. We’re keen not to get posts of the style “10 Tips for Writing Good Journal Articles”. We have nothing against these posts – we often feature them! But this project is aim towards generating a discussion of the craft of sociological work, the practices which sustain it and the emotional life and personal concern which are irrevocably bound upon it. We are particularly interested in contributions that explore the constraints that contemporary academic structures place upon the creative exercise of sociological craft and how we can, hopefully, work towards ameliorating these circumstances.

If you want to submit a contribution for the project then please e-mail your contribution attached as word document (with any multimedia files attached separately) along with a short 2 line bio to accompany your post.

Given the pressures people face it is probably a surprise that anyone agrees to right a book review. One of the advantages of the high price of academic books is that the promise of a free book is seen as a substantial pay-off. Even though this is the case it can still be tricky to successfully commission reviews. People often don’t have enough time, which is completely understandable. We all have to turn things down for this reason from time to time (I’ve had an idea for a post on saying no, I hope to post it on here soon). This makes it difficult to commission review from across academics at different stages of their careers. It is harder to find more established academics who are willing to write a book review. and beyond this, i suspect that the training of ambitious early career academics includes advice about avoiding book reviewing in favour of what are seen to be more productive/measurable activity (a shame as book reviewing can really help to build up background knowledge and facilitate more substantial writing). But one simple lessons learned very quickly was that people are more likely to agree to review a book if it is something they are keen to read. So I started to curate the section a little more. I did this by finding books that looked interesting or potentially influential. I then started actively contacting publishers to get hold of these books. I was quickly able to build up a stock of these books, alongside the others that publishers were sending me anyway. I also found that publishers learned the type of thing I was after and started sending the type of stuff I wanted for the section. With this newly curated stock of books I had much more success. I is sometimes hard to match books to potential reviewers. The quality of websites varies substantially. But I found that the rate of people agreeing increased, and I was also able to attract more reviewers. Even established academics are keen to review important books in their field, especially if they are books they wanted to read anyway. I still get a good share if no’s or no responses, but the hit rate of positive responses is quite high. I’m always keen to find reviewers. I have a bit of a backlog of books now, so some more commissions are on the to do list. One idea I had was to post a photo of the pile of books for review in here. I might do this in the future, for now I’ll stick with commissioning reviews. And I do occasionally get an email from dolls asking if they can write a review, but these are quite rare.

We have around 35 book reviews in the journal this year – I commissioned around half of these, my very capable predecessor left a good pool of reviews behind. And I’m now working on 2014. However, we now publish all reviews on our online first or ‘latest articles’ section. This means that the reviews are often published within a few weeks of submission. This allows the reviews to be timely. Indeed, I’ve just provided posts to seven recently published book reviews on this blog. These will all be in the print journal in 2014, but are already available online. This is working well at the moment, but we will no doubt review this, particularly in mind of open access debates. A number of journals are now publishing book reviews online and open access, often on blogs. This seems to be working well. As things stand we are keeping them in the journal. But we are about to enter a period of substantial change in academic publishing.

This post by Dave Beer was originally posted on Thinking Culture

This inaugural event for the BSA’s Digital Sociology Group brings together a diverse range
of speakers who, in a variety of ways, work within the nascent field of digital sociology.
Rather than proceed from a substantive account of what digital sociology is or could be,
this event seeks to address the question ‘what is digital sociology?’ through an open and
informal exploration of a broad range of exciting work being undertaken by sociologists
in the UK which could, in the broadest sense of the term, be characterised as ‘digital’. In
casting a spotlight on these projects in such a way the event aims to initiate an ongoing
dialogue about the continuities and discontinuities between these emergent strands of
digital activity, as well as the broader methodological and disciplinary questions which
they pose.

Speakers:
Kim Allen, Manchester Metropolitan University
Les Back, Goldsmiths, University of London
Ben Baumberg, University of Kent
Laura Harvey, Brunel University
Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths, University of London
Heather Mendick, Brunel University
Mark Murphy, University of Glasgow
Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London
Helene Snee, University of Manchester

Delegate rates:
BSA Concessionary Member (student/unwaged/retired) £10
BSA Member £15
Non-member (student/unwaged/retired) £20
Non-member £25

Register at: http://portal.britsoc.co.uk/public/event/eventBooking.aspx?id=EVT10285
For administrative assistance contact: BSA Events Teamevents@britsoc.org.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 383 0839
Academic enquiries: Dr Emma Head e.l.head@keele.ac.uk

Part of the idea for this stemmed from a favourite website of mine, Songwriters on Process, which discusses the craft of songwriting in a reflective way with a diverse range of songwriters:

Songwriters on Process is dedicated to the creative process of songwriters. It’s the stories behind the songs, from beginning to end.  The site features in-depth interviews with songwriters in which they dissect their process.  What is their creative process when they literally sit down to write a song? What do they do when they get writer’s block? What quirks or superstitions do they have? How disciplined are they? Who are their literary inspirations?  How do they get inspired? Do they compose on computer or pen and paper? These are just some of the topics we discuss.

http://www.writersonprocess.com/about-benjamin-opipari-phd.html

And this is the sort of questions it addresses, taken from an interview with Brian Fallon:

Do you make daily writing a part of your routine?

No, that’s where I split the balance between being whimsical and being disciplined.  I can’t do it every day.  I like to write in bulk.  I’ll write five or ten songs in a month, then take a month off.  At the end of that month, I start to feel like I need something to come out.  I feel like it’s going to happen, so I do things to inspire myself. I used to just pick up the guitar and that would be it.  And if I picked up the guitar and nothing came and I couldn’t think of any words, I was out of luck. But now I’ve started to work with things like Garage Band, and I’m doing things like finding all these soul loops and cutting them out.

I learned how to play the piano and the organ and was like, “Wait a second, I can inspire myself through drum beats, or really anything.” I used to have random scattered papers with ideas all over the place.  Now I also have these little mp3 files  that are 30 seconds long and full of craziness.  I can go back to them at anytime when I feel something happening, so I peel through them and flesh out the ones I like.

That’s probably also a good way to prevent writer’s block.

That’s why I started doing it.  I had a really bad case of writer’s block a year ago.  It was really hard because I never had nothing to write about.  I decided that was never going to happen again, so anything I thought about, any idea, I’d write it down, take a picture of it. Mess with a little drum loop to make it interesting.  Even if it was a little interesting and could never be used in any of my outlets, I would do it anyway.

Do you keep a notebook handy to write down things you see and hear?  

Not really.  That’s never been the case for me.  I know a lot of people do that, but it’s hard for me to do. Sometimes I’ll be on the subway and listen to people talk.  And I’m always like, “How is anybody getting anything out of this?  This is nothing.  It’s all about coffee and business meetings!”  I read a biography of Tom Waits once, and he writes about anything.  I mean, how do you sit there and listen to someone talk and write it down?  What are you fleshing out?  There’s nothing there! But apparently there is.

- Live sociology: social research and its futures

Attempting the impossible

by Alyce Santoro, “a delicate empiricist”

Shifts in society reflect shifts in the social imaginary: excerpt of the Manifesto for the Obvious International (the full text can be read here):

“In philosophy, the collectively agreed upon definitions, symbols, styles, behaviors, ways of using language, and other factors that are held in common throughout a culture – assumptions about how things are “supposed to be” – are called the social imaginary. Whether it is “normal” to compete or cooperate, own property, go into debt, go to war, or go shopping is determined by a wide range of constantly shifting factors, including the influence of our political, legal, and educational systems; corporate advertising; the media; and various amalgams thereof. The social imaginary is like a program that runs surreptitiously in the background; until we become consciously aware of it, we don’t notice that our attitudes are being influenced by entities that may have a vested interest in them. When we fear our neighbors instead of loving them, industries that produce guns, fences, and alarms profit – we willingly give them our dollars in exchange for a strange kind of security indeed. The same happens when we buy into the illogical premise that it is “normal” to pursue endless economic growth based on finite resources that, if consumed, destroy planetary conditions that support life.”

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Alyce Santoro is an internationally noted conceptual artist. A former scientist, she creates multimedia “philosoprops” to draw parallels between seemingly disparate fields and to spark dialog about holistic approaches to challenges facing the environment and society. More at alycesantoro.com and @alyceobvious.
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[This week's "visual sociology" post is on the cusp of philosophy, social activism, and art. Alyce Santoro plays with material objects, images and text to create artwork loaded with social and philosophical messages. Perhaps we ought to rename the column "Visual social science"? But even that wouldn't be precise enough. Since launching this column, SI has come across a wonderfully wide and varied application of visual approaches and methods than a narrow definition of "sociology" would accommodate -  from empirical sociology to philosophy, anthropology, ethnography, education, politically charged art...] 

 E-mail us your visual sociology submissions and ideas on S.I.Imagery@gmail.com. Full instructions can be found here, or just email us if you have any questions.

It isn’t an uncommon response: when a government fears it’s losing control, it worries about the role played by social media in that loss of control. The extent to which Twitter and Facebook really contributed to the uprisings in the ‘Arab Spring’ is still a matter of debate – but the governments certainly thought they might, and sought to either suppress them or shut them down as part of their attempts to control the people. In the UK, in the aftermath of the rioting in London in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameronsuggested:

“Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. So we are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Even at the time, Cameron seemed unaware that he was suggesting exactly the same thing for the UK as he was deploring in places like Egypt and Libya – and even now, with suggestions that some within the government want to bring back the Snoopers’ Charter (see my blog posts here and here), and with regular calls to take control over various forms of ‘extreme speech’ – one man in the UK was arrested for a Facebook post of a burning poppy – it’s very clear that governments of many flavours consider the internet, and social media in particular, to be something to be feared.

And yet, when we watch what is happening in Turkey, many of us find ourselves naturally siding with those protesting. We need the right to protest – and the right to communicate, to organise, to assemble, to associate – and to do so with as much freedom as possible. That’s why those kinds of freedoms are built into most of the key human rights documents and declarations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and others have these as core values – and quite rightfully so.

When we see those rights restricted, controlled or threatened, we should know that this is wrong – and people in Turkey do. I was particularly struck by one tweet, by tweeter Faruk Ateş (@KuraFire):

“A government that fears the free communication among its citizens is a government you can no longer trust to govern you. #Turkey”

He’s right. When governments seek to control our communication – whether by shutting down social media, or by monitoring all our communications (as the Snoopers’ Charter proposes), ultimately that means that they are governments that you can no longer trust to govern you. The Turkish government is looking increasingly like that kind of government – and so would ours in the UK if we tried to do the same.

Of course there are good ‘excuses’ for doing so – fighting terrorism, avoiding ‘disorder’, stopping radicalisation and so forth – but we should be aware that by doing so we are risking sacrificing a huge amount of what makes us ‘civilised’ in any real sense. We should not allow ourselves to be distracted or persuaded that there’s something else going on – that, for example, the Snoopers’ Charter is only about monitoring the communications of the ‘bad guys’ and will only be used to deal with terrorism. As David Cameron demonstrated back in 2011, it’s very, very easy for a government to slip into thinking that powers are needed to keep ‘control’ when things get difficult. Powers to monitor all will ultimately be used to monitor all, and for whatever purpose the government and other authorities deem appropriate at the time. It is a slope that is very slippery indeed….

We should all be watching what happens in Turkey very carefully – for many reasons. How the Turkish government ultimately deals with the protest will be very important – primarily for the Turkish people, but in many ways for all of us. I, for one, am hoping that freedom wins out, and that suppression and oppression are not the main victors. The same is true for all countries. We need to find solutions to our problems that don’t require that kind of suppression and oppression – solutions that support our human rights – and our humanity.

Paul Bernal is a Lecturer in IT, IP and Media Law at UEA. This article was originally posted on Paul’s blog. You can follow Paul on twitter @PaulBernalUK.