The Sociological Imagination

Recent Posts - page 2

• A playbook for merchandising doubt

  By Mark Carrigan on July 21, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 20, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 19, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 18, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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’?

  By Mark Carrigan on July 17, 2017 • ( 2 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 16, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 15, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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”

  By Mark Carrigan on July 14, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 13, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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 Mark Carrigan on July 12, 2017 • ( 1 )

  

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 11, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 10, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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 Mark Carrigan on July 9, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 8, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 7, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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”

  By Mark Carrigan on July 6, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 5, 2017 • ( 1 )

  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?

  By Mark Carrigan on July 4, 2017 • ( 2 )

  

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 3, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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

  By Mark Carrigan on July 2, 2017 • ( 0 )

  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 ›

• The dark future of mediatization

  By Mark Carrigan on July 1, 2017 • ( 0 )

  In the last year, Facebook Live has been plagued by occasional headlines reporting on shocking instances of violence being streamed through the platform. The sporadic quality of these reports easily creates an impression that this is exception. There have always… Read More ›

• Theory as practice: for a politics of social theory, or how to get out of the theory zoo

  By Mark Carrigan on June 30, 2017 • ( 2 )

  By Jana Bacevic [These are my thoughts/notes for the “Practice of Social Theory“, which Mark Carrigan and I are running at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge from 4 to 6 September, 2017]. Revival of theory? It… Read More ›

• Making an Impact with Social Media, July 5th in Manchester

  By Mark Carrigan on June 29, 2017 • ( 0 )

  Social media offers for exciting opportunities for generating impact and communicating research beyond the academy. However, 500 million tweets and 3 million blog posts that are generated in a single day, as well as over a billion websites, pose an obvious challenge: how… Read More ›

• On the Spiralists

  By Mark Carrigan on June 28, 2017 • ( 1 )

  In a recent editorial in Current Sociology, Michael Burawoy warns about what he describes as the ascent of the spiralists. He finds these figures throughout the UC Berekely administration, accusing them of being “people who spiral in from outside, develop signature… Read More ›

• CfP: ‘Social Research in a Sceptical Age’

  By Mark Carrigan on June 27, 2017 • ( 0 )

  The current climate of scepticism towards ‘experts’ has put many research practitioners and users on the defensive.  Is it enough simply to assert the value of rigorous methods, or should we be checking, sharpening and improving our tools?  If ‘post-truth’… Read More ›

• CfP: Constitution: The Power of Shaping Forms of Life

  By Mark Carrigan on June 26, 2017 • ( 0 )

  4th International Colloquium in Social and Political Thought “Constitution: The power of shaping forms of life” November 2 & 3, 2017 Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile Keynote speakers: Joel Colón-Ríos (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) Fernando Atria (Universidad… Read More ›

• Public intellectuals as guides to the political flux, Or, “who can tell us what the fuck is going on?”

  By Mark Carrigan on June 25, 2017 • ( 1 )

  In the last couple of days, I’ve been reading The Candidate by Alex Nunns. It’s a detailed and insightful account of Corbyn’s ascent to the leadership of the Labour party and the conditions which made this possible. After the election,… Read More ›

• Ten Theses on Liberalism

  By Steve Fuller on June 24, 2017 • ( 2 )

  When I was first exposed to liberalism as a political philosophy, I was told that its founders were Spinoza and Locke, two thinkers who have always struck me as having rather little in common, except some common foes — especially… Read More ›

• The precursors to curation

  By Mark Carrigan on June 24, 2017 • ( 0 )

  While many see the term ‘curation’ as modish and vague, I see it as an important concept to make sense of how we can orientate ourselves within a changing cultural landscape. However I can sympathise with the thrust of these… Read More ›

• “Help! Help! Here comes everybody!”: Social Media and Corbynism

  By Mark Carrigan on June 23, 2017 • ( 0 )

  How has social media contributed to the growing success of Corbynism? In asking this question, we risk falling into the trap of determinism by constructing ‘social media’ as an independent force bringing about effects in an otherwise unchanged world. This often… Read More ›

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