The Sociological Imagination

Recent Posts - page 2

• Request for Zines

  By Sadia Habib on September 5, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  WHAT IS A ZINE? “Zine” is short for fanzine.   “For all intensive purposes, a zine is a cheaply-made, cheaply-priced publication, often in black and white, which is mass-produced via photocopier and bound with staples. Most zines revolve around a… Read More ›

• 3 dystopian visions of the future of gaming (and capitalism)

  By Mark Carrigan on September 5, 2016 • ( 0 )

  In a near future America, the world is locked into an inglorious decline while the majority of its population is locked into an intoxicatingly expansive virtual world. Ecological crisis and economic ruin operate hand-in-hand to leave the 99% living in… Read More ›

• Create Your Publication Strategy

  By Mark Carrigan on September 4, 2016 • ( 0 )

  

  This new six-week course is designed to help post-docs improve their writing and maximise their chances of publication. The course is run by Dr Helen Kara (UK) and Dr Janet Salmons (US) who, between them, have extensive publication experience and… Read More ›

• We should be very careful about how we construct ‘the public’ in discourses of public engagement

  By Mark Carrigan on September 4, 2016 • ( 0 )

  I just came across this description of Robert Moses, by the American Sociologist and former Secretary of Labour Frances Perkins, concerning his attitude towards the public. It was quoted in an essay by Jackson Lears in vol 38 number 6 of… Read More ›

• CfP: In, Against and Beyond Precarity: The Struggles of Insecure Workers

  By Mark Carrigan on September 3, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Work, employment and society is pleased to announce a forthcoming special issue: In, Against and Beyond Precarity: The Struggles of Insecure Workers The issue will be guest edited by Gabriella Alberti, Ioulia Bessa, Kate Hardy, Vera Trappmann and Charles Umney,… Read More ›

• Cyborgology is looking for new regular contributors!

  By Mark Carrigan on September 2, 2016 • ( 0 )

  The excellent blog Cyborgology is looking for new contributors: For nearly six years Cyborgology has been dedicated to producing thoughtful essays and commentary about society’s relationship to technology. Writers enjoy significant freedom to write essays and stories of varying length, style,… Read More ›

• DEADLINE TODAY: The Accelerated Academy

  By Mark Carrigan on August 31, 2016 • ( 0 )

  30th November to 2nd December 2016, Leiden, the Netherlands From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual… Read More ›

• Call for blog posts: the lived experience of interdisciplinarity in social research

  By Mark Carrigan on August 30, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Following on from our succesful workshop at Social Media & Society 2016, the Digital Social Science Forum is seeking blog posts describing and reflecting on the lived experience of interdisciplinarity in social research. The workshop itself sought to explore conceptual… Read More ›

• Yemen: Britain’s forgotten conflict

  By Mark Carrigan on August 29, 2016 • ( 0 )

• What are you favourite academic memes?

  By Mark Carrigan on August 28, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A great suggestion made by Deborah Lupton on Twitter last month: @mark_carrigan @TheSocReview We need a repository of GIFs/memes featuring real academics – that would be fun! — Deborah Lupton (@DALupton) July 26, 2016 If you have any suggestions, tweet… Read More ›

• Social Media and Academic Labour

  By Mark Carrigan on August 27, 2016 • ( 0 )

  It is increasingly hard to move without encountering the idea that social media is something of value for academics. The reasons offered are probably quite familiar by now. It helps ensure your research is visible, both inside and outside the… Read More ›

• Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age: Botany and the Garden Part 2

  By Mark Carrigan on August 26, 2016 • ( 1 )

  by Hamish Robertson Introduction In the first part of this essay I alluded to the garden as a developmental engine of knowledge that canvassed both a deep cultural history and a highly modernist locus for new, innovative knowledge production. In… Read More ›

• Engines of Knowledge in the First Information Age: Botany and the Garden Part 1

  By Mark Carrigan on August 25, 2016 • ( 0 )

  by Hamish Robertson Introduction This is the second in a series of short essays exploring what I have called ‘engines of knowledge’ in the first quantitative, ‘big data’ information age (there have been others), which emerged in the early 19th… Read More ›

• The Spook Who Sat By The Door

  By Mark Carrigan on August 24, 2016 • ( 0 )

  By Hamish Robertson This year has seen an extraordinary upswing in revelations about the kinds of violence that are seemingly endemic in American society. In particular, the persistence of an often deadly mixture of readily accessible weapons and prevailing racism,… Read More ›

• Using micro-podcasts to profile participants at a workshop

  By Mark Carrigan on August 23, 2016 • ( 0 )

  I recently helped out with an event by the Survivor Research Network which was being supported by The Sociological Review. We were keen to profile participants at the event in a way that gave a sense of the range of people involved, as… Read More ›

• The Sociology of ‘Streaming’

  By Mark Carrigan on August 22, 2016 • ( 0 )

  by Mark Johnson and Jamie Woodcock The popularity of “streaming” – the practice of broadcasting live gameplay across the internet to an audience – is a rapidly growing social and cultural phenomenon. If any readers are in doubt about the contemporary… Read More ›

• An exciting new journal: Frontiers in Sociology

  By Mark Carrigan on August 21, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A really exciting launch: Frontiers in Sociology: Frontiers in Sociology is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal launched in February 2016. The first social-sciences journal of the “Frontiers in” series, Frontiers in Sociologywill foster cross-disciplinary work as well as fairness, transparency,… Read More ›

• Biographical Approaches to Studying Digital Capitalism

  By Mark Carrigan on August 20, 2016 • ( 0 )

  In the early pages of Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, he offers a cogent analysis of how initial public offerings lock tech companies into a growth imperative which ultimately proves destructive of the value they create. As he puts… Read More ›

• The Importance of Disappointment

  By Mark Carrigan on August 19, 2016 • ( 0 )

  There’s a lovely passage by Olivia Lang, quoted in this review of her recent book, which reminds me of what Ian Craib called the importance of disappointment: There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that… Read More ›

• The ideological function of open data

  By Mark Carrigan on August 18, 2016 • ( 0 )

  I was at an interesting symposium on Big Data hosted by Sage earlier this year where a number of participants discussed the limitations on implementation of the government’s open data initiative: data is often published in an unhelpful or even outright… Read More ›

• The coordinates of the austerity consensus are disintegrating

  By Mark Carrigan on August 17, 2016 • ( 0 )

  From Corbyn: Against All Odds, by Richard Seymour, pg 22. There’s a huge opportunity for the Labour left but also a huge risk, as momentum has built for an anti-austerity platform that might no longer be relevant: “It is not… Read More ›

• We need to understand why it is the beach is full of dying kids

  By Mark Carrigan on August 16, 2016 • ( 0 )

  His young life was as delicate as the wing of a butterfly And as fragile as a spider’s web For him we cry Because when he dies We all do Did Ahmed not deserve a life? Ahmed never hurt a… Read More ›

• Book Review: Social Media for Academics

  By Mark Carrigan on August 16, 2016 • ( 0 )

  by Andy Tattersall, originally posted on the LSE Review of Books Academics engaging in social media as a means to communicate their research and interests have a variety of experiences. There are those who have taken to it like a… Read More ›

• CfP: The Accelerated Academy

  By Mark Carrigan on August 15, 2016 • ( 0 )

  30th November to 2nd December 2016, Leiden, the Netherlands From the 1980s onward, there has been an unprecedented growth of institutions and procedures for auditing and evaluating university research. Quantitative indicators are now widely used from the level of individual… Read More ›

• The tragically incompetent elites of the centre left

  By Mark Carrigan on August 14, 2016 • ( 0 )

  This critique by Thomas Frank, on loc 2729 of his Pity the Billionaire, applies as well to proponents of the ‘third way’ within the Labour Party as it does to the leaders of the Democratic Party in relation to whom… Read More ›

• Academic video blogs: 5 tips for getting started

  By Mark Carrigan on August 13, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A really useful resource produced by jobs.ac.uk: If you’ve made videos like this and you’d like us to share them,  leave a URL in the comments box below and we’d be very happy to take a look.

• A fantastic podcast discussion about social media for academics

  By Mark Carrigan on August 12, 2016 • ( 0 )

  This is one of the best discussions about social media for academics I’ve heard: Episode 58 of This Week In Health Law. Fresh from ASLME’s Health Law Professors’ Conference in Boston: a special TWIHL!Pharmalot’s Ed Silverman joins a cavalcade of past… Read More ›

• Call for blog posts: the lived experience of interdisciplinarity in social research

  By Mark Carrigan on August 11, 2016 • ( 1 )

  Following on from our succesful workshop at Social Media & Society 2016, the Digital Social Science Forum is seeking blog posts describing and reflecting on the lived experience of interdisciplinarity in social research. The workshop itself sought to explore conceptual… Read More ›

• Symposium: Anxiety and Work in the Accelerated Academy

  By Mark Carrigan on August 10, 2016 • ( 0 )

  Friday September 23rd at the University of Warwick, 9:30am to 6:00pm The culture and organisation of knowledge production are undergoing dramatic transformations. Neo-managerialist models for the management of research and teaching, the expansion of audit and academic rankings, and the… Read More ›

• The idiocy of corporations on Twitter

  By Mark Carrigan on August 9, 2016 • ( 0 )

  A lovely feature by John Oliver about the idiocy of corporations on Twitter: For a deeper analysis of corporations on Twitter, see this great essay on weird corporate twitter: We all know that a corporation’s Twitter account is managed by a social-media worker (despite… Read More ›

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