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The most ridiculous sentence I’ve ever read
This means: not renouncing the noetic that transitionally infinitizes its objects, which is what Valery called Spirit; and yet not ignoring all kinds of sublimation processes that have phantasmatic...
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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...
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When writing on the iPad becomes a pleasure rather than a chore
I’ve started using iWriter for the iPad and I can’t recommend it highly enough. In fact writing this post on my laptop now feels clunky and irritating after having spent the last couple of hours...
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Struggling to put words to an idea
This post on things that universities should teach students is a lovely read in its own right. However the final point really stood out to me: That if they haven’t, at some point, found themselves...
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What’s the difference between ‘public intellectualism’ and being unusually...
In the last year I’ve had a selection of requests from the media to talk on an eclectic range of issues: contemporary sexual culture, the quantified self, dystopic social change, the limits of liberal...
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What do you actually use Evernote for?
I’ve written in the past about my dislike for Evernote and near continuous search for an alternative to it. I won’t rehearse my issues with it here but the one that really matters is that I simply...
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Learning to say ‘no’ in #highered
When I was younger, I used to feel plagued by boredom. It’s only in recent years that I recognised that it was boredom. I was aware of the experience but it had never occurred to me at the time to use...
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Stuff I want to find out
How do norms emerge ‘online’ and is this different from how they emerge ‘offline’? What does this tell us about the ‘online’/’offline’ distinction? Is “all science becoming data science” and, if so,...
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How to get started on a sociology essay
Are you clear about what the question is asking? If you’re uncertain about what the terms mean or how they fit together then it’ll be difficult to know how to start writing. Try and clarify issues...
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Some thoughts on 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...
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The value of blogging for part-time PhD students
One of the more elusive benefits of blogging has been the implications for my professional identity. As a part-time PhD student, without funding but committed to an academic career trajectory (albeit...
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Productivity culture, cognitive triage and the pseudo-commensurability of the...
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...
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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...
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How to turn a wallet full of cards into a book
That’s the challenge I’ve set myself for the next three months. The remaining sections of Social Media for Academics exist in embryonic form within this wallet. Each of the cards has an idea or theme...
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16 interesting ways to communicate knowledge
A note to self as much as a post for other people: Through Design Fiction (e.g. Zero Hours) Through Social Fiction (e.g. Low Fat Love) Through Visual Journalism (e.g. Days of Destruction, Days of...
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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...
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Life in the Accelerated Academy, part 2
The idea that a part 2 to yesterday’s post would be less rushed seems rather naive in retrospect. Feeling rushed in the morning is different to feeling rushed in the evening but it is nonetheless...
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Creativity as Apophatic
For the last couple of days, I was in Edinburgh taking part in Time Without Time. It was a great event and I’ll probably blog more about it next week. The second day was very different from the usual...
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