Visiting the art college and the Informatics school reminds me how uncreative most academic buildings and arrangements are. Many bear a striking resemblance to Dunder Mifflin, a monastery made of MDF, or the offices of a well established but slightly shady law company specialising in lengthy divorce battles. Students are …
My study is illicit market ecosystems. The counterparts are global insecurity markets. These are growing markets in policing and public order solutions. They extend from gear – riot shields, body cameras, conducted energy devices like the Taser – to eyes – surveillance methods, smart policing algorithms. Each device produces a …
In the early stages of the PhD, you work to ‘reduce the problem space’. Define the problem using the smallest number of steps, variables or data points. This shows you the scope of your study. Then elaborate the problem in as many contexts as you think it applies. This shows …
Is someone likely to use it to detonate under me at a conference (‘but surely you know that Bodkins has covered your very argument in her seminal work in the journal of Ipretendtoreadit studies?’) Am I likely to meet the author and give them a bland ‘loved the article’, and …
Inspired by a discussion of corporate fraud and wage theft I am aiming to incorporate this work into my Illicit Markets course: Smith D (2013) The “Hyper-meritocracy” – an Oxymoron Led by Criminal Morons. In: New Economic Perspectives. Available at: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/10/hyper-meritocracy-oxymoron-led-criminal-morons.html(accessed 14 October 2020). Akerlof GA, Romer PM, Hall RE, …
Is it neoliberal, or just capitalist? Is it performative, or just displayed? Is it paradoxical, or just contradictory? Is it dichotomous, or just separate? Is it criminalised, or just unlawful? Is it totemic, or just symbolic? Is it a practice, or just an activity? Is it bounded, or just limited? …
When you start out as a research student, what do you think your main area of work will be? It might be data collection, the many challenges of access to a field, learning new skills to wrangle data, and always writing, writing, writing. It is a surprise when most of …
Republished from the Edinburgh Decameron Angus Bancroft What do you touch most everyday? Your face? Your hair? Someone else, you lucky duck? Coffee cup? Door handle? Keyboard and screen? A lot of our social, leisure and work lives were conducted digitally before lockdown and now it seems nearly all of …
Republished from the Edinburgh Decameron Angus Bancroft In pandemic times social time seems to give way to virus time. The time the infection takes to replicate, transmit and reinfect is now the basic unit of time which supersedes other rhythms of social and economic life. There is a much longer …
Republished from the Edinburgh Decameron One of the effects of our arm’s length social life is that we interact with a limited range of interactional cues: our subconscious interpretation of body language, eye contact, tone of voice, is heavily truncated by the technology. There are many implications of that, not …
