Something I’ve been grappling with is the right to opacity and how that can be supported. The reason I think is less to do with opacity as a privacy supporting right and more to do with it as a public good. Currently opacity is largely ‘owned’ by centralised platform services. …
Fiction: Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, borrowed electronically through Libby/Edinburgh City Libraries. Academic themes: Pre crime: Arrigo, Bruce, and Brian Sellers. 2021. The Pre-Crime Society: Crime, Culture and Control in the Ultramodern Age. Bristol, UNITED KINGDOM: Bristol University Press. Emotions and the machine: Collier, Ben, Richard Clayton, Alice Hutchings, …
The researcher’s kitbag should include several analytical heuristics you can apply to your case. These are not ready made pop up explanations. They are designed to aid thinking about why the social world looks and operates the way it does. This one is a version of Becker’s (1998) machine trick: …
Detailed ethnographic work (Bourgois 1998, Wakeman, 2015) has shown the rich, complex set of reciprocal obligations and responsibilities by which heroin users in marginal social and economic circumstances maintain a moral economy. The moral economy is instrumental and emotionally bound, locking users into norms of reciprocity and sharing, distributing resources …
Clue: No I want to supplement some of the advice given to PhD students about their supervision team. There are a lot of guides for PhD students on ‘choosing your supervisor’. Advice falls into the following categories: topic expertise, position in the field, and personality/working style. Do they know their stuff, do …
The purpose of the exercise is to help you work out your ontological positioning. The reason I have done it this way is to provokes reflection which is easier when faced with a distinct proposition. Say if you agree/disagree with the following statements, and why. Show what the implications of …
Students taking sociology courses are can be very successful at absorbing empirical data and understanding the dynamics of everyday life in relation to topics of gender, class, ethnicity and so on. As my colleague Ralph Fevre and myself noticed, students often understood theoretical frameworks well but have difficulty moving between …
The researcher stance should be one of polite but informed puzzlement and a willingness to learn from the world. A few of the posts I have been writing are about different ways to spark your curiosity. It is that willingness to push beyond face value answers and assumptions that is …
This month was mainly spent reviewing references for a paper on darknet markets and illicit drug diffusion. It’s a fine thing to see the academic discussion developing alongside the maturing practices of this illicit market segment. Informative recent paper on where things have been and where it looks like they …
… it just happens to be one where everyone is silently watching, and judging 👍 To the introvert an academic conference is like being at a party where there is just one person you feel comfortable talking to. Your mission is to work out who they are without interacting with …
