Our first autonomous robot arrived in the house last week. It is a wee fellow, hugging the ground as if cowering in the presence of its true master, the iPhone. A round plastic body, a sensor cluster, wheels and a vacuum are set off with a cheery burble. It is black, …
Street encounters and digital encounters are hybrids. Trying to understand them separately will trip the ethnographer up (Lane, 2018). Lane elaborates the digital element to street encounters and the reverse using a multi-sited ethnography which traces encounters through street and digital domains. Doing so means he avoids assuming the meaning …
… the heat is on the bottom level It has been a norm that in the UK we expect public figures to be held to a higher standard than us schmoes. Ordinary folk can make daft statements, fool around, run over the family dog and still be invited to the …
… in the abstract and also not literally in the concrete It’s a delusion of a certain type of policy wonk that if you just tweak a society’s political institutions enough you will get the right outcome. A common reference point is the refoundation of West Germany after the second …
Much of what I’m writing about here I owe to the insights and research of my colleagues Alex Wafer, Kirstin Lardy, Delani Mathevula and Motswaedi. In fact a lot of it comes from a recent talk by Alex. We know the digital divide very well. Much of economic and social …
The kind of reading you do matters a lot to the kind of scholarship you are doing. The classic image of the scholar is someone poring carefully over a text, parsing each phrase and glossing every paragraph. A scholar isolated from the world around, unburdened by cares. I expect few …
Forgiveness is good for the soul. Debt forgiveness is the juice that keeps the economy fresh. If all debts were honoured then capitalism would close up shop. Debt forgiveness can be egalitarian. Social movements promoted the forgiveness of odious debts incurred by developing world governments. Debt cancellation has been a …
What is the physics of society? Its chemistry, its biology? We are beings who live through these material stuffs. Biochemistry matters for mind and behaviour. For example, the distribution of energy in the form of food is a critical question for health, for cultural symbolism, for life. The distribution of …
Everyone develops their own set of software tools over time. There are lots of handy specialist software programmes out there. Look out for those that have a strong support community around them. This is what makes R such a pleasure to learn and Nvivo so frustrating. I’ve selected ones I …
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 …
