Social science writing is a set of conventions or styles. These conventions can be used to create distance on the subject, the impression of an objective standpoint, or to get close in and give the reader a sense of what it is really like to be there. You can learn …
Okay, someone writing a crime script analysis should probably not be saying this but here we go. One of the lightulb moments in teaching sociology is when you introduce Erving Goffman’s Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. It tells on us. In a compelling way it shows what we are like …
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash This post was inspired by reading David Buil-Gil and Patricia Saldaña-Taboada’s article cited below. It helped crystalise my thinking about what colour of sociologist I am. One of the fundamental insights of critical sociology or criminology is that what we are studying is a …
The best software is accessible, extensible and community supported. However because reasons we tend to end up with tools that are centralised and ‘heavy’ – they do too much, much more than you will ever need, they have high lock-in and can’t be easily adapted or customised, they are opaque …
The end of European empires contributed to the rise of methodological nationalism. That is the set of infrastructures and habits of mind that treats each nation-state a single coherent container of a population. Global datasets like that held by the United Nations are typically aggregates of national ones so preserve …
There’s been much referencing to techno-social hybrids and as with anything else the term can lose its specificity as it becomes used to refer to any novel combination or arrangement of technologies. Almost any technology we encounter is a combination of other systems so if we are not to just …
‘I just got out of prison and asked my sister how much it would cost to start a business. She said $500. I got a grand from my husband, I bought two ounces of cooked up crack. Opened this place at one of my sister’s friend’s house … I had …
As part of the textbook ‘Dead White Men and Other Important People’, authored with my great PHD supervisor Ralph Fevre, we wrote some ‘doodles’ which were meant to mimic how students could take notes in a style that encapsulated the problem they were examining. The intention was to sum up …
I wrote this because one of the most persistent and grief inducing questions I ask in supervisions is ‘what is your research question’, the slightly more honed version of ‘what’s your PhD about?’ It is unfair to ask it since I run many research projects where the ‘research question’ is …
‘Laugh at [the ads] because when you’re in active meth addiction you don’t really care what the outside world is saying and you surely don’t care what the Internet has on it. … While you’re an active meth user, it plays no role in your recovery or wanting to get …
