In the fifth event in the Accelerated Academy series, the Cultural Politics and Global Justice cluster at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education hosts an afternoon seminar on critique and agency in the accelerated academy. How is temporality changing within the academy? What does this mean for our capacity to individually and collectively shape our working lives? Is there still space for critique within an academy where time pressure has become the norm?

• Time present and academic futures – Jana Bacevic (Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge)
• On Critical University Studies – Alison Wood (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
• The Coming of the Venture Academic – Filip Vostal (Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences)

Each speaker will talk for around 20 minutes, with time for questions. We will then open out for a broader discussion of the themes raised during the talks. For information about the Accelerated Academy project, see the website or special section of the LSE Impact Blog.

The Sociological Review are organising a conference unlike any other next month in Gateshead, UK. There will be sociological walks, a film festival, art work, participatory workshops, a diverse array of plenary sessions and much more. It will be preceded by an ECR day organised by the journal’s early career editorial board. Thanks to the support of the foundation, the conference only costs £100 (standard) and £50 (concessionary).

Only a week left to get your tickets: register here and don’t miss out! 

In recent discussions of capitalist transformation, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are many criticisms which can be raised of the platform metaphor, however we believe it provides a useful hook through which to make sense of how social, economic, political, cultural and technological factors are collectively contributing to systemic transformation.

This intensive five week reading group explores platform capitalism, the growing focus on the platform and its implications for sociological and educational research. Each session will be an informal discussion of two papers, chapters, essays or talks:

• May 2nd, 4pm to 6pm
  Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek, Chapter 2
  Keynote at Digital Capitalism: Revolution or Hype? by Evgeny Morozov
  
• May 9th, 4pm to 6pm
  Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics by Zeynep Tufekci
  The Anxieties of Big Data by Kate Crawford
• May 16th, 4pm to 6pm
  Social Media Platforms and Education by José Van Dijck and Thomas Poell
  Evaluative infrastructures: Accounting for Platform Organizationby Martin Kornberger, Dane Pflueger and Jan Mouritsens
• May 23rd, 4pm to 6pm
  Two Narratives of Platform Capitalism by Frank Pasquale
  The Radicalization of Utopian Dreams by danah boyd
• May 30th, 4pm to 6pm
  The Politics of Platforms by Tarleton Gillespie
  Democracy is dead: long live democracy! by Helen Margetts 
  

The meetings will take place from 4pm to 6pm in DMB 2S5 in The Donald McIntyre Building in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. This is a fifteen minutes walk from Cambridge train station and we welcome all attendees. We would appreciate if you could e-mail your intention to attend to mac228@cam.ac.uk so we can update you with further details.

Bourdieusian field analysis continues to make a key contribution to both the theory and methodology of cultural sociology. The approach not only utilizes a relational sociological analysis of complex cultural patterns of cultural participation, it also enables researchers to develop national and cross-national analyses of power dynamics among different actors and institutions. Bourdieu defines fields as “structured spaces of positions’ and ‘the network of objective relations between positions’. Field analysis offers an alternative to “variable based” approaches to social life and helps researchers to illustrate the links between actors’ volume and composition of capital and their interests, strategies and beliefs.

This course offers an introduction to Bourdieusian Field Analysis. Different from ‘hypothesis testing’ and regression modelling, field analysis uses multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a geometric analysis to inspect and visualize the main cleavages, coalitions and clusters within the sample. This method allows researchers to observe horizontal and hierarchical patterns of oppositions within a field and to analyze topics such as culture and consumption, political and economic power, the academic field or dynamics of internationalization. The first day of the course will give you a general introduction to fields and multiple correspondence analysis, the second is dedicated to the practical application of the method to your own data (or data that will be made available to you) with the statistical software R.

This course is useful for:

• PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and academic staff in the social sciences,
• Those interested in learning about the methods used by Pierre Bourdieu for the analysis of cultural fields and social relations
• Those interested in elite networks, power in the political, economic or academic domain and dynamics of internationalization in these fields
• Market researchers, other commercial researchers, and public sector professionals wishing to learn MCA as a means of clustering complex data sets, and presenting attractive and intuitive visualisations.

Course Schedule
Day 1:  Introduction to Field Analysis and MCA
The first day of the course will provide you with a theoretical and historical introduction of field analyses, illustrated by a series of examples from cultural sociology, sociology of professions, sociology of elites and the field of power. In the second part of the day, we will focus on multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) as a method, by showing its heuristic principles, its functionalities and requirements (in comparison with other statistical techniques such as regression modelling) with exercises dedicated to practical application of the method.

Day 2:  The second day of the course is dedicated to a more practical application of the method. The goal is to show you, on the basis of a simple data-set (or based on your own data), how MCA works and how it can be used practically in the framework of the R package soc.ca. All important steps of an MCA will be demonstrated and the main analytical decisions will be discussed.

Location:
Centre for Critical Inquiry into Society and Culture (CCISC), Aston University, Birmingham-UK.

Teaching faculty:
Dr. Felix.Bühlmann (University of Lausanne)

For further information please send an email to both emails:

Dr. Ebru Soytemel (CCISC-Sociology and Policy, Aston University- Birmingham)
e.soytemel@aston.ac.uk
John Pollard (Research Administrator, CCISC- Aston University- Birmingham)
j.pollard2@aston.ac.uk

Course Fees:
The course will run for two days. Participants can attend only Day 1 or alternatively Day 1 and Day 2.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided on both day.

To register for this event, please visit this link.

We are delighted to welcome 2 exciting keynote speakers: Dr Kate Lister (Leeds Trinity University) and Prof Katherine Johnson (Brighton University).

We invite proposals relating to any aspect of sex, gender and/or sexuality in the past/present and/or future, topics may include but are not limited to:

– Intersectionalities of sex, gender and sexuality
– Sex in art, history and literature
– Integrating and interrogating sex in psychology and the social sciences
– The politics of voice and silence in sexual stories
– The sexed and gendered past: real and imagined
– The sexual futures of humans and machines
– The (re)production of stereotypes
– Sexual communities beyond LGBT
– Past and future of queer theories
– Work, sex and diversity
– Archiving and preserving sexualities
– New approaches and methodologies
– Sex, gender and sexuality activism

Presentations will take the format of either:
15 minute presentation
5 minute lightning talks
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words here by the 23rd March

The event will include networking and development opportunities for PGRs and ECRs.

Cost: £60. This includes lunch and refreshments on both days. A very limited number of small travel bursaries and free spaces are available for unwaged/unaffiliated individuals. Please contact us for more information

Any queries, please email futuresex2018@gmail.com

This international conference aims at exploring the digital economy, understood as the new forms of production, work, consumption, distribution, and finance ushered in by the diffusion of digital technology. From the way we work, to the way we consume and pay for products and services, to the rise of new platforms for consumption and collaboration, the economic field is being revolutionised by digital media. Yet, the jury is still out on whether these changes point to an even more exploitative or rather towards an alternative and fairer economic model.

The conference will explore these processes of transformation of the economy and their relationship with culture and society focusing on a number of specific phenomena that have been the object of intense debate in recent years and questioning the suitability of future trends and innovations: automation and its positive and negative repercussions on working conditions; crypto-currencies and whether they are freeing us from state control or reproducing neoliberal dynamics; universal basic income as a possible new form of welfare befitting the transformation of the economy in a digital era; the rise of digital giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon and the consequences of their oligopolistic position in the market; the new models of value formation connected to data mining and analytics; and many more.

We invite participants from various disciplines and streams of research including media studies, sociology, economics, consumer research, management, information and computer science. Together, we will address a set of recurring questions. How, for example, is digital technology restructuring the economy? Are crypto-currencies really alternative to established financial regimes or are they rather at the very forefront of new forms of financial speculation?   How do managerial practices evolve with the aid of digital resources? How do transformations in the mobile environment correlate to changes in the field of logistics? What are the features of the new forms of precarisation/casualisation of work that are described as “gig economy”? How does digital technology serve to enforce new forms of surveillance and measurement in the workplace? Can technological advancement promote alternative economic models as implied by references to terms such as “big data socialism” or “luxury communism”? Can digital media serve the construction of new forms of workers’ representation and trade-unionism?

The conference will comprise two plenary sessions and 4 breakout panels, and will host internationally acclaimed scholars as keynote speakers.

The conference will take place on Friday, 11 May 2018
Abstract of 250 words are due by 7 March 2018.
Submission lin: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digitalcapitalism201

Abstracts should be 250 words maximum, and include the author(s) name and position, and a short title.
Acceptance notices will be given on 20 March 2018

Friday, 15^th June, University of Surrey

CALL FOR PAPERS

Keynote speakers: Agata Lisiak (Bard College, Berlin) and Rita Chawla-Duggan (University of Bath

Increasing use is made of both creative and visual methods in social research. Nevertheless, to date there has been very little discussion of the extent to which such methods can be used in comparative research. This seminar will explore some of the challenges of using these methods cross-nationally, examining the different cultural associations that may be brought to bear in different national contexts, and how these are accounted for in research design, data collection and analysis. It will also draw on the experiences of researchers working in this area, to explore how such challenges can most effectively be addressed. We welcome papers that address any aspect of using creative and/or visual methods in comparative research, or across spaces of difference more broadly defined (e.g. with groups from different ethnic or social class backgrounds).

Abstract Submission: Please send abstracts of up to 250 words by 14^th April 2018 to Rachel Brooks at the University of Surrey: r.brooks@surrey.ac.uk. (There will be no charge for attending the seminar as all costs are kindly being covered by the International Journal for Social Research Methodology.)

Seminar Organisers: The seminar is organised by the Eurostudents research team at the University of Surrey (Rachel Brooks, Jessie Abrahams, Predrag Lazetic and Anu Lainio). Further details about the Eurostudents project can be found at: www.eurostudents.net.