Alastair McIntosh, the Scottish writer and activist, kindly did an interview last month, the first for my "Groundhog Day or End of Days" project (see here). You can (and in my opinion should!) read the transcript here, but here's a few clips to whet your appetite. And then I started to notice, you know, when... Continue Reading →
Abeyance – a crucial concept (video)
https://twitter.com/marcsrhudson/status/1637791469476954112 If you don't understand protest waves and movement cycles and ABEYANCE, you are a risk not just to yourself, but to those around you.
Looting the Ivory Tower – “Biographical Availability”
https://twitter.com/marcsrhudson/status/1636318881311588353 From here - McAdam, D. (1986) “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer.” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 92, No. 1, pp. 64-90
Durkheim the truffle-hunting pig, question begging, and – yes – “fuck nuance”
There's a very good paper (with a click-bait headline - "Fuck Nuance") about theory building, abstraction etc. Here's a link to a pdf. And there's a section in it (lots of it is eminently quotable) about Emile Durkheim, the French guy who can claim to be the father of sociology. "Indifferent to fairly representing his... Continue Reading →
Looting the Ivory Tower: Trasformismo, #Gramsci #Transitions
Made a new short video for my "Looting the Ivory Tower" series (important academic articles or concepts translated into plain English) https://twitter.com/marcsrhudson/status/1635273839214211072 What do people think (of the concept, of the video)? Suggestions for improvements to future videos, and concepts that could be rendered in 2 mins and 19 seconds (i.e. within the Twitter limit).
The research process and serendipity – excerpt from Alison Lurie’s “Foreign Affairs”
Another excerpt from Alison Lurie's brilliant "Foreign Affairs" - this time Vinnie (academic) and her non-academic acquaintance Chuck, who is looking up his family tree... Nice on how research can be a coming-at-it-sideways thing... He had a real productive trip to South Leigh this time, Chuck tells her, putting away two-thirds of the Indian dinner... Continue Reading →
Looting the Ivory Tower: “Managing transition risk”, oil companies and #climate
Another day, another top notch academic article, turned into a glib 2 min 20 second video... "Managing transition risk: Toward an interdisciplinary understanding of strategies in the oil industry" [aka Why existing academic concepts fall short of capturing the messy complexity of #EnergyTransition and what needs to be done] Here's the video https://twitter.com/marcsrhudson/status/1634577726945329154 This is... Continue Reading →
Looting the Ivory Tower: “The wicked trinity of late capitalism”
I have made a short (2mins 19 seconds) film as part of my "Looting the Ivory Tower" series. It's on a new paper in Geoforum - "The ‘wicked trinity’ of late capitalism: Governing in an era of stagnation, surplus humanity, and environmental breakdown" by @IliasAlami @JackCopley6 @moraitisalexis Twitter was playing silly buggers with uploading, so... Continue Reading →
Serious fun – on using jokes/fables to explain academic and political concepts (cows, au pairs and snow ploughs)
We all need better "cognitive maps," as Freddie Jameson called them all the way back in 1984, in his pivotal article "Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism." Cognitive maps are devices that help us orientate ourselves, understand all the blizzards of stimuli, ideas, messages, signs, whatever you want to call them. Those who... Continue Reading →
Enduring academic patronage
"At that moment she realized that he had enrolled himself in the class of persons (usually but not always ex-students) who take it for granted that Vinnie will write them recommendations, give them letters of introduction to colleagues abroad, read their books and articles, and take an interest in their personal and professional happiness. Typically,... Continue Reading →
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