Today’s moral panic is about AI and machine learning. Governments around the world are hastening to adopt positions and regulate what they are told is a potentially existential threat to humanity – and certainly to a lot of middle class voters in service occupations. However, it is notable that most of the hype is coming… Read More »
Edgar Morin is probably the most influential French sociologist that the English-speaking world has never acknowledged… In part, this is likely to be because he does not fit the image of French sociology that has dominated the English-speaking academic world. Morin has always taken his own line on major issues of the day rather than… Read More »
I am not a member of Collateral Global, but they were sufficiently interested in what a sociologist might have to say about pandemics as to invite me to be interviewed by Jennie Bristow, another UK sociologist, on their behalf. We discussed the role of the historical and sociological imagination in making sense of the past… Read More »
A small group of us have recently been working informally on a hypothesis that we have called ‘social precognition’. In summary, this proposes that the world of STEM cannot make any major advances that have not already been imagined by creative artists. Science fiction precedes science… However, my researches have raised the troubling thought that… Read More »
…it seems that theory modules are being squeezed out of UK sociology degrees because students find them boring…Is part of the problem to do with how we teach theory? …Theory is not an abstract exercise but an attempt to deal with real and urgent problems. It is also dangerous. The trite narrative of ‘dead white… Read More »