Social Science Space

In the previous blog we learned about the type of psychogeographical thinking which was developed by Guy Debord and Situationist International. The latter movement was centered on France and mainland Europe in the immediate decades after World War II. Ultimately they failed to get their message through to wider society. In this article I explore how their basic principles re-emerged as a new form of psychogeography in the British Isles. This form would be less political than the work of Debord, at least on the surface, and would be championed by poets, writers of historical fiction and other forms of literature.

Spats, fall-outs and intellectual and personal feuds have long been commonplace among scholars. And, because critiques of ideas and publications are also exercises in freedom of expression, they are integral to the rough and tumble of academic life. But British universities are now facing much more insidious challenges…

Brexit and the concurrent increase in jingoism on the street raises questions about the extent to which British universities may continue to be an attractive choice for foreign students. What message should the UK broadcast on this issue?

In academic institutions that value hierarchies and compliance and seek to understand scholarship in terms of its economic value, argues our Daniel Nehring, there is little space for a discipline that aims to critically interrogate the intersections of structure and agency and the social production of inequalities.

Rebutting Daniel Nehring’s recent post asking if sociology still matters in Britain, Robert Dingwall responds that sociology does have a good story to tell about itself, even in the age of austerity.

Daniel Nehring sees a fundamental contradiction between the critically engaged scholarship on social inequalities and power structures that British sociologists still produce and the thoroughly financialized, individualistic, and highly competitive organisational logics of the universities in which they work.

Despite what he calls the poisonously xenophobic tone of politics and public debates in Britain, our Daniel Nehring still finds it a colorfully multicultural and sometimes, in some places, cosmopolitan society. One place he’d especially like to protect that virtue is in British universities.

The rich and diverse ways in which students and scholars of diverse national and cultural origins collaborate at British universities, argues Daniel Nehring, belie the economic reductionism currently fashionable in public debates about higher education.

Last month a team of UK academics launched an initiative called the Evidence Information Service, which seeks to enable rapid dialogue between researchers and policy makers. Here, the system’s founders describe the response so far and the challenges that lie ahead.

Just a few years ago, critical voices could still speak through mainstream media to highlight the dangers of the quickly accelerating commercialisation of academia. These commentators have now been pushed to the margins.

Recorded at the British Sociological Association annual conference 2011, sponsored by SAGE. In this interview with Professor John Urry, Professor […]