The turn of kindness

Of metrics and kindness in the academy

Academic Irregularities

September and October this year have seen another round of academics on Twitter announcing their withdrawal from academia. And I have met quite a number of doctoral students whose very last option for a career would be a university post. It’s not even a brain drain overseas – new graduates understand the performance-managed, metricized, casualized, marketized university is global. We see the emergence of a generational refusal to pledge lives and wellbeing to institutions which reward dedication and loyalty with excessive workloads, unattainable expectations coded as ‘performance’ but which in all reality obscure the actual work of research and teaching.

When I wrote the HEPI report Pressure Vessels in May of 2019, one
reviewer said it read like a UCU rant. In fact, the assertions are fully
supported by universities’ own figures showing the year-on-year increase in
referrals to occupational health and counselling services. The conclusion –
that universities are…

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Personal data metaphors and imagery

Thinking digital data metaphors…..

This Sociological Life

I am currently completing my new book, with the working title of Data Selves, to be published by Polity. Here is an excerpt from a chapter that looks at personal data materialisations.

We have to work hard to find figures of speech and ways of thinking to encapsulate the ontology of digital data. The concept of digital data, a first glance, appears to describe a wholly immaterial phenomenon that does not engage the senses: there seems to be nothing to look at, touch, hear, smell or taste. The metaphors and other figures of language employed to describe digital data are attempts to conceptualise and make sense of these novel forms of information and their ontologies. Even as digital technologies continue to generate and process detailed information about people’s bodies, social relationships, emotions, practices and preferences, prevailing discourses on these data tend to de-personalise and de-humanise them. The use of the…

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Excerpt from Introduction of Data Selves

worth a serious ponder

This Sociological Life

My new book Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives is due for publication next month. Below is an edited excerpt from the Introduction chapter, in which I explain my theoretical approach.

The phenomenon of personal digital data poses a challenge at an ontological level. Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary western societies. Personal data are both private and public. They could be considered to be owned by, and part of, the people who have generated them, but these details are also accessed and used by a multitude of other actors and agencies. At a deeper level, personal data challenge the ontological boundaries between the binary oppositions of Self/Other, nature/culture, human/nonhuman, and living/dead. Discussions of how digital data about and for people are incorporated into everyday lives must therefore grapple with the problem of how we conceptualise the idea of ‘the…

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