Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

Panel Discussion:  Evelyn Honeywill,  Nicola Johnson and myself. Chaired by  Deborah Lupton I attended a symposium convened by Deborah Lupton, Theorizing Digital Society , on Monday held at the University of Canberra. The twitter hashtag was #TDS15 for those who'd like to engage in the conversation around the symposium. Here is a collection of the tweets so far . There were a number of very interesting talks presented on the day. I particularly enjoyed the opening keynote speech by  Susan Halford  on the continuing importance of social theory in the world of big data and web science.  Evelyn Honeywill's paper on network character and broader psycho-social dynamics of  social media and  Jean Burgess and Ariadna Matamoro's paper on issue-networks and mapping techniques applied to the #gamergate controversy were also highlights for me.   My paper applied  Legitimation Code Theory  to  the knowledge practi...

Post-conference, mostly Sydney people. The first Legitimation Code Theory conference is being held in Cape Town Next week.  I'll be presenting at the conference .  Here is the title and abstract: Title:  'Different Types of Legitimacy’:  University Students’ Recognition of the Organizing principles of Knowledge. Purpose. This paper employs the Specialization dimension of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and aspects of grammatical metaphor (agentive construction, nominalization and technicality) from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to understand how University students perceive the legitimacy of knowledge.  There is an emergent literature that employs concepts from LCT to examine knowledge structures and redress the problem of knowledge-blindness in the sociology of education and beyond.   There is also a problem of knower-blindness where “the study of knowers’ dispositions has been a longstanding area of relative neglect by code sociology...