Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

Next talk is the USYD's Department of Sociology and Social Policy Seminar Series.  Details here . Title : Constellations of Scepticism: Contesting Climate Science and Scientists on the Blogosphere. Abstract Discussions of the role of social media in spreading ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ often centre on misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories need to be debunked. Yet, focus on misinformation alone can suggest an arena without rules or evaluative logics. This talk engages with the case study of the climate sceptic blogosphere and how they construe, construct, and contest knowledge. Analysis of the climate sceptic blogosphere, one of the first arenas of online alternative facts, suggests that there are rules that organise legitimate knowledge. The organisation of knowledge claims in this sphere hints towards an underlying worldview that makes the arrangement of some claims and stances valued and others devalued. Missing this logic leads to an analysi...

Day of the talk. (Photo credit:  Kirstin WIlmont ) I have another LCT roundtable coming on - 23rd of March, 2018.  Title : Explanatory or Axiological Power? Determining the Basis of Cosmologies in Janus-Faced Discourses Abstract:  This roundtable will explore criteria to determine if explanatory power or axiological power is the finial basis for the selection and organization of knowledge practices on the climate sceptic blogosphere.   Climate sceptic bloggers frequently engage in political and policy discussion yet insist that the core problem of climate science and policy is the weakness of the empirical and conceptual underpinnings of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.   Explanatory power is presented as the basis for legitimacy in climate science and climate politics, yet there is a case that the code matching of contrarian position with the mainstream position on climate science serves as a basis to contest knowledge-building and delay...

#LCTC2 on the final day The Second Legitimation Code Theory Conference finished yesterday - for those who weren't there, here is the social media buzz on Twitter and Instagram around the conference (& here ): [ View the story "Tweeting LCTC2" on Storify ]

Camperdown Memorial Rest Park, Church St Newtown, Sydney. (14th, June,2017) Alex Page and I are coordinating a Unit for Winter School, the Sociology of Deviance and Difference , and we wrote a brief note for the Unit of Study to convey the ethos and importance of such a topic.  Here it is: A Brief Note From Your Course Coordinators: We would both like to formally welcome you to the Winter School version of Sociology of Deviance and Difference for 2017!  In this intensive unit over the next two and half weeks we – Mathew Toll and Alex Page – will be working with you to unpack the nature of deviance and difference and ask questions like:   what is deviance? Is it socially constructed? And if so, how and why is it constructed in certain ways? Who gets to set the rules? Who gets to label someone a deviant? How is deviance and difference experienced? And, what are the relations of power at play that determine constructions of normalcy? Why this way and ...

The Second International Legitimation Code Theory Conference  is happening at the University of Sydney, July 2017.  I have a paper in the conference:  Title:  Hyper-Knowledge Codes: Contesting Knowledge-Building on the Climate Sceptic Blogosphere . Knowledge codes are not guarantees of knowledge-building; in fact, some may hinder it. This paper explores a ‘hyper-knowledge codes’ through a cosmological analysis of climate sceptic blogs. Studies of the field of production that employ Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) have principally focused on disciplines where the basis of legitimation is a knower code. Maton (2014: 38) identifies the potential of social knower codes to fragment disciplines and undermine knowledge-building. While studies of knowledge code disciplines, e.g. physics, chemistry and biology, have focused on impediments students face to educational attainment and the realization of legitimate knowledge and not the field of production.  Yet, ...

Author/s: Mathew Toll Affiliation/s:  Postgraduate member, LCT centre for Knowledge-Building, University of Sydney. Title: Unpacking the Black Box:The Climate Sceptic Blogosphere and the Idealization of Knowledge . Abstract:  Discussion of the role of the blogosphere in propagating climate scepticism echoes the focus on misinformation implicit in the deficit model. This characterization of the climate sceptic blogosphere suggests an arena without rules or evaluative logics. Yet this is not borne out by a cosmological analysis of climate sceptic blogs. In this paper, preliminary research is presented on the legitimation codes that underpin how ideal knowers and legitimate knowledge are construed on the climate sceptic blogosphere. On the blogosphere there is a commitment to unpacking the black box of science and evaluating it from the position that can be characterized as a toxic knowledge code , a schema for the legitimation of knowledge that emphasises the proced...

Extract from Sardamov's (2015: 92) " Out of Touch: The Analytic Misconstrual of Social Knowledge. " Rather than my first non-self citation coming from one of my academic publications it was actually a post on this blog that managed to attract some attention.  I don't mind that the sentence is embedded in a sequence of text that I don't think is a reasonable approximation of something I have argued.  But you can judge that for yourself. I'm just miffed that someone cited something I wrote. 

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...

Talking about knowledge and education. Mathew Toll  is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.  He completed his BA (hons) in 2012.  His current research is in digital sociology and the sociology of knowledge, looking at the deficit model of public understanding of science, political deliberation and knowledge formation online.  Title:   Discerning Knowers: Exploring University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims. Abstract:   Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of social power. Educational research mirrors with theories that treat knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).  This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin 1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and epistemic relations...

I've managed to get my first conference paper through the peer-review process and I'll be speaking at the Australian Sociological Associations annual conference hosted at the University of Adelaide this  November in the sociology of education stream. The paper is a condensed and sharpened version of my honours thesis .  The abstract is as follows:  "Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of social power.  Educational research mirrors with theories that treat knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).  This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin 1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and epistemic relations.  Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2012 for an honours research project with pa...

A view from my desk, notice spatial disorganization and inspirational quotes.  Fellow PhD candidate, Alexander Page , over at his new blog ‘Sociology as Self-Defence’ has written a blog post on sociology as embodiment and elaborated for us what he thinks constitutes a good sociologist and how he endeavours to embody that normative standard.   I thought I’d write a parallel post on what I think about the practice of sociology and how I employ my time as a first year PhD candidate. Throughout my undergraduate degree I’d too receive the same snide remarks about the economic value of doing a B.A. and majoring in sociology (all my sibling went into the physical and medical sciences, and I cop the periodic jibes about who is going to be the real doctor).   I didn’t respond that I wanted to be a professional activist, which, even though I’m aware of thesis eleven, sounds a little too vanguardist, as if you should prioritize political ideals over the pursuit of an ...

Marshall Mcluhan on an Australian television program discussing the affect of different forms of communication (television, radio and print) on the structure of human awareness.

I’ve previously mentioned the existence of my honours thesis ( here , here and here ) and the possibility that I might place it in the eternal cloud known as the internet. Well I've finally gotten around to doing just that and you can find Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims: here .  To get an idea of what it's all about, the abstract is as follows: The thesis is centred on how University students perceive the legitimacy of knowledge claims.  Contemporary sociological theory is often concerned with the transformations associated with the emergent “ knowledge economy ” and “knowledge society”. In view of this, University students’ perception of knowledge claims is of practical concern due to their future role as knowledge-workers and potential members of the power elite.  To address these issues, elements of Social Realism , Legitimation Code Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics have been d...