Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

#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 ...

University of Sydney's  Eszter Szenes  being way too nice. (I really wish I could have been more help). 

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...

Sam Harris by Zoe Young. The painting echoes the pose of Manet’s  Olympia  – but the subject is an indigenous Australian woman surrounded by European books, that comment on the European traditions of art, and perched underneath the leg of the day bed, holding it level, is a copy of John Berger's  Ways of Seeing .  The symbolism of this was what first struck me when viewing the painting at the Archibald prize exhibition. It is not subtle. It offers continuity with a tradition and, at the same time, a re-contextualisation and critical comment on it.  The only analysis of the painting that I found so far identifies the reference Manet’s work but concludes that Young's painting is shallow and unconsidered:  It’s a likeable, albeit lightweight work, but I don’t understand what Young is trying to tell us by putting so many books into the picture. Does she want us to know she is a good reader? Is she suggesting Harris is not just a pretty face? Eithe...