Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

Society is underpinned by standards and expectations as to what social worlds should resemble and operate. But when the very foundations of that world are rocky and open to misuse and abuse, the society is left in a destabilized position. What remains is the question of how these worlds are tolerated in this destabilized form? Can they continue indefinitely in such a way? This place of discomfort is the abject, that which is contrary to everyday harmony. Often the locus of the abject can be expressed in violence. In the case of the Holocaust the abject impacted the individual Jewish people and the wider community of Germany and the world. The meaning that was derived to spark the violence and the meaning that remains are in stark contrast. Prior to the Holocaust the Jewish people were not abject to their community, but with a little guidance and propaganda they were led to a mass hysteria that the world hopes to never witness again. During Europe’s enlightened period the annihi...

I co-wrote a short piece on using computational methods in a history course.  If you're interested in teaching text and data mining, digital humanities, and digital methods - you might be interested in this .

Title slide for the talk. The Third Legitimation Code Theory Conference  (#LCT3 on twitter) is coming up this year and I have submitted a paper co-authored with Shi Chunxu   ( who runs the LCT Research Group in China  & works on legal discourse with LCT and Systemic Functional Linguistics).  We have a couple of manuscripts in the works - so hopfully they will be published soon.  For now here is the abstract for our conference paper: Title :  Knowledge and Rhetoric:  A Specialization Analysis of Courtroom Argumentation Abstract : Legal cultures grounded on abstract principles or rhetorical appeals to moral feelings would seem to be diametrically opposed.  Yet, in courtroom argumentation, there is a balance between interpreting events with legal statutes; and moral evaluations of character and intentions (Shi, 2017). The mix of epistemic and social elements suggests a problem: what is the basis of legitimation in courtroom argumentati...

I did some digging and I found a series of old essays I wrote during High School and just after published on the che-lives.com e-zine (i.e. a blog, but we were going for a digital analog of zines put out by activists and anarchist collectives).  One of the last ones, " The Concepts of Alienation and Surplus value, A brief look ", was my first or second sociology essay for Open Foundation at Newcastle Uni (alternative pathway into Uni). I seemed to have liked situationlists,  Cyril Smith , and Non-leninist Marxists.  Here is my ealiest collection, under the pseudonym euripidies. And here is a second collection, later, under the name Monty Cantsin.