Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

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 ...

I printed off a copy of my honours thesis , Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students' Perceptions of Knowledge Claims ,  today with a view to reread it and give it a final edit before I let people read it (and to see if I can get a research paper or two out of it). I thought I'd take a picture of the acknowledgement page and post it up here in appreciation of those who, though named and nameless, know who they are.  For those who can't make the snapshot out (click on it to expand it), it reads: "I would like to thank Albert Camus for letting me know: if there is a sin against the thesis, it lies perhaps less in despairing of the thesis as in hoping for another thesis, and in evading the implacable grandeur of the thesis we have.    Or perhaps he meant life, I can’t quite remember. I would also like to thank the proof readers, participants, fellow honours’ students, supportive friends and family, and my supervisor Dr Karl Maton ."...

Yesterday I submitted an honours thesis entitled:   " Discerning Knowers: An Exploratory Study of University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims ”.  On the final count it was 110 pages long, with twenty two thousand words in total. It changed several times from the initial conception to the final product. I have a lot more respect for people who conduct research,  it is very hard to get at what is happening in the world. Also, now I know the process isn't impossible. Even when I started the thesis there was a large part of me that thought that I couldn't write twenty thousand words; but as it turns out I wrote a lot more that didn't end up in the finished thesis. Perhaps one day, after the comments from the markers and final revisions,  I might put it online or let people read it. For now I'd like to thank my supervisor Dr Karl Maton   and present the thesis abstract bellow for anyone who might be interested. Abstract The main problem thi...