Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

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...

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. 

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."  - Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Sailing from Coal Point to Croudace Bay:  Another day at Port Stephen heads:  And earlier in the same day as the first video,  sailing from Dora Creek up toward  Pulbah Island:

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...