What about the authors who can’t pay? Why the government’s embrace of gold open access isn’t something to celebrate

Dismayed by news that the Government has embraced the Finch Report findings, Mark Carrigan asks what will happen to authors and early careers researchers who have not yet secured a steady stream of funding and cannot pay the upfront fees required of gold open access

5 Minutes with Professor Rachel Pain: “Research capacity is our greatest resource, and collaboration at any level has the potential to make for excellent research”

Rachel Pain talks with Mark Carrigan to discuss the impact agenda, collaborative research, and the distinct opportunities and challenges posed to the academic community by the Research Excellence Framework (REF2014). She finds that now is the time for universities to re-evaluate existing relations within and between the academy and wider society. Especially in this time of austerity, universities should look to collaborate further with organisations not currently well represented and rewarded under the impact agenda

Noortje Marres: Technology and culture are becoming more and more entangled.

Mark Carrigan continues his investigation of data science with this latest interview with Noortje Marres on Digital Sociology. Growing digital awareness means lots of opportunities for collaboration between sociology and related fields and there is also a chance for sociologists to challenge the deeply-rooted narrative of a clash between technology and democracy

Book review: media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot

Across 13 chapters, scholars from media studies and science and technology studies offer insights into how we can see media technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena. Topics include the lived realities of network infrastructure, media technologies as always in motion, and the various interests of digital users. Mark Carrigan finds this a fascinating volume

5 Minutes with Kip Jones: “we engage in the creative process and open new doors for communication”

Kip Jones acted as Executive Producer and Author of the award-winning short film Rufus Stone (2011). This effort is the main output of a three-year New Dynamics of Ageing research project that explored the biographies of older gay and lesbian citizens and their experiences of rural living in Britain. This professionally made film was created by means of a unique collaboration between the director, Josh Appignanesi (The Infidel), and Jones. In this article Mark Carrigan, Managing Editor of the British Politics and Policy blog, interviews Jones

Evelyn Ruppert: “Social consequences of Big Data are not being attended to”

For the second interview in our Philosophy of Data Science series, Mark Carrigan interviews Evelyn Ruppert on creating an interdisciplinary forum to discuss the major changes in our relations to data, as subjects, citizens and researchers. The journal Big Data and Society will investigate how data is generated as a part of everyday digital practice and how it is curated, categorised, cleaned, accessed, analysed and acted upon. While many diverging tensions exist in the study of big data, Ruppert finds as we are at a moment of discovery and experimentation, there is greater openness to different ways of thinking

Is hybrid a desirable ‘new normal’ for academic events?

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an intense period of innovation in how academic events are mediated and communicated to online audiences. As in-person academic events begin again, Mark Carrigan, considers whether we are returning to an implicit new normal in which hybrid in-person events are the default mode of communication. Whilst this format may prove useful, he argues that the environmental and accessibility benefits of online and a-synchronous forms of communication should not be jettisoned in the urge to resume business as usual

Book review: what is a social movement? by Hank Johnston

Focusing on movement organizations and networks, what they do, and how they articulate their ideas of justice and collective interests, What is a Social Movement? aims to lay the essential groundwork for understanding this significant and exciting field of research, where it came from, and where it is headed. What makes this book so useful is how thoroughly it maps the topography of social movement research. It not only summarizes particular approaches and tendencies within the literature, but also draws out the points of contention between them and illuminates the fault lines upon which social movements research has grown and changed over the previous century, writes Mark Carrigan

From hermits to celebrities - how social media is reshaping academic hierarchies and what we can do about it

By adopting social media in increasing numbers, academics have also bought into the dynamics of social media celebrity. In this post Mark Carrigan reflects on the impact of the attention economy on academia and how attention is often unfairly concentrated on a small number of individuals. Taking this into account, he argues that well edited multi-author outlets can play an important role in distributing online attention in a more equitable fashion

An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously

A significant impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on academic life has been the way in which it has necessitated almost all traditional features of academic work to be mediated via screens. What is less frequently remarked on is how this ‘pivot to digital’ may also be shaping research via other media, specifically the rise of audible research content, such as podcasts. In this post, Mark Carrigan, reflects on how research listening has shaped his own practice and how an implicit assumption of its secondary relationship to reading, may limit our appreciation of engaging with research in a multi-modal fashion