News Archive
In the data: interdisciplinary modes of machine learning - Adrian MacKenzie seminar, 10th June
Dr Adrian MacKenzie, Lancaster University, will give a paper at the fortnightly CIM seminar. 4pm, Cowling Room.
Where Do Neoliberals Go After the Market? - A one day conference, 13th June
Neoliberalism is commonly identified as a belief in the self-regulating powers of markets. What then is the strategic neoliberal response to the various economic crises of the past five years? Are markets simply to be designed better or extended further? Or are there new devices, arenas and ideologies through which this technical and positivist reinvention of liberty is pursued? For example, are notions of openness (as in open data and open government) coming to replace 'the market' as the means to liberty and to what extent can openness be considered neoliberal? Are we witnessing a shift from faith in 'price' to faith in 'data'?
This one-day conference, featuring Prof Philip Mirowski, will address these questions, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including software studies, international political economy, economic sociology, social studies of finance and history of economics, to consider neoliberalism in terms of the specific instruments and formats through which its promise of freedom might now be offered.
Doctoral training event on 'evidence-based policy' - 30th May
On the 30th May, Will Davies is organising a day-long event, 'Knowledge for policy, knowledge of policy', for PhD students to discuss the interface of social scientific research and public policy. Drawing on critical and ethnographic investigations of the policy-making process, together with presentations from academics who have worked in government, the event will be valuable for any doctoral students thinking about the policy uses and influence of academic research, critically or practically, or considering a future career in the world of public policy. The day is open to all PhD students in the UK.
Digital / Moving Image and Networked Performance: on Cultural Transformations
Summer school / conference 8-12 July, University of Warwick
Will Davies article published: 'When is a market not a market?'
A new article, 'When is a market not a market?: 'Exemption', 'externality' and 'exception' in the case of European State Aid rules', written by Will Davies of CIM, has been published in Theory Culture and Society.
Celia Lury: Going Live: Towards an amphibious sociology
In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of ‘liveness’, exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in ‘live methods’ I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, for the potential it offers sociology to deploy methods reflexively in more than one medium, contrasting the methods of making middles to the methods of establishing measures of representativeness, and exploring the opportuni- ties and pitfalls of participation, or being in the middle.