Dr Stella Chatzitheochari will be chairing an event on Preventing and Tackling School Bullying, hosted by Inside Government. The event is aimed at School teachers and practitioners and will take place on Thursday 10th December 2015 in Central London. Further information about the event can be found on the Inside Government website http://www.insidegovernment.co.uk/event-details/school-bullying/547/#agenda.

The Festival of the Imagination will take place on campus on 16-17 October 2015 and will be the centrepiece of the University's 50^th anniversary celebrations, showcasing the work we do at Warwick through a diverse programme of events all focused around the central theme 'Imagining the Future'.

As part of this festival, there will be lots of talks and acitivities for staff and students to get involved in.

Highlighted below are some events which might be of particular interest to our Sociology community:

• ‘Is Diversity Academic in UK Universities?’ - Prof. Gurminder Bhambra is on the panel exploring this issue on Saturday 17 October at 2.15pm. This event free, but you should book tickets: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/warwick50/events/imagination/talks/diversity/
• ‘Solving Inequality’ - Inequality is one of our most urgent social problems. Poverty in Britain is at a post-war high and set to increase yet further. What prevents us from plugging the gap between rich and poor, and how can we redress the balance? This talk will take place on Saturday 17 October at 12pm. Students can attend for the discounted price of £5. More information and booking can be found at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/warwick50/events/imagination/talks/inequality/

We hope that you'll join us there!

25th November 2015, 11:00 to 17:00

WT0.05, University of Warwick

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This workshop and symposium will explore the, mostly implicit, conceptions of the human, humanity and human nature that underpin various contemporary conceptions of social life. In the context of much-publicised post-human futures, this is an invitation to reconsider the idea that social life itself is predicated on the fact that human beings are capable of such collective existence. Humans are beings who have a continuity of consciousness so that they see themselves as themselves throughout their life; human are beings who negotiate a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory identities and recognise each other as members of the same species, and they are also beings who can create and interpret cultural artefacts. Crucially, humans are beings who can deploy a sense of self-transcendence so that they are able to look at the world from somebody else’s point of view and thus conceive new social institutions.

The main focus throughout the day will be on how questions about the human are encountered in social theory and social research and what are the various implications and challenges of taking these seriously in our work. The day of activities will be divided into two parts. During the morning, we will have a participatory workshop for PhD students and early-career researchers. The goal of the workshop is to help participants negotiate the sometimes abstruse scientific, philosophical, moral, and even theological underpinnings of asking questions about ‘the human’ in the context of their own research projects. Dr Daniel Chernilo (Loughborough University) will offer a general overview of this field of enquiry as well as reflect on its various implications. We will also invite participants to reflect on their own research projects by making a brief (10-minute) presentation of their research projects and how questions about the human have been or are expected to be encountered within them. We’d like to ask all participants to reflect in advance on conceptions of the human and how they pertain to their projects. Uncertainty here is not a problem, in fact it will be a useful contribution to discussions on the day! In the afternoon, we will have a symposium in which Dr Mark Carrigan, Professor Margaret Archer and Daniel Chernilo will engage with questions of the human as they unfold in their own work on digital sociology (Carrigan), the morphogenetic society (Archer), and philosophical sociology (Chernilo).

To register your interest, please contact D.Chernilo@lboro.ac.uk and Mark@Markcarrigan.net with a brief description (500 words or less) of your research and how questions of the human are relevant to it by October 31st, 2015. The event is free but places are limited. Travel bursaries are available for those in need of it, please ask for more details.

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Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry

ERC PROJECT LAUNCH, WITH WINE AND NIBBLES

4 November 2015, 5pm-7pm

Zeeman Building (Mathematics) Room MS.04

Dr Stella Chatzitheochari will be speaking at a free ESRC seminar in London on Monday 9th November from 9.30am-12.00pm.

The seminar, organised by Centre for Longitudinal Studies at UCL Institute of Education, is hosted as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science, in collaboration with the Anti-Bullying Alliance.

For further information and to book your ticket, visit the website now.

June 23rd, University of Warwick, 10am – 4pm

R1.15, Ramphal Building

Social ontology is integral to the study of society. It is impossible to inquire into the social world without some understanding, at least tacitly, concerning the entities which make up that world and their properties and powers. However social ontology remains an often confused and contentious matter within the social sciences.

The conference is open to all PhD students and Early Career Researchers with an interest in social ontology.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/centre-for-social-ontology-phdecr-conference-tickets-17016640229

This new book edited by Margaret Archer and collecting the work of the Centre for Social Ontology’s collaborators has just been released. It is the latest volume in the Social Morphogenesis series and examines how generative mechanisms emerge in the social order and their consequences. It does so in the light of finding answers to the general question posed in this book series: Will Late Modernity be replaced by a social formation that could be called Morphogenic Society?

This volume clarifies what a ‘generative mechanism’ is, to achieve a better understanding of their social origins, and to delineate in what way such mechanisms exert effects within a current social formation, either stabilizing it or leading to changes potentially replacing it . The book explores questions about conjuncture, convergence and countervailing effects of morphogenetic mechanisms in order to assess their impact. Simultaneously, it looks at how products of positive feedback intertwine with the results of (morphostatic) negative feedback. This process also requires clarification, especially about the conditions under which morphostasis prevails over morphogenesis and vice versa. It raises the issue as to whether their co-existence can be other than short-lived.

The volume addresses whether or not there also is a process of ‘morpho-necrosis’, i.e. the ultimate demise of certain morphostatic mechanisms, such that they cannot ‘recover’. The book concludes that not only are generative mechanisms required to explain associations between variables involved in the replacement of Late Modernity by Morphogenic Society, but they are also robust enough to account for cases and times when such variables show no significant correlations.

http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319137728

The ten day festival starts tomorrow! View the complete programme here.

The festival will shine the light on social sciences by providing a variety of events for students, staff members and the wider public.

Here is a snapshot of just a few of the sessions which will take place:

• 12 May, 11.00-13.00: Dr Cath Lambert's 'Centre for Study of Women and Gender: Archive in the making' - R1.13, Ramphal
• 12, 13, 14 May, 19.15: Perfomance: 'Coney's Early Days (of a Better Nation) - Arts Centre. Booking required - book for this event here

So, join us and explore social matters throughout the years, whilst celebrating Warwick's 50th anniversary.

2 June - at The University of Warwick

The Centre for Social Ontology invites applications for this practical workshop aimed at those investigating human reflexivity through empirical research. The ‘internal conversation’ was developed by Margaret Archer as a solution to the problem of structure and agency: a mediatory mechanism that accounts for how society’s objective features influence its members to reproduce or transform society through their actions. Since initially discussed in Being Human, this account of human reflexivity has been developed through a trilogy of books reporting on empirical studies into the distinct modes through which reflexivity operates. This body of work has been used in projects across a range of disciplines and been the topic of much theoretical and methodological debate.

This workshop intends to support those who are currently undertaking or in the process of planning empirical research investigating the internal conversation. The day will begin with an introductory lecture by Margaret Archer in which she will discuss the development of her work on reflexivity, ranging from the initial formulation in Being Human through to her recent work with Pierpaolo Donati on relational reflexivity. Then Mark Carrigan (Warwick), Monder Ram (Birmingham) and Balihar Sanghera (Kent) will each give a shorter talk about their experience of investigating reflexivity through empirical research. The rest of the day will address the methodological and theoretical questions often encountered when studying reflexivity e.g. how to identify the modes of reflexivity of research subjects.

The workshop is free but registration is essential. If you would like to participate then please e-mail socialontology@warwick.ac.uk with a brief description of your project. We’re keen to adapt the content as much as possible to meet the needs of participants. If there are particular issues you would like us to address then please suggest these in your initial e-mail.

July 8th - The Shard, London​

This innovative conference brings together leading figures from a variety of fields which address issues of digital technology and digital data. We’ve invited speakers with a range of intellectual perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds who engage with questions relating to digital data and digital technology in their work. Our suggestion is that social ontology, however this might be construed, represents a potential common ground that could cut across this still rather siloed domain of inquiry into the social dimensions of digital technology.

The conference aims to explore this possibility by assembling a diverse range of perspectives and drawing them into a dialogue about a common question, without assuming a shared understanding of the topic at hand. Our aim is to extend this digitally via twitter, podcast and blog beyond the event itself, in order to facilitate an extended conversation that will draw more people into its remit as it circulates after the conference itself.

To this end, we invite each speaker to address this theme (the social ontology of digital data & digital technology) in whatever way they choose. Each speaker will have 30 mins to talk and 15 mins for questions. We’ll have an accomplished audio editor on hand to record each talk as a podcast. These will be released on www.socialontology.org and will be circulated on social media in order to try and stimulate a continuing debate around the issues raised at the conference. The hashtag for the day will be #socialontology.

This conference is aimed at people actively working in this field.

Confirmed Speakers:

• Chair: Celia Lury (Warwick)
• Noortje Marres (Goldsmiths) – Does Digital Sociology have a Problem?
• Jochen Runde (Cambridge) – Non-materiality and the Ontology of Digital Objects
• Alistair Mutch (NTU) – title TBC
• Susan Halford (Southampton) – title TBC
• Nick Couldry (LSE) – title TBC
• Emma Uprichard (Warwick) – Big Data, Complexity and Time.