Events 2011-2012

The New in Social Research

A series of talks hosted by CSISP and the Department of Sociology

Spring 2012

This series of talks and presentations seeks to engage creatively with recent debates about the role of social science in society, and from different vantage points explores the idea of innovation in social research. The series finds its starting point in the suggestion that social research capacities are today being re-distributed among a variety of agents, as powerful actors, technologies and platforms are today invested in re-tooling social practices and their analysis. Of course, social research has long been a notoriously applicable and famously flexible label, with research formats from survey research to ethnographic studies, opinion polls and reality tv arguably qualifying. However, because of a confluence of recent developments social research seems to be turning into a favoured object of innovation: from the digitization of social life to the rise of open knowledge movements and the increased emphasis on impact and ‘engaged social science’. These developments have occasioned various grand statements as to the renewal of sociology:  from the idea of a new computational social science powered by ‘big data’ to the promise of a new age of participatory social research.
 
This series seeks to bring together a diverse set of speakers to explore and think through these claims to newness in social research, approaching them as an opportunity to re-examine divisions of labour in social research. Inviting social researchers working in a variety of fields, we ask questions like: in what ways is technology a powerful organising force in social research, and in what ways is it powerless or debilitating? Does the renewed interest in ‘impactful’ social research open up new opportunities for participatory research, or does it translate this formerly progressive idea into something rather more opppresive? Given the current investment in ‘citizen science’, and more particularly ‘crowdsourced’ data collection and analysis in the natural and technical sciences, how transferable and appropriate are such models as a label for sociological research? Are new technologies and practices of data collection, analysis and visualisation enabling a displacement of research capacities from experts to amateurs, the opposite, or is this not quite the right way of framing the question? How and why? In exploring these questions, this series will be in part a practical exercise in the philosophy of social science and in part an experiment in renegotiating the boundaries, qualities and capacities of social research.

All seminars (with the exception of the March 7 event) are on Tuesdays 16.30

Location: RHB137 (Feb7, Feb21, March 20)
              RHB256 (March 27)
              NAB326 (Feb 28)
              NAB LG01 (Mar 7)

This series is organised by Noortje Marres


 
 
PDF Poster: The New in Social Research 

My Best Fiend. On the Productivity of Intellectual Enmities

Lecture series, Autumn 2011

The Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP)/the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London

Organised by Michael Guggenheim 

“My best fiend” is a lecture series, which invites scholars to reflect on their academic enemies (from movements: Marxism, to persons: Talcott Parsons, to disciplines: anthropology, to concepts: "the other"). The goal of the series is to investigate the productivity of intellectual enmities.

Science and Technology Studies has highlighted the productive role of controversies to produce epistemic objects and sort the world. Controversies align scholars with methods, theories and schools of thought, they produce orientation in otherwise confusing seas of research. But controversies also pigeonhole people into camps. They undeservedly identify complex research identities with schools and theories and create guilt-by-association. The lecture series is calling for an analysis of such constellations by the protagonists themselves.

Enemies are productive. They spark interest, they draw energy, people care about them and they care about us. Why else would people spend time denouncing this badly formulated concept of an esteemed colleague, decrying the neighbouring discipline that keeps misunderstanding the world, or keep on writing bad tempered footnotes about this mistaken theory – and thereby become complicit in this very unproductivity? Why do scholars choose this enemy and not another?

Enemies also often involuntarily direct ones thinking, researching and theorising. If an enemy posits a, people feel compelled to posit b. If she writes approvingly of c, we need to denounce it. An enemy can have more power over people’s thinking than they would probably like to have it. It is as if people are guided in their thinking not only from their research object, but by an unknown field of do’s and don’t’s, accumulated since the time of their studies, of where to go and look and where not to look.

The lecture series calls for analyzing the productivity of intellectual enemies. The speakers choose an enemy of their choice, and analyse his, her or its productivity for their own thinking, their research and their career. Doing so, they contribute to a new sociology of sociology. They revisit controversies and analyze them from within and beyond to engage in a sociological celebration of what they usually denounce.

All Lectures Tuesdays, 4.30-6pm, RHB 137

1st Nov.: Liz Moore (Goldsmiths)
Reflections on the Genesis of Intellectual Fiends

8th Nov.: Harry Collins  (Cardiff)
Good and Bad Arguments With Friends, Idiots and People Without Integrity

6th Dec.:  David Oswell (Goldsmiths)
Dances with Wolves: Latour, Machiavelli and Us

13th Dec.: Steve Fuller  (Warwick)
Bruno Latour and Some Notes on Some Also Rans.

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