#socialrealism — Public Fediverse posts

Your art history post for today: by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954), “500,000 Czechs on Nazi Front,” 1938, tempera on masonite, 24 x 18 in. (61 x 45.7 cm.), photo: Christie’s New York, 23 May 2013. #arthistory #painting #WPA #socialrealism

Context: in 1938, Germany annexed Austria. Taking over the northern part of Czechoslovakia (known as the Sudetenland) was Hitler’s next priority. The leaders of Britain, Italy, France, and Germany met in Munich to discuss the issue September 29-30, 1938. They pointedly did not include leaders of Czechoslovakia in the meeting.

The Allies agreed in that meeting to German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for Germany’s pledge of peace. This agreement is known as the Munich Pact.

And we all know how much a Nazi pledge of peace turned out to be worth. Never take a dictator at his word. Not then, not today.

"The Fire," David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1939.

Siqueiros (1896-1974) was a Mexican social realist painter, known mostly for his murals.

However, what we have here isn't Social Realism, but an experimental Abstract painting. He was known before then mostly for representational landscapes and portraits, or symbolic-yet-still-realistic political scenes. In his 1939 exhibition at the Matisse Gallery in NYC, he presented art done with new equipment and techniques. This was done with an airbrush, with stencils, in a pyroxylin lacquer now used in such things as nail polish, photography, and magicians' flash paper. He specifically used Duco, an automotive lacquer, for his Matisse show.

As it became shiny and inflexible, it looked cool, but as this was done on paper, it was quite fragile, and now is mounted on a rubber backing.

Siqueiros had an eventful life; an avowed Communist, he fought in the Spanish Civil War, was a muralist for the Obregon government in Mexico, was involved in an attempted assassination of Leon Trotsky, worked in the US and Cuba.....while some say his artistic work was interrupted by his political activity, he viewed them as one and the same.

From the Museo Blaisten, Ciudad de Mexico.

#Art #MexicanArt #DavidAlfaroSiqueiros #AbstractArt #SocialRealism

Chapters abstracts for my new book

I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗

Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age?

This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life, using illustrative real-world examples while still retaining a conceptual focus. The chapter argues that while digital technologies have transformed information access and social interaction, we need a more robust analytical framework than technological determinism or epochal generalization. It establishes the book’s aim to investigate the ontological status of personhood amid digital transformation, proposing a sociological recovery of agency as central to understanding contemporary sociotechnical change.

Chapter 2: Personal Reflexivity and Social Change

This chapter critically examines influential accounts of ‘late modernity’ from theorists like Giddens, Bauman, and Beck, particularly their claims about detraditionalization. It demonstrates how these approaches recognize the crucial relationship between personal reflexivity and social change but ultimately fail to develop adequate conceptual tools for analyzing this relationship empirically. The chapter reveals how Giddens’s structurationist approach, despite its sophistication, creates an oscillation between voluntarism and determinism that cannot properly account for the variable ways in which agents relate to their social environments. This critical analysis lays groundwork for a more robust account of reflexivity that can better grasp how digital mediation transforms everyday experience.

Chapter 3: The Realist Account of Reflexivity

This chapter introduces Margaret Archer’s realist theory of reflexivity as an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between personal and social change. It outlines Archer’s ‘three-stage model’ of structure and agency, contrasting it with ‘two-stage models’ that black-box reflexivity. The chapter explores how reflexivity operates through internal conversation, manifesting in four distinct modes (communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured) that condition how individuals navigate social constraints and enablements. Focusing on the relational and cultural dimensions of reflexivity, it demonstrates how ideas and relationships shape our deliberative processes and life projects, creating a foundation for understanding how digital platforms might transform these fundamental aspects of agency.

Chapter 4: Biography as an Ontological Category

This chapter develops biography as a critical ontological category for social analysis, moving beyond the limitations of concepts like Giddens’s ‘fateful moments’. It draws on Archer’s morphogenetic approach to conceptualize biography not as a sequence of discrete turning points but as a temporally extended process through which persons become who they are. Through critical engagement with biographical research, the chapter demonstrates how treating biography as ontologically robust provides a more secure foundation for understanding social change. It concludes by proposing two essential concepts (psychobiography and personal morphogenesis) as tools for analyzing how individuals navigate social transformation through ongoing cycles of change and stability.

Chapter 5: Personal Morphogenesis

This chapter elaborates the concept of personal morphogenesis as a framework for understanding how people change over time through their engagements with the social world. It explores how personal morphogenesis unfolds through three temporal relations: past conditioning (‘Me’), present action (‘I’), and future orientation (‘You’). Drawing on Derek Layder’s concept of psychobiography, the chapter demonstrates how social contexts and reflexive responses accumulate over time to shape who we become. Rather than reducing the individual to an individualistic frame, this approach recovers the person as a stratified entity whose biographical emergence is central to understanding social change, establishing a conceptual foundation for analyzing how platforms shape this process.

Chapter 6: Sociotechnical Transformation

This chapter traces the historical development of digital technologies from early utopian visions to contemporary critical perspectives on platforms. It examines how the initial rhetoric of technological utopianism has given way to growing concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and digital power. The chapter offers a periodization of digital change from Web 1.0 to social platforms to generative AI, highlighting how technological shifts have transformed user experiences and infrastructural arrangements. It pays particular attention to the rise of “big data” as both technological development and ideological project, revealing how the epistemic claims of data science have contributed to an evisceration of human agency in platform contexts.

Chapter 7: Personal Reflexivity

This chapter analyzes how digital platforms transform personal reflexivity through three key mechanisms: the multiplication of communication channels, the digitalization of the archive, and the problem of cultural abundance. It demonstrates how these changes create conditions of distraction and cognitive triage, making sustained reflection increasingly difficult in platform environments. The chapter introduces an adverbial approach to understanding platform effects, focusing on how reflexivity becomes distracted rather than what people reflect upon. By examining the proliferation of digital interruptions and cultural options, it reveals how platforms shape the temporal structure of reflexive deliberation, with significant consequences for personal identity and life projects.

Chapter 8: Collective Reflexivity

This chapter investigates how platforms transform collective action and social movements through two key mechanisms: the ease of mobilization and the rise of computational politics. It develops the concept of ‘fragile movements’ to describe how platforms enable rapid assembly while undermining the organizational capacities needed for sustained collective action. Alongside ‘distracted people’ these ‘fragile movements’ create a problematic dynamic where democratic steering of sociotechnical change becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter examines how collective reflexivity, the capacity of groups to deliberate about shared concerns, is simultaneously enhanced and compromised by platform mediation, with profound implications for normative transformation in digital societies.

Chapter 9: Platformised Socialisation

This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to address how socialization processes are transformed under platform conditions. It challenges simplistic notions like ‘digital natives’ while acknowledging the profound ways platforms reshape how people become who they are. The chapter examines how the cultural context for socialization changes through platform mediation, particularly in how potential and possible selves are encountered and constructed. It concludes by situating the analysis within broader questions of epochal change, arguing that while platforms fundamentally alter the parameters within which human agency unfolds, they do not create wholly new types of people. Instead, they reconfigure the temporal and relational dimensions of personal becoming in ways that demand new conceptual tools for social analysis.

#archer #humanAgency #MorphogeneticApproach #PlatformAndAgency #reflexivity #socialRealism

Chapters abstracts for my new book

I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗

Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age?

This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life, using illustrative real-world examples while still retaining a conceptual focus. The chapter argues that while digital technologies have transformed information access and social interaction, we need a more robust analytical framework than technological determinism or epochal generalization. It establishes the book’s aim to investigate the ontological status of personhood amid digital transformation, proposing a sociological recovery of agency as central to understanding contemporary sociotechnical change.

Chapter 2: Personal Reflexivity and Social Change

This chapter critically examines influential accounts of ‘late modernity’ from theorists like Giddens, Bauman, and Beck, particularly their claims about detraditionalization. It demonstrates how these approaches recognize the crucial relationship between personal reflexivity and social change but ultimately fail to develop adequate conceptual tools for analyzing this relationship empirically. The chapter reveals how Giddens’s structurationist approach, despite its sophistication, creates an oscillation between voluntarism and determinism that cannot properly account for the variable ways in which agents relate to their social environments. This critical analysis lays groundwork for a more robust account of reflexivity that can better grasp how digital mediation transforms everyday experience.

Chapter 3: The Realist Account of Reflexivity

This chapter introduces Margaret Archer’s realist theory of reflexivity as an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between personal and social change. It outlines Archer’s ‘three-stage model’ of structure and agency, contrasting it with ‘two-stage models’ that black-box reflexivity. The chapter explores how reflexivity operates through internal conversation, manifesting in four distinct modes (communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured) that condition how individuals navigate social constraints and enablements. Focusing on the relational and cultural dimensions of reflexivity, it demonstrates how ideas and relationships shape our deliberative processes and life projects, creating a foundation for understanding how digital platforms might transform these fundamental aspects of agency.

Chapter 4: Biography as an Ontological Category

This chapter develops biography as a critical ontological category for social analysis, moving beyond the limitations of concepts like Giddens’s ‘fateful moments’. It draws on Archer’s morphogenetic approach to conceptualize biography not as a sequence of discrete turning points but as a temporally extended process through which persons become who they are. Through critical engagement with biographical research, the chapter demonstrates how treating biography as ontologically robust provides a more secure foundation for understanding social change. It concludes by proposing two essential concepts (psychobiography and personal morphogenesis) as tools for analyzing how individuals navigate social transformation through ongoing cycles of change and stability.

Chapter 5: Personal Morphogenesis

This chapter elaborates the concept of personal morphogenesis as a framework for understanding how people change over time through their engagements with the social world. It explores how personal morphogenesis unfolds through three temporal relations: past conditioning (‘Me’), present action (‘I’), and future orientation (‘You’). Drawing on Derek Layder’s concept of psychobiography, the chapter demonstrates how social contexts and reflexive responses accumulate over time to shape who we become. Rather than reducing the individual to an individualistic frame, this approach recovers the person as a stratified entity whose biographical emergence is central to understanding social change, establishing a conceptual foundation for analyzing how platforms shape this process.

Chapter 6: Sociotechnical Transformation

This chapter traces the historical development of digital technologies from early utopian visions to contemporary critical perspectives on platforms. It examines how the initial rhetoric of technological utopianism has given way to growing concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and digital power. The chapter offers a periodization of digital change from Web 1.0 to social platforms to generative AI, highlighting how technological shifts have transformed user experiences and infrastructural arrangements. It pays particular attention to the rise of “big data” as both technological development and ideological project, revealing how the epistemic claims of data science have contributed to an evisceration of human agency in platform contexts.

Chapter 7: Personal Reflexivity

This chapter analyzes how digital platforms transform personal reflexivity through three key mechanisms: the multiplication of communication channels, the digitalization of the archive, and the problem of cultural abundance. It demonstrates how these changes create conditions of distraction and cognitive triage, making sustained reflection increasingly difficult in platform environments. The chapter introduces an adverbial approach to understanding platform effects, focusing on how reflexivity becomes distracted rather than what people reflect upon. By examining the proliferation of digital interruptions and cultural options, it reveals how platforms shape the temporal structure of reflexive deliberation, with significant consequences for personal identity and life projects.

Chapter 8: Collective Reflexivity

This chapter investigates how platforms transform collective action and social movements through two key mechanisms: the ease of mobilization and the rise of computational politics. It develops the concept of ‘fragile movements’ to describe how platforms enable rapid assembly while undermining the organizational capacities needed for sustained collective action. Alongside ‘distracted people’ these ‘fragile movements’ create a problematic dynamic where democratic steering of sociotechnical change becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter examines how collective reflexivity, the capacity of groups to deliberate about shared concerns, is simultaneously enhanced and compromised by platform mediation, with profound implications for normative transformation in digital societies.

Chapter 9: Platformised Socialisation

This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to address how socialization processes are transformed under platform conditions. It challenges simplistic notions like ‘digital natives’ while acknowledging the profound ways platforms reshape how people become who they are. The chapter examines how the cultural context for socialization changes through platform mediation, particularly in how potential and possible selves are encountered and constructed. It concludes by situating the analysis within broader questions of epochal change, arguing that while platforms fundamentally alter the parameters within which human agency unfolds, they do not create wholly new types of people. Instead, they reconfigure the temporal and relational dimensions of personal becoming in ways that demand new conceptual tools for social analysis.

#archer #humanAgency #MorphogeneticApproach #PlatformAndAgency #reflexivity #socialRealism

Chapters abstracts for my new book

I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗

Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age?

This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life, using illustrative real-world examples while still retaining a conceptual focus. The chapter argues that while digital technologies have transformed information access and social interaction, we need a more robust analytical framework than technological determinism or epochal generalization. It establishes the book’s aim to investigate the ontological status of personhood amid digital transformation, proposing a sociological recovery of agency as central to understanding contemporary sociotechnical change.

Chapter 2: Personal Reflexivity and Social Change

This chapter critically examines influential accounts of ‘late modernity’ from theorists like Giddens, Bauman, and Beck, particularly their claims about detraditionalization. It demonstrates how these approaches recognize the crucial relationship between personal reflexivity and social change but ultimately fail to develop adequate conceptual tools for analyzing this relationship empirically. The chapter reveals how Giddens’s structurationist approach, despite its sophistication, creates an oscillation between voluntarism and determinism that cannot properly account for the variable ways in which agents relate to their social environments. This critical analysis lays groundwork for a more robust account of reflexivity that can better grasp how digital mediation transforms everyday experience.

Chapter 3: The Realist Account of Reflexivity

This chapter introduces Margaret Archer’s realist theory of reflexivity as an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between personal and social change. It outlines Archer’s ‘three-stage model’ of structure and agency, contrasting it with ‘two-stage models’ that black-box reflexivity. The chapter explores how reflexivity operates through internal conversation, manifesting in four distinct modes (communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured) that condition how individuals navigate social constraints and enablements. Focusing on the relational and cultural dimensions of reflexivity, it demonstrates how ideas and relationships shape our deliberative processes and life projects, creating a foundation for understanding how digital platforms might transform these fundamental aspects of agency.

Chapter 4: Biography as an Ontological Category

This chapter develops biography as a critical ontological category for social analysis, moving beyond the limitations of concepts like Giddens’s ‘fateful moments’. It draws on Archer’s morphogenetic approach to conceptualize biography not as a sequence of discrete turning points but as a temporally extended process through which persons become who they are. Through critical engagement with biographical research, the chapter demonstrates how treating biography as ontologically robust provides a more secure foundation for understanding social change. It concludes by proposing two essential concepts (psychobiography and personal morphogenesis) as tools for analyzing how individuals navigate social transformation through ongoing cycles of change and stability.

Chapter 5: Personal Morphogenesis

This chapter elaborates the concept of personal morphogenesis as a framework for understanding how people change over time through their engagements with the social world. It explores how personal morphogenesis unfolds through three temporal relations: past conditioning (‘Me’), present action (‘I’), and future orientation (‘You’). Drawing on Derek Layder’s concept of psychobiography, the chapter demonstrates how social contexts and reflexive responses accumulate over time to shape who we become. Rather than reducing the individual to an individualistic frame, this approach recovers the person as a stratified entity whose biographical emergence is central to understanding social change, establishing a conceptual foundation for analyzing how platforms shape this process.

Chapter 6: Sociotechnical Transformation

This chapter traces the historical development of digital technologies from early utopian visions to contemporary critical perspectives on platforms. It examines how the initial rhetoric of technological utopianism has given way to growing concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and digital power. The chapter offers a periodization of digital change from Web 1.0 to social platforms to generative AI, highlighting how technological shifts have transformed user experiences and infrastructural arrangements. It pays particular attention to the rise of “big data” as both technological development and ideological project, revealing how the epistemic claims of data science have contributed to an evisceration of human agency in platform contexts.

Chapter 7: Personal Reflexivity

This chapter analyzes how digital platforms transform personal reflexivity through three key mechanisms: the multiplication of communication channels, the digitalization of the archive, and the problem of cultural abundance. It demonstrates how these changes create conditions of distraction and cognitive triage, making sustained reflection increasingly difficult in platform environments. The chapter introduces an adverbial approach to understanding platform effects, focusing on how reflexivity becomes distracted rather than what people reflect upon. By examining the proliferation of digital interruptions and cultural options, it reveals how platforms shape the temporal structure of reflexive deliberation, with significant consequences for personal identity and life projects.

Chapter 8: Collective Reflexivity

This chapter investigates how platforms transform collective action and social movements through two key mechanisms: the ease of mobilization and the rise of computational politics. It develops the concept of ‘fragile movements’ to describe how platforms enable rapid assembly while undermining the organizational capacities needed for sustained collective action. Alongside ‘distracted people’ these ‘fragile movements’ create a problematic dynamic where democratic steering of sociotechnical change becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter examines how collective reflexivity, the capacity of groups to deliberate about shared concerns, is simultaneously enhanced and compromised by platform mediation, with profound implications for normative transformation in digital societies.

Chapter 9: Platformised Socialisation

This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to address how socialization processes are transformed under platform conditions. It challenges simplistic notions like ‘digital natives’ while acknowledging the profound ways platforms reshape how people become who they are. The chapter examines how the cultural context for socialization changes through platform mediation, particularly in how potential and possible selves are encountered and constructed. It concludes by situating the analysis within broader questions of epochal change, arguing that while platforms fundamentally alter the parameters within which human agency unfolds, they do not create wholly new types of people. Instead, they reconfigure the temporal and relational dimensions of personal becoming in ways that demand new conceptual tools for social analysis.

#archer #humanAgency #MorphogeneticApproach #PlatformAndAgency #reflexivity #socialRealism

After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

I’ll do one more read through when it gets back from my proof reader, but the book I started in September 2008 with my PhD is now finished 👇

The virtue of the detraditionalisation thesis lay in its insistence on a meta-process, a change which exceeds empirical trends which can be measured. It provides, as Lundby (2009: 141) puts it, “a meta approach that makes it possible to integrate very different results of surveys and qualitative investigations into an overall coherent understanding”. The problems with the detraditionalisation thesis arose from the grandiose poetics which left it captivated by its own pronouncements about epochal change. For this reason I believe we ought to be as cautious as we can be about declaring an outcome to sociotechnical change, without dispensing with the recognition that there will be an outcome. If anything the vast investment in LLMs and the data infrastructure which supports them, intersecting with a post-pandemic political economy which appears to be leaving neoliberalism behind, heralds an intensification of change rather than a diminution (Tooze 2021, Varoufakis 2023). It’s possible this might be leading towards a perpetual polycrisis, a social order unable to stabilise itself amidst an accelerating climate catastrophe. But even this doom loop, suggested by Seymour’s (2024) notion of disaster nationalism, represents a social order of sorts, even if it’s an apocalyptic one. 

It is difficult to incorporate this horizon of crisis into our frame of reference without subordinating our analysis of the interaction phase through which it is being generated. However by  approaching platformisation through the concepts of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, I have argued that we can avoid both grandiose (and premature) pronouncements about a ‘digital age’ and dismissive rejections of the reality of genuine change. The analysis I’ve offered of distracted people and fragile movements explores how platforms reconfigure rather than replace human agency. By examining how reflexivity operates within platformised contexts, tracing its biographical unfolding rather than proclaiming wholesale transformation, we gain a more textured understanding of contemporary social life. This has meant breaking with an account of agency premised, as Savage (2021: 191) puts it,  “on this ontological temporal difference between past, enduring structures, and a contemporary contingent agency that breaks from them”. Unless we can surrender this baggage, we are left with a meta-process defined through the falling away of the past, operationalising ‘tradition’ as that which is experiencing a decline and thus squeezing out continuities through definitional fiat. The problem is not an epochal horizon, as much as ontological assumptions which lead to the epistemic mistakes of pronouncing epochal change in a grandiose and premature manner. A realist conception of the platform can acknowledge its emerging status as a condition of our social existence, while remaining clear that is we who must decide what to make of it.

#biography #criticalRealism #epochalTheorising #personalMorphogenesis #PlatformAndAgency #platformStudies #socialChange #socialRealism

After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

I’ll do one more read through when it gets back from my proof reader, but the book I started in September 2008 with my PhD is now finished 👇

The virtue of the detraditionalisation thesis lay in its insistence on a meta-process, a change which exceeds empirical trends which can be measured. It provides, as Lundby (2009: 141) puts it, “a meta approach that makes it possible to integrate very different results of surveys and qualitative investigations into an overall coherent understanding”. The problems with the detraditionalisation thesis arose from the grandiose poetics which left it captivated by its own pronouncements about epochal change. For this reason I believe we ought to be as cautious as we can be about declaring an outcome to sociotechnical change, without dispensing with the recognition that there will be an outcome. If anything the vast investment in LLMs and the data infrastructure which supports them, intersecting with a post-pandemic political economy which appears to be leaving neoliberalism behind, heralds an intensification of change rather than a diminution (Tooze 2021, Varoufakis 2023). It’s possible this might be leading towards a perpetual polycrisis, a social order unable to stabilise itself amidst an accelerating climate catastrophe. But even this doom loop, suggested by Seymour’s (2024) notion of disaster nationalism, represents a social order of sorts, even if it’s an apocalyptic one. 

It is difficult to incorporate this horizon of crisis into our frame of reference without subordinating our analysis of the interaction phase through which it is being generated. However by  approaching platformisation through the concepts of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, I have argued that we can avoid both grandiose (and premature) pronouncements about a ‘digital age’ and dismissive rejections of the reality of genuine change. The analysis I’ve offered of distracted people and fragile movements explores how platforms reconfigure rather than replace human agency. By examining how reflexivity operates within platformised contexts, tracing its biographical unfolding rather than proclaiming wholesale transformation, we gain a more textured understanding of contemporary social life. This has meant breaking with an account of agency premised, as Savage (2021: 191) puts it,  “on this ontological temporal difference between past, enduring structures, and a contemporary contingent agency that breaks from them”. Unless we can surrender this baggage, we are left with a meta-process defined through the falling away of the past, operationalising ‘tradition’ as that which is experiencing a decline and thus squeezing out continuities through definitional fiat. The problem is not an epochal horizon, as much as ontological assumptions which lead to the epistemic mistakes of pronouncing epochal change in a grandiose and premature manner. A realist conception of the platform can acknowledge its emerging status as a condition of our social existence, while remaining clear that is we who must decide what to make of it.

#biography #criticalRealism #epochalTheorising #personalMorphogenesis #PlatformAndAgency #platformStudies #socialChange #socialRealism

After 16 years and 7 months I’ve finished Platform and Agency

I’ll do one more read through when it gets back from my proof reader, but the book I started in September 2008 with my PhD is now finished 👇

The virtue of the detraditionalisation thesis lay in its insistence on a meta-process, a change which exceeds empirical trends which can be measured. It provides, as Lundby (2009: 141) puts it, “a meta approach that makes it possible to integrate very different results of surveys and qualitative investigations into an overall coherent understanding”. The problems with the detraditionalisation thesis arose from the grandiose poetics which left it captivated by its own pronouncements about epochal change. For this reason I believe we ought to be as cautious as we can be about declaring an outcome to sociotechnical change, without dispensing with the recognition that there will be an outcome. If anything the vast investment in LLMs and the data infrastructure which supports them, intersecting with a post-pandemic political economy which appears to be leaving neoliberalism behind, heralds an intensification of change rather than a diminution (Tooze 2021, Varoufakis 2023). It’s possible this might be leading towards a perpetual polycrisis, a social order unable to stabilise itself amidst an accelerating climate catastrophe. But even this doom loop, suggested by Seymour’s (2024) notion of disaster nationalism, represents a social order of sorts, even if it’s an apocalyptic one. 

It is difficult to incorporate this horizon of crisis into our frame of reference without subordinating our analysis of the interaction phase through which it is being generated. However by  approaching platformisation through the concepts of psychobiography and personal morphogenesis, I have argued that we can avoid both grandiose (and premature) pronouncements about a ‘digital age’ and dismissive rejections of the reality of genuine change. The analysis I’ve offered of distracted people and fragile movements explores how platforms reconfigure rather than replace human agency. By examining how reflexivity operates within platformised contexts, tracing its biographical unfolding rather than proclaiming wholesale transformation, we gain a more textured understanding of contemporary social life. This has meant breaking with an account of agency premised, as Savage (2021: 191) puts it,  “on this ontological temporal difference between past, enduring structures, and a contemporary contingent agency that breaks from them”. Unless we can surrender this baggage, we are left with a meta-process defined through the falling away of the past, operationalising ‘tradition’ as that which is experiencing a decline and thus squeezing out continuities through definitional fiat. The problem is not an epochal horizon, as much as ontological assumptions which lead to the epistemic mistakes of pronouncing epochal change in a grandiose and premature manner. A realist conception of the platform can acknowledge its emerging status as a condition of our social existence, while remaining clear that is we who must decide what to make of it.

#biography #criticalRealism #epochalTheorising #personalMorphogenesis #PlatformAndAgency #platformStudies #socialChange #socialRealism

Para sa mga kaugnay na ulat ng @bayanmoipatrolmo: https://news.abs-cbn.com/bmpm

ArtPatrol
#SocialRealism
#Art
#CamarinesSur

Bida ang kwento ng mga ordinaryong Pinoy sa social realism artworks ni Bayan Patroller Nick Valenzuela.

#ArtPatrol
#SocialRealism
#Art
#CamarinesSur

Following our recent symposium we are inviting short blog posts (750-1500 words) reflecting on the intellectual legacy of Margaret Archer. These will be published on the Critical Realism Network blog. Here are some examples of themes these posts could address:

1. Archer’s Place in Sociological Theory:  the ways in which Archer’s ideas have been received, challenged, and transformed within the discipline. 
2. Archer’s Work within the Larger Dialogues of Critical Realism: the ways in which Archer’s ideas have contributed to and challenged the critical realist tradition. 
3. The Global Reception of Archer’s Work: the ways in which Archer’s ideas have been received, interpreted and adapted in different places. We want to explore both Archer’s role in the internationalization of British sociology, as well as the reception of her work in different countries of the Global North and Global South.
4. Archer’s Work Beyond Critical Realism: the ways in which Archer’s work has been influenced by and has influenced traditions, debates and issues beyond critical realism, such as pragmatism, moral philosophy and the philosophy of science.

We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including graduate students and early-career researchers. We also encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and contributions from scholars working in related fields, such as philosophy, anthropology, and political science.

If you’re interested in submitting a post, please contact Mark Carrigan with your idea initially.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/08/%f0%9f%93%8dcall-for-blog-posts-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialMorphogenesis #socialRealism

August 3rd, 10am-5pm at the University of Warwick

Margaret Archer’s work has had a profound impact on social theory, challenging and reshaping our understanding of agency, structure, culture and their interplay in producing social change. Her contributions to the discipline have been wide-ranging, from critical interventions in conceptual debates to discussions about the nature of our times. Archer’s engagements with other thinkers, both within and outside the critical realist tradition, have shaped contemporary sociological debates.

Karim Knio – The Immanent Causality Morphogenetic Approach (TBC)

Juan David Parra – Archer’s Morphogenesis and the Political Economy of Education Systems

Krzysztof Wielecki – The presence of Margaret Scotford Archer in Polish sociology

Lakshman Wimalasena – Reflexivity in Practice: Advancing the Working Experience through a Reflexive [Co-Design] Intervention

Richard Remelie – Measuring reflexivity

Ka Lok Yip – Archerian Realism and Phenomenology: Friends or Foes?

Anzhela Popyk – Structure and Agency: Transnational and School Transitions of Ukrainian Forced Migrant Adolescents in Poland

Catherine Hastings – Developing critical realist empirical research using Archer’s explanatory framework

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/18/%f0%9f%93%8djoin-us-on-august-3rd-to-celebrate-the-intellectual-legacy-of-margaret-archer/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialRealism

The Widower (1875-6) by Luke Fildes (English artist, lived 1843–1927). A toil-worn labourer nursing a dying child, surrounded by an uncomprehending and newly motherless brood. Fildes had worked as an illustrator for Dickens.

#Victorian #VictorianArt #SocialRealism #Motherless #Widower #Dickensian #Dickens #Poverty #VictorianEra #1800sArt

The Widower (1875-6) by Luke Fildes (English artist, lived 1843–1927). A toil-worn labourer nursing a dying child, surrounded by an uncomprehending and newly motherless brood. Fildes had worked as an illustrator for Dickens.

#Victorian #VictorianArt #SocialRealism #Motherless #Widower #Dickensian #Dickens #Poverty #VictorianEra #1800sArt

The Widower (1875-6) by Luke Fildes (English artist, lived 1843–1927). A toil-worn labourer nursing a dying child, surrounded by an uncomprehending and newly motherless brood. Fildes had worked as an illustrator for Dickens.

#Victorian #VictorianArt #SocialRealism #Motherless #Widower #Dickensian #Dickens #Poverty #VictorianEra #1800sArt

The Widower (1875-6) by Luke Fildes (English artist, lived 1843–1927). A toil-worn labourer nursing a dying child, surrounded by an uncomprehending and newly motherless brood. Fildes had worked as an illustrator for Dickens.

#Victorian #VictorianArt #SocialRealism #Motherless #Widower #Dickensian #Dickens #Poverty #VictorianEra #1800sArt

The Outskirts of Paris, 1918 #rivera #socialrealism https://www.wikiart.org/en/diego-rivera/the-outskirts-of-paris-1918

House over the Bridge, 1909 #socialrealism #rivera https://www.wikiart.org/en/diego-rivera/house-over-the-bridge

He created realism built of cold structures and isolated people. Hopper twisted the cityscape into a constructed landscape with elevated views, horizontal plains, and private, impenetrable lives. The Whitney exhibition is near-encyclopedic. https://hyperallergic.com/801406/edward-hoppers-views-of-isolation/?fbclid=IwAR1rqcPFl1L0pkKpqFI8dNk_AprITbqMSfcoRhtnC30LLAdNx7ygy3g_CMw
#modernart #museum #arthistory #socialrealism #realism #potterdayart #artcollector #realist

The Seamstress, 1946 #socialrealism #jacoblawrence https://www.wikiart.org/en/jacob-lawrence/the-seamstress-1946