Digital Sociology seminar series launch

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Apologies for not posting on here for a while, I’ve been so busy lately, but the hard work has paid off, and I’m happy to announce both the launch of my book (!) and the roll-out of a new ongoing seminar series organised with the brilliant British Sociological Association’s Digital Sociology Study Group which I’m very proud to be a contributor to. Details below:

We are happy to announce the roll out of an ongoing series of discussions hosted by the British Sociological Association’s Digital Sociology Study Group. 

Starting from July 15th 2020, The Digital Sociology Study Group will be hosting monthly discussions, workshops, and book launches with academics, researchers, authors, practitioners, and activists exploring a range of issues around digital sociology. These will be hosted online and available to all who wish to take part. 

The first session, taking place 13:00 – 13:45 on July 15th, will be a book-launch for ‘Designing the Social: Unpacking Social Media Design and Identity’ written by Harry Dyer, a member of the Digital Sociology Study Group and a Lecturer in Education at the University of East Anglia. This will be a 20 minute introduction to the book from Harry, followed by a Q+A. Attendees will be able to purchase the book for a 20% discount from Springer.com using a discount code announced during the event (valid Jul 15, 2020 – Aug 12, 2020). 

We would like to use this launch as a space to also hear from attendees about what you would like to see from these monthly discussions moving forward, so please do come with suggestions and ideas for the group going forward. We hope to make this a useful and accessible series for all levels.

The event will be hosted using Jitsi, a secure, free open-source video-hosting alternative to Zoom with end-to-end encryption. To access the discussion, simply visit meet.jit.si/DigitalSociology. We will be muting cameras and microphones upon arrival. To talk and contribute, simply unmute yourself.

We look forward to seeing and talking to you all, and hope this monthly will be a useful resource moving forward, especially at a time where face-to-face meeting is restricted.

All the best,

British Sociological Association Digital Sociology Study Group

Digital Sociology Podcast

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I’m really happy to share with you all a lovely interview I had with Dr Chris Till, a lovely and talented lecturer at Leeds Beckett University.

The interview is the latest episode of his Digital Sociology podcast series, where Chris interviews researchers about their work. It was a real pleasure and an indulgence to get to talk to an engaged audience about my work. Chris is a great interviewer and I think it’s actually a lovely chat!

You can find it in all good podcast apps. Just search ‘digital sociology’ and you’ll find it!

Alternatively, the link to the soundcloud is here. Have a listen and let me know what you think!

Understanding the Social in a Digital Age

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I’m really proud to be running this brilliant event with the equally brilliant Zoetanya Sujon. We’ve been planning this for a while now, and we’re really happy to release the call for papers. It’s a free event, with two brilliant and exciting keynote speakers. We’d love it to be a lively day, so please do submit abstracts.

If you have any questions, email us at @UnderstandingTheSocial@gmail.com. Abstracts due August 28th 2018.

 

Understanding the social in a digital age: An interdisciplinary conference on media, technology, and the social

The pervasiveness of social media has led to both the rise and erasure of ‘the social’. The social is increasingly evasive, at once found everywhere and nowhere. Social media are widely lauded for connecting people and enabling richer, more dynamic socialities yet many critique these processes as emptying out social connection in favour of data accumulation, self-promotion, and platform capitalism. Similarly, these new ways of experiencing, augmenting, and understanding the social are rife with their own socio-cultural and socio-economic biases, born out through designers and users, meaning not every user experiences these spaces and relates to these technologies in the same manner. It becomes apparent that ‘the social’ presumes a singular experience, when realities are far more diverse.

Current research on social media draws in an interdisciplinary manner from a wide range of thinking on what the social means, and is increasingly challenging extant theories and conceptions of the social. This poses a number of questions for how we consider, define, and explore the social, and crucially what our responsibilities are as researchers and educators. This also poses a number of opportunities to work across disciplinary boundaries to explore and reframe our understandings of media, technology, and the social.

Keynotes will be given by Professor Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Professor Gina Neff, Oxford Internet Institute.

This event aims to critically examine not only the meanings of the social in contemporary digital practices across cultures, but also challenges underlying epistemologies of the social in research and popular cultures. Papers may approach the topic from theoretical, conceptual, and/or empirical positions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Challenges of and negotiations around agency and structure
  • The relationship between technology, self, and society
  • Educational challenges and responsibilities in the digital age
  • Changing socialities in the face of platform capitalism, the sharing economy, the gig economy, the rise of mediation, & networked selves
  • The embedding and disembedding of socio-cultural resources online
  • Resistance and transgression on, in, with, and through technology
  • The role of designers, users, researchers and the public in the framing, conceptualisation, and representation of ‘the social’ online
  • Extant and emerging social structures in the digital age
  • Boundaries between online and offline social practices
  • Affordances and mediation of social practices
  • Alternative media and sub-altern communities
  • Technological mediation of public / private
  • Digital citizenships and the politics of belonging
  • Emerging technologies and digital futures

This list is merely suggestive of the range of topics of interest to the organisers and is not in any way restrictive of possible interpretations of the theme.  We encourage contributors to be imaginative in formulating ideas and paper proposals.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short bio of 100 words should be submitted via email by 28th August 2018.

You will receive notification of the outcome of your submission by September 30. Submissions from early career researchers are highly encouraged. Final papers should be no longer than 8,000 words / 20 minutes. All those who submit final papers by January 7th will also be invited to submit to a special edition of an international peer-reviewed journal.

The event is free to attend and present, and will be hosted at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning and the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, on the 8th January 2019.

Key dates:

Abstract submission: August 28th 2018

Notification of outcomes: September 30th 2018

Draft papers due: January 7th 2019

Conference: January 8th 2019, at UEA

Organisers:

Dr Zoetanya Sujon (University of Arts London)

Dr Harry Dyer (University of East Anglia)

Enquiries and abstract submission: UnderstandingTheSocial@gmail.com

ACCS 2018 Panel – Fearful Futures and How to Navigate Them

/ Harry T Dyer / 1 Comment

Next week I’m going to be heading to Japan to attend the Asian Conference on Cultural Studies with some of my UEA colleagues from the School of Education and Lifelong learning.

The conference theme is: ‘Fearful Futures: Cultural Studies and the Question of Agency in the Twenty-First Century’. It looks like an amazing event, with some really interesting panels and speakers. The full programme can be found here . It’s a provocative and interesting theme to tackle that speaks to the current climate, and I’m really interested to see the sorts of research and discussions that come out of the event!

Our panel details are below. We’ll be tweeting about the event on our joint twitter page (@CCSEResearch), so follow along if you’re interested! If you’re in attendance, come and see us! I’m excited about the event, and have to say, our symposium sound pretty damn awesome.

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Call for Papers: Digital Culture and Education

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A call for papers is out for a special edition of Digital Culture & Education, an international open access peer-reviewed journal. I recently got named as an editor of the journal and am really happy to be helping to launch this exciting special edition.

Full information can be found here, feel free to email me for a discussion about it!

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La plume de ma tante… What French language lessons can tell us about current UK digital skills education

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A quick French lesson

Over the last few days I’ve been mulling over the state of digital skills education in the current UK educational system, reflecting on a phrase that I randomly heard for the first time in forever on a BBC podcast – “La plume de ma tante”.

For those not familiar, ‘la plume de ma tante’ was a phrase commonly used in French language teaching in the UK for the first half of the 20th teaching. It translates literally as “the quill of my Aunt”, and it was for a long time one of the very first things every British student of the French language would learn in a French lesson.

You might be thinking to yourself that it is a really odd phrase to learn at the beginning of a French language course, and you would be entirely right. It was used as a functional example of French grammar. The phrase shows how the definite article and possessive adjectives change form according to gender. A useful grammar lesson for sure, and one that has useful applications for a study of the language, but nonetheless ‘la plume de ma tante’ was such an obscure phrase it was fairly useless if you wanted to learn practical French phrases.

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Upcoming one-day conference, Oxford, January 2018

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As this year closes in already filling up my diary for 2018… First event London the books for me is a brilliant and rammed one-day event in Oxford about ‘materialities and mobilities in Education’. 

I’ll be presenting my latest about how technology is shaping transitions into higher education. The entire day looks amazing and I’m hoping to catch as many talks as possible. 
Apparently the event is fully booked AND there’s a waiting list… So if you’re coming, I’m looking forward to seeing you there! 
Full details of the day below 
——————————–
Monday January 8 2018

Materialities and Mobilities in Education – One-Day Conference

School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, UK (Gottman Room)

Kindly sponsored by the Economic Justice and Social Transformation research cluster

9.30 – 10.00am: Registration

10.00 – 11.00am: Welcome and Keynote 1

‘Spatial imaginaries’ and the transition to university: an intersectional analysis of class, ethnicity and place (Michael Donnelly, University of Bristol).

11.00 – 1.00pm: Parallel Sessions

 1a (Gottman Room)

i. Mobile preschools, mobilities and materialities (Danielle van der Burgt and Katarina Gustafson, Uppsala University)

ii. Moving beyond immobility: narratives of undergraduate mobility at the ‘local’ college (Holly Henderson, University of Birmingham)

iii. We’re going on a journey: materialities and mobilities in the Outward Bound Trust (Jo Hickman Dunne, Loughborough University)

iv. Building colleges for the future: pedagogical and ideological spaces (Rob Smith, Birmingham City University)

v. The construction of hypermobile subjectivities in higher education: implications for materialities (Aline Courtois, University College London)

1b (Gilbert Room)

i. Materiality and meaning-making: towards creative mapping praxis on ‘post-conflict’ Belfast (Amy Mulvenna, University of Manchester)

ii. Materiality and the formation of transnational identities among British Ghanaian children schooling in Ghana (Emma Abotsi, University of Oxford)

iii. The school bus as agentic assemblage (Cathy Gristy, Plymouth University)

iv. Learning ‘the feel’ in the wooden boat workshop: material perception as understanding (Tom Martin, University of Oxford)

v. Relational mobilities: global citizenships between international ad local private schools (Sophie Cranston, Loughborough University)

1.00 – 1.30pm: LUNCH (Gottman Room)

1.30 – 2.15pm: Keynote 2

Choreographies of belonging: Reimagining ‘local’ students’ everyday (im)mobiities in Higher Education (Kirsty Finn, Lancaster University)

2.30 – 4.30pm: Parallel Sessions

Session 2a (Gottman Room)

i. International study in the global south: linking institutional, staff, student and knowledge mobilities (Parvati Raghuram, Open University)

ii. Higher education mobilities: a cross-national European comparison (Rachel Brooks, University of Surrey)

iii. Transnational encounters. Constructions of schools and (post)colonialism across continents 1945 – 1975 (Ning de Conick-Smith, Aarhus University)

iv. The space in-between: the materiality and sociality of the international branch campus in China (Kris Hyesoo Lee, University of Oxford)

v. Materialities and (im)mobilities in transnational capacity-building projects in higher education (Hanne Kristine Adriansen, Aarhus University)

Session 2b (Gilbert Room)

i. ‘In two places at once: academics with caring responsibilities, conference mobility and the role of communication devices’ (Emily F. Henderson, University of Warwick)

ii. Data and school spaces – materialisations, circulations and temporalities (Matt Finn, Exeter University)

iii. The role of technology in shaping student identity during transitions to university: how technology is affecting the way students experience and conceptualise the university as a social, academic and physical space (Harry T. Dyer, University of East Anglia)

iv. Making space for academic work (Mary Hamilton, Lancaster University)

v. Materialities and mobilities of the university: widening participation students’ narratives of success (Emma Wainwright, Anne Chappell and Ellen McHugh, Brunel University London)

vi. Between omnipotence and immobility: a comparison of banking, Hollywood and further study as popular pathways amongst graduates from an elite university in New York (John Loewenthal, Oxford Brookes University)

4.45 – 5.30pm: (Gottman Room) Closing Remarks; Book Launch and Wine

One day symposium on ‘researching young people, digital technologies and health’

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Apologies for the lack of posts here lately! It’s been a manic summer full of running around, writing, and planning my next research project, and I’ve already sunk back into the new year teaching schedule…

If you’re curious about some of the things I’ve been doing this summer, you can listen to this podcast I recorded over the summer, or read this article I wrote for The Conversation. I’ll be updating this blog on my new research project as it progresses and evolves.

For now, please find below some information about a brilliant upcoming event in Manchester in a few weeks time. The lineup is brilliant, including some of my favourites;  Deborah Lupton and Huw Davies. I’m busy on the Friday, otherwise I’d be there soaking up the wealth of knowledge, but I hoping others will go and share some of the ideas on Twitter!

 

All the information can be found below!

 

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Online news, fake news, filter bubbles, and mainstream media. Or how I learnt to stop retweeting Trump. 

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A report came out today from the Reuters Institute in Oxford University, published by Rasmus Neilsen, detailing where people get their news nowadays. It’s really interesting, and confirms what many researchers have suggested in the last few years, that the internet is becoming an important space for the production, consumption, and sharing of news.

The report notes that 84% of the 18-24 year old participants viewed the internet as their main source of news, though interestingly only 24% of 18-24 year olds viewed the more narrow category of ‘social media’ as their main source as news. This says a lot for a working definition of social media, for our understanding of where young people are on the internet, and for our understanding of how young people use the internet. Researchers need to continue to grapple with the shifting boundaries of social media, and clearly need to continue to broaden their scope beyond just Twitter and Facebook in order to understand the entirety of the young people’s online actions and interactions.

With only 4% of participants viewing print media as the main source of news, and 9% listing TV as the main source, it is clear that the shift towards online news consumption is not abating any time soon. However, we also need to consider another form of news consumption that we can begin to unpack through looking at Fiske’s ideas around ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’.

Fiske’s writing in the 1980s attempted to problematise the narrative around how we consumed media. Rather than viewing the relationship between audience and media as a simplistic one-way street in which the media told us how to feel about an issue, Fiske argued that there was a distinction between ‘mass culture’ and ‘popular culture’ that needed to be considered. Mass culture in essence is the culture that is presented to us by the institution of the media. However, Fiske noted that we could resist, subvert, and challenge these messages, and that we could in turn create our own culture; popular culture. Popular culture, in Fiske’s words, is “made by the people, not produced by the culture industry”, and therefore contains the voices and ideas of the people. Fiske suggested therefore that we need to understand both how culture is presented to us, but equally how it is used, and what life it took on when it came in contact with a socially grounded audience. He noted that:

“…by ignoring the complexity and creativity by which the subordinate cope with the commodity system and its ideology in their everyday lives, the dominant underestimate and thus devalue the conflict and struggle entailed in constructing popular culture within a capitalist society”

This suggests therefore that news is not just what we read and consume from a popular news source, it is also our reactions to these events and issues.  We can understand news not only as a product of ‘mass culture’ passed to us by the news media, but also as ‘popular culture’ created in part through our reaction to the news. Through our responses to Trump’s Tweets, through our browsing of vitriolic comment sections, through reading our Aunt’s Facebook posts, through reading blogs, we are consuming both ‘popular culture’ and ‘mass culture’.

Interestingly, mass culture and popular culture are not separate or separable; they exist together, meaning that popular culture, though subversive, contains multiple layers and multiple voices (or what Bakhtin termed ‘Heteroglossia’). As Fiske notes:

“A text that is to be made into popular culture must, then, contain both the forces of domination and the opportunities to speak against them, the opportunities to oppose or evade them from subordinated, but not totally disempowered, positions. Popular culture is made by the people at the interface between the products of the culture industries and everyday life”.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the internet, where we are surrounded by issues as they unfurl, with many layers of commentary, and many attempts to create ‘popular culture’. Thus popular culture becomes a battleground as multiple forces attempt to create the narrative of the news and shape popular culture out of the remnants of mass culture. The news then is not the battleground here, instead it is people’s reaction to the news. In otherwords, the news is arguably less important today than the reaction to the news.

This is increasingly apparent through Trump’s retweeting of News platforms such as the Drudge Report and Fox News, and his attempts to delegitimise other sources such as MSNBC and the New York Times. We can see the multiple interacting layers of popular culture in action as Trump provides his own attempt at the creation of popular culture. This is inevitably followed by other users retweeting Trump and providing their own commentary, followed by other users reacting to this…and so on… Indeed, this even becomes cyclical as Trump’s tweeting then become the news, which is then further commented upon. Thus popular culture and mass culture become largely inseparable online, and the division between what is news and what isn’t becomes hazy.

When we consider how we consume news, and where this comes from, we must not forget to also consider how we create and perpetuate news. We must consider what voices we are amplifying, what narratives we are resisting, and what sources we are challenging. We must not forget that retweeting users that we disagree with in some manner amplifies their voice through their heteroglossic presence. The internet is not a level playing ground for everyone, and as users we choose to give credence to others through following and retweeting them. We should think about who we allow to create popular culture, and also whose voices we amplify, even in protest to them. Finally, both users and researchers should understand that the news isn’t just something that comes from a newspaper or a website, but that it increasingly is a complex mix of many voices and agendas.