I recently published a paper (open access), with my Leeds Beckett colleague Joseph Ibrahim, on a study we did on CrossFit. In this we drew on interviews with CrossFitters to try to conceptualise what kind of community, CrossFit represents. Ultimately, we suggested that the community offered by this loose network of fitness centres represents a ..read more

I have been working on a project the last few months called Beyond Meat & Memes. This is a multimodal critical discourse analysis of vegan social media activism on Instagram and TikTok. We recently launched the website for the project. This is a fairly basic site as we only had a small amount of funding ..read more

I recently published a review of a new book, Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces by Sabine Pfeiffer in Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews. You can find the published version of review on the journal website here (paywalled) or the (open access) accepted version on my institutional repository here (or get in touch with me ..read more

I have written a post on the Leeds Beckett website about a new project I am leading which is analysing vegan activist discourse on image and video-based social media. The first section is below and you can click through for the rest. Dr Chris Till, Dr Jess Drakett, and Dr Joseph Ibrahim have won a British Academy Leverhulme funded grant to conduct a new research project called “Beyond Meat & Memes”. This project investigates what kinds of strategies and tactics are being used to spread messages and recruit people to the vegan cause. Specifically, they are investigating how the increasingl ..read more

I recently wrote a new article for the Cost of Living Blog on Palantir’s contract with the NHS and how it might influence how the organisation frames patients . I have copied it in below and you can follow the link for the full article. Just after my blog post was published it was reported that pro-Palestine NHS health workers were protesting the Palantir contract due to their contracts with the Israeli state, army and intelligence services including for targeting supposed “terrorists”. Will a controversial new data platform change how the NHS “thinks ..read more

I recently published a paper in the journal Big Data and Society on. Spotify ‘s moves into health, exercise and wellness features. In this I suggested that an unacknowledged motivation for this is revealed through analysis of grey literature such as patent applications and reading of their financial strategy. I argue that a key function of such prospective innovations is Spotify trying to tell a story to investors, and the stock market in general, about their future potential capacity to generate data on health, exercise and wellness activities and provide targeted marketing on this basis. I l ..read more

For this episode I spoke to Michael Rosino about his book Debating the Drug War: Race, Politics, and the Media which comes from a detailed analysis of the discourse on drug policy and race in newspapers and the comment sections of their online versions. Michael tells me about the discourses he identified which often deny racism and racial oppression as a factor in patterns of criminalisation of groups in drug related crime statistics. Michael is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Molloy College, Long Island, New York and you can follow him on Twitter @michaelrosino You can listen to the ep ..read more

For this episode I spoke to Peter Bloom who is a Professor of Management at the University of Essex, Owain Smolović Jones who is Director of the Open University’s Research into Employment, Empowerment and Futures academic centre of excellence and Jamie Woodcock who is Senior Lecturer at the Open University. We talk about their new book Guerilla Democracy: Mobile Power and Revolution in the 21st Century which is a theoretically sophisticated analysis of digital politics. We have a fascinating chat about different examples of radical collective action (from striking cinema and restaurant workers ..read more

This episode is a really great chat I had with Ben Jacobsen and David Beer both of The University of York. We talk about their new book Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past which is an exploration of the ways in which social media engages with memory and how this becomes significant for their platforms. They focus on the “Facebook Memories” app within the Facebook platform which generates reminders to users of previous posts, photos or other content. We talk about what kinds of memories Facebook values and how it draws in previ ..read more

In this episode I spoke to Scott Timcke who is a comparative historical sociologist, with an interest in race, class, and technology in modernity. He is a research associate with the University of Johannesburg’s Centre for Social Change and a fellow at the University of Leeds’ Centre for African Studies. The basis of our discussion is Scott’s book Algorithms and the end of Politics: How Technology Shapes 21st Century American Life which was published in 2021 by Bristol University Press. Scott tells about how algorithms and processes of datafication are influencing how politics functions. In pa ..read more