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

There has been a huge gap since the last episode as life, work and then Covid got in the way. I will be putting out a few episodes over the next few weeks which have all been recorded recently with the exception of this first interview with Mark Wong. This was recorded in 2019 and was intended to be the first of a series which I didn’t manage to do at the time. But Mark’s work is fascinating to reflect on in 2021 as he has done fascinating work on “Hidden Youth”, that is, young people who spend all or most of their time at home engaging with other people solely online. This has been a familiar ..read more

I’m hosting an online webinar for the British Sociological Association Yorkshire Medical Sociology Group at 13:30 on 18th January 20201. This will be a talk followed by a discussion led by Catherine Price based on her paper ‘Covid-19: When Species and Data Meet’ published earlier this year in Postdigital Science and Education. The published paper is a very interesting analysis of the relations between humans, viruses and data which have been created in the current pandemic and what the consequences of this are. We have been forced to (at least temporarily) live with a new virus and take accoun ..read more

In this final episode of series 1 (we will be back next year) of the Social Theory Podcast I spoke to Morteza Hashemi about the great Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldun. See the end of this post for links to the episode. Khaldun was around in the 14th and 15th century and lived and traveled across the Islamic world including Tunisia, Egypt and Andalusia. Khaldun is a hugely important thinker who has sadly been underappreciated in many parts of the world. The innovative critical and philosophical approach to history he took revealed sociological insights which would not be matched or built on for at le ..read more

This episode features a chat with Dr Natalia Gerodetti about the early and pioneering sociologist Harriet Martineau.  See the end of this post for links to the episode. Natalia makes the case for Martineau as the “mother of sociology”. We discuss some of her fascinating biography and her independent and adventurous life which was far from usual for women in the nineteenth century. Martineau wrote a vast amount over her life in a variety of genres including fiction, journalism, political and activist interventions, popularisations of political economy (which were hugely popular. But we foc ..read more