The heatwave was not fake, but lots of things are. If you want to know more about the word fake and its descendants and the fake world we live in #AI #linguistics makingsciencepublic.com/2026/05/22/f...

WHO (and MSF) lack of attention to social sciences was noted as a key failure in their own review of the 2013 outbreak. Clearly a lesson not learned...

Young men torched an Ebola center bc they were mad they couldn't retrieve their friend's body for burial, AP reports. People get mad when their loved ones are disappeared. If that's not taken seriously, the whole response will go south. My piece from 2015 www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/ar...

Very interesting study of the differences between human and robot driving through a focus on driver training. Looking for Trouble: Pre‐Intervention Monitoring in Human and AI Driver Training - Broth - Symbolic Interaction - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

'The Three Rs of Fear Messaging in a Global Pandemic: Recommendations, Ramifications and Remediation' declared the Top Viewed paper in the 2024 volume of Clincial Psychology & Psychotherapy www.dingwallenterprises.co.uk/top-viewed-a...

E.g., Gail Jefferson (1990) on three-part lists in social interaction. We mustn't fool ourselves into letting the gibberish machines take credit for the rich repertoire of interactional resources humans have devised in order to conduct human business. This is human social technology. It is art.

Coincidentally, the number of staff currently at risk of redundancy (2700) at the University of Nottingham is the same as the number of jobs at risk at British Steel. Yesterday, the govt said they aren't neutral on job losses & so pledged to save those steel jobs. Watch as they blithely ignore HE.

In honour of Attenborough's 100th - on tensions between science and media narration (R.Dingwall and M. Aldridge) ‘Television wildlife programming as a source of popular scientific information: a case study of evolution’, Public Understanding of Science, 2006, 15; 2: 131-52. doi.org/10.1177/0963...

A sight to behold - the magnificent and historic York Minster in springtime #medievalsky

New Article in Symbolic Interaction: "Accomplishing Ethics-Work as a Generic Social Process" by Deana Simonetto @deanasimonetto.bsky.social Antony Puddephatt #sssi #research #ethics #ethnography

Dr Richer's views are unexceptionable - but could only come from Oxford, whose hostility to qualitative social science, except in anthropology, is notorious. Big Tech values this - Eg the WIT group at KCL. Great work on Alzheimers by @alisonpick.bsky.social et al www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Policy drift in this area has gone on long enough. There is no single other thing that the govt could do that would make as much difference to the health and well-being of children, and their families. Rebuilding the HV service must be a priority. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

4 copper beech trees flanked by two horse chestnuts. #wollatonpark

Very interesting but strong echoes of my A level French class 60 years ago! For me, exposure to a different culture led to sociology but the journey began with discussions of Sartre, existentialism, the construction of reality and moral responsibility for the results www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Our edited collection “Sensing Life. The Social Organisation of the Senses in Interaction” (Edited By Will Gibson, Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Dirk vom Lehn) is out. Thanks to the contributors! www.routledge.com/Sensing-Life...

'If lazy and lop-sided thinking about STEM is wrong about the past, it’s even more obviously wrong about the present and the future. How many of the world’s most pressing problems will be solved by science alone? Not many.'

The grudging disclosure of the Epstein files by the US government has rightly attracted a great deal of commentary...There has, however, been much less discussion of the motivations of the men involved. www.socialsciencespace.com/2026/04/jg-b...

Who needs a Camellia House, these camellias are thriving in the sensory garden. #formalgarden #wollatonpark #camellias

My visits to Wollaton Hall Deer Park never disappoint. Today saw Egyptian Geese in trees, Grey Herons nesting, the inevitable deer and my first Mandarin, Green Woodpecker and Sand Martins of the year #UKBirding

Colourful fair on a sunny day at Wollaton Park

Personally I don't like tossing the word 'fascist' around quite so freely - but once you get past that, this is a very useful account of some of the reasons why sociology has something to contribute to the development of well-informed democratic citizens. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Just to say, it features three women I admire, Cameron and photography, Somerville and astronomy and Marcet and chemistry (and also a little something on philology, not just geology, biology and all that)

In this week's post I return to the 19th century and explore various aspects of the history of science around Tennyson - inspired by Richard Holmes's new biography makingsciencepublic.com/2026/03/27/t...

Another way to sneak in ID for UK citizens?

But still no-one offering deep-dish Chicago pizza...can't even get it in London 😡 www.theguardian.com/food/2026/ma...

This paper might be of interest to people working in women's health and/or sport, especially in considering the 'ontological pervasiveness' of women's bodies, also check the acknowledgements for a rant: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #sociology #health #qualitative #socialscience

In the past I have dealt with metaphors for how we work with AIs and metaphors for how AI works. In this post I deal with metaphors that creep into AIs' workings. makingsciencepublic.com/2026/03/20/m...

This is a brilliant piece of work, especially in explaining why we should be sceptical about calls for national vaccination.

Great paper by a former PhD student. Periods, Pains, Pills, and Performance—Fighting Blood, Bodies and Biology - AlHashmi - Sociological Forum - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Do I hear echoes of a Labour Government's decision to fund the Humber Bridge just ahead of a crucial by-election in Hull?

The meningitis outbreak is exposing the new world of post-Covid anxiety, by Professor @rwjdingwall.bsky.social of @spsatntu.bsky.social for @telegraph.co.uk #meningitis #MenB #vaccines www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03...

If you want to have a giggle, here is me on the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast talking about my life in in the #hiphilangsci and, boy, did I have some lucky breaks hiphilangsci.net/2026/03/15/p...

That's funny, I could have sworn he said something about not needing Royal Navy vessels because the war was already won. You broke it Don, you fix it.

Goodhart’s law never dies: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In this case measuring the proportion of research active staff has encouraged behaviour where the non research active are no longer classified as staff.

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

There is only one plausible candidate for a banknote - Larry the Downing Street cat - in honour of outstanding public service. Do we need a petition on this? Maybe also animals awarded the Dickin Medal = Victoria Cross for animals? @number10cat.bsky.social

Harvey Sacks in the NYTimes - www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/s... #EMCA #harveysacks #conversationanalysis

"For your people have corrupted themselves. ... They have made themselves a molten calf, and worshipped it and sacrificed to it, and said, ‘This is your god’" (Exodus 32:7-8).

Happy birthday NHSD www.socialsciencespace.com/2026/03/cele...

Spread the word! The next York Conference on Conversation Analysis will be held 17-18 July. Encourage your MA/PhD students to submit an abstract. Deadline: 10 April. In addition to presenting their research, Ana Cristina Ostermann and Richard Ogden will also deliver post-conference workshops!

FT comments section this morning - saying what everyone else is thinking, right?

Thinking today of a former student in the Gulf military. Obvs in such roles, you expect you might have to put your life on the line one day. But it should be for a better cause than keeping Netanyahu out of jail and distracting US attention from Trump's involvement with Epstein.

Watching a TV show and a senior academic has bookshelves in their office with plenty of space for new books. I’m used to suspending disbelief but this is ridiculous.

Last shout-out for my post on #AI, #metaphor and #magic! makingsciencepublic.com/2026/02/27/m...

Worth a few minutes attention from anyone who thinks the UK problems of GP service are unique. Sufficient and Efficient Spending on Primary Care Benefits National Health and Health Systems - PHILLIPS - The Milbank Quarterly - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Presumably he also plans to teach bears where to defecate

It's not a popular message, but that there are as few as 185 people earning 100k at a big, serious uni like Cardiff is actually a signal of how low UK academic salaries are, and how much professorial salaries, in particular, have eroded comparatively. www.timeshighereducation.com/news/top-ear...

It's not an easy task. It takes a certain kind of approach which combines listening closely and trying to understand the person on the other end of the line....The work across the city has had a real impact. Over the course of 2024, an extra 7,000 vaccinations were carried out'.

Healthcare in Greenland is publicly funded, free at the point of use, and despite geographical challenges considered very good. Healthcare costs in the USA are extortionate and responsible for 60% of all US bankruptcies. So maybe Denmark should be sending hospital ships the other way.