Congrats to Oskar Milik for passing his PhD viva!

Huge congrats to our PhD student Oskar Milik for passing his PhD viva last week. Oskar's thesis is titled "Protecting Face in Virtual Life: Identity and Interaction in Online Digital Games" and he was supervised by Associate Professor Aogan Mulcahy. Below is a summary of his project.

Title: Protecting Face in Virtual Life: Identity and Interaction in Online Digital Games

This project looks at heavily invested players in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games in order to see what aspects of self are projected through the computer screen, and what is left anonymous. It takes the form of a dramaturgical and ethnomethodological analysis of self-declared “hardcore” players and organizations in the online digital MMO games World of Warcraft and EVE Online. Drawing on the works of sociologists and game researchers, this project focuses specifically on the most invested players in order to see how the virtuality of their online interactions causes changes in the way the individual projects and maintains identity as well as how social control mechanisms are formed. Data was collected over a period of five years from 2011-2016 with primary sources of data being recordings taken of organizational events and speeches as well as ethnographic notes taken through participant observation.

The analysis of this data leads to three distinct outcomes that are valuable for the discipline of sociology as well as research in digital games. First, it shows that by focusing on either character-based interactions in-game or on out-of-game personality features of the player, studies performed on digital games have either studied physical-world respondent information or online linguistic interaction. In response, it presents the concept of persona to try to unify the anonymity of character-based interaction with the permanence of player-based traits. Second, this project shows how systems of social control are created and maintained through complex player-designed systems using both in-game and out-of-game resources to provide a meta-game reputation for players interested in “hardcore” play. Finally, this project highlights the challenges that in-game leaders face, and their efforts to overcome these, in trying to construct and maintain social order and social structures in a virtual environment.

Workshop: Irish synthetic population database

Associate Professor Diane Payne and colleagues at UCD are initiating a project to build a synthetic population database for Ireland. Different kinds of digital data, including social media data, geo spatial data etc might be used to enhance the synthetic database planned.

The workshop takes place at UCD on 24th -25th November 2016. This is an interdisciplinary project and we are happy to explore opportunities for research collaboration. If you would like to attend the workshop on some or all of Thursday/Friday this week, it would be helpful if you could email tara.byrne@ucd.ie to let her know your attendance.

Conference report on Shklar Symposium

Jointly funded by Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and University College Dublin, organized by Samantha Ashenden (Politics, Birkbeck) and Andreas Hess (Sociology, UCD) and held at Birkbeck College on 29th October 2016 

This one-day symposium brought together a nucleus of people with the purpose of presenting papers for a planned volume, ‘A political companion to the work of Judith N. Shklar’ (with Penn Press). In this endeavor they were joined by scholars and postgraduate students from Birkbeck and elsewhere. The day began with presentations from Bernard Yack (Brandeis University) and Tracy Strong (Southampton) on Shklar’s use of literary sources. The ensuing discussion was followed by Kamila Stullerova’s (IR, Aberystwyth) paper about Shklar’s notion of realism, which led to a lively exchange about the role of ideas in international politics and relations. Philip Spencer’s (Politics, BIrkbeck) paper about the applicability of Shklar’s idea of ‘putting cruelty first’ and how it contributes to our understanding of the crime of genocide was equally well received. The afternoon saw two more presentations, one by Samantha Ashenden (Politics, Birkbeck) about political obligation and its links to our understanding of law, and one by Andreas Hess (Sociology, UCD) about the notions of civil disobedience in Shklar’s late lectures on political obligation.

Participants agreed that the day provided for an excellent conversation, with diverse papers demonstrating several overlapping themes that will deepen the planned collection. In short, the symposium contributed greatly to fostering dialogue between the contributors to the book. It really set the ball rolling for that project, and in addition it offered postgraduate students from politics, philosophy and psycho-social studies at Birkbeck and elsewhere a taste of political theory in action. Several participants commented that it was the best academic seminar they had participated in for a long while.

Video: Masterclass on Crisis in Journalism

Barbara Górnicka (UCD Sociology PhD graduate) publishes a book on nakedness

Barbara Górnicka presents a sociological investigation – both historical and contemporary – into the problems surrounding naked bodies. She draws on her own participation in a nudist swimming club and goes on to study the often very complex and paradoxical emotions that have been associated with nakedness in the Western world for centuries. The book provides answers not only to why we find exposing our naked bodies shameful, but also why we find it sexual and erotic in the first place. It looks beneath taboos surrounding nakedness today and offers a theoretical explanation for their development over time. On the basis of her historical analysis, the author demonstrates that it was not until the late nineteenth or twentieth century that we began to see nudity as erotic.

Dr. Barbara Górnicka completed her doctoral degree in sociology at University College Dublin.

Nakedness, Shame, and Embarrassment: A Long-Term Sociological Perspective from Springer.

Dr. Watson on RTE Radio on 20th anniversary of TG4

Dr. Iarfhlaith Watson was talking on the Irish speaking radio show about the 20th anniversary of TG4. You can hear Iarfhlaith from 5min 20sec: http://rte.ie/r.html?rii=b17_21080316_2130_31-10-2016