RTE shooting on campus with former students

RTE was shooting on campus yesterday for the documentary "Generation What?", which is scientifically accompanied by several members of the School of Sociology at UCD. The documentary is about the young generation in Ireland, their values, ideals and aims in life. Our former students Kevin Myers and Amanda Slevin will present the sociological findings from interviews and a larger survey carried out in 2016.

Congrats to Özge for passing her PhD viva!

Congratulations to our student Özgecan Kesici-Ayoubi who passed her PhD viva this term. Well done! Her research titled "Attaining Modernity through Nationalism: The Kazakh Alash Orda Movement" was supervised by Prof. Malesevic. Below is an abstract of the PhD thesis:

Title: Attaining Modernity through Nationalism: The Kazakh Alash Orda Movement

The analysis of the first Kazakh national movement, the Alash Orda movement, has traditionally been confined to strictly historiographic interpretations. By broadening the analysis through macro-sociological lenses, this dissertation examines the modes in which Kazakh nationhood was first conceptualised by a Western educated elite in the Kazakh Steppe. It argues that the Alash Orda movement resorted to nationalism in an attempt to speed up the process of modernising the nation. This argument is developed through an in-depth analysis of the literature on the legacies left behind by the Kazakh intellectuals. It demonstrates that the modernist intellectuals built upon previous Kazakh intellectuals’ work in promoting self-awareness and enlightenment. Moreover, their modernist ideas are exemplified through the discourse around sedentarisation of the traditionally nomadic Kazakhs, and increased self-determination of women. The thesis also examines the practice of nationalist movements that are traditionally engaged in myth-making and national history writing, and provides an analysis of the cultural and national ‘infrastructure’, in the forms of national education or literature that the intellectuals envisioned for Kazakh nationhood. Finally, it examines the demise of the movement and the legacies it left behind for modern Kazakh nationhood. Modernity was not achieved with the emergence of the movement. However, with the implementation of the Soviet Nationalities Policy, a layering process took place. The foundations of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic were placed on understandings of Kazakh nationhood that the Alash Ordists had previously envisioned; modernity later ensued with the establishment of the Soviet Union. The dissertation hence argues that nationalism is not necessarily the result of modernity, but rather, could strategically be deployed as an attempt to attain modernity.

Podcast receives university-wide SPARC funding

Our student-led sociology podcast "Dublin Calling" (Soundcloud, iTunes, RSS), where students and staff from our faculty talk with famous sociologists about their work, but also about the life and struggles of PhD students and early career researchers, just received university-wide SPARC funding. Huge congrats to our PhD student Mark Doyle who played a crucial role in this application! The funding will be used to develop the podcast more and secure its funding for the next two years.

The aim of the SPARC programme at UCD is to help students and staff bring to life ideas for improving the university experience or the wider community. It gives students and staff a unique opportunity to work as equal partners and to stand-out amongst their peers as innovative thinkers and leaders. By working in partnership staff and students will not only achieve meaningful project results, they will also have the opportunity to develop and enhance their working relationship and come to a greater understanding of each other’s roles within the university.

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