What advice would you give first year PhDs?

Free writing exercises to get typing!

How is it that a blank page, with that blinking cursor, can be so intimidating? Free writing exercises are used by writers of all kinds of books and articles, from fiction to academic and journalistic. They help you "just write" when you can't think of where to start; they help you put those first few…

WalkingLab by Dr Sarah Truman and Dr Stephanie Springgay

We are WalkingLab, a queer-feminist walking research-creation collective.[i] At WalkingLab we organise international walking events, conduct research with diverse publics including youth in schools, and collaborate with artists and scholars to realise site-specific research-creation events[ii] that complicate and rupture the White-cis-hetero-ableist-patriarchal canon of walking scholarship. There is currently a global momentum on walking methods, indicated…

Top sociology podcasts

Here's a round-up of the top sociology podcasts out there recommended by academic Twitter: Thinking Allowed on the BBC - this is a classic. Laurie Taylor talks to two or three experts on a sociological topic. It has been going for years, so you have (at time of writing) 626 episodes to choose from. The…

The AI Revolution: Balancing Opportunities and Risks, by Prof Anthony Elliott

As the great wave of digital technology breaks across the world, artificial intelligence creeps increasingly into the very fabric of our lives. From personal virtual assistants and chatbots to self-driving vehicles and tele-robotics, AI is now threaded into large tracts of everyday life. It is reshaping society and the economy. Klaus Schwab, founder of the…

Poll and results: What’s the most challenging part of doing a PhD?

Here are the results of our poll: The other responses were: all of the above + 10 supervision problems impact on mental health problems with academic culture stressing over being good enough finding time to work on PhD when doing it part-time responding positively to challenging feedback From this poll, it looks like, for a…

What I want you to know about Foodbank use and food insecurity in the UK, by Kate Haddow

I am really not the sort of person to say I am intelligent and I am happy to admit I know nowt really.  I am not really the kind of person on Facebook or Twitter to get involved in deep debates like Brexit... uhhh god no, give me a good meme any day because I…