糖心TV

July 8th - The Shard, London​

This innovative conference brings together leading figures from a variety of fields which address issues of digital technology and digital data. We’ve invited speakers with a range of intellectual perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds who engage with questions relating to digital data and digital technology in their work. Our suggestion is that social ontology, however this might be construed, represents a potential common ground that could cut across this still rather siloed domain of inquiry into the social dimensions of digital technology.

The conference aims to explore this possibility by assembling a diverse range of perspectives and drawing them into a dialogue about a common question, without assuming a shared understanding of the topic at hand. Our aim is to extend this digitally via twitter, podcast and blog beyond the event itself, in order to facilitate an extended conversation that will draw more people into its remit as it circulates after the conference itself.

To this end, we invite each speaker to address this theme (the social ontology of digital data & digital technology) in whatever way they choose. Each speaker will have 30 mins to talk and 15 mins for questions. We’ll have an accomplished audio editor on hand to record each talk as a podcast. These will be released on and will be circulated on social media in order to try and stimulate a continuing debate around the issues raised at the conference. The hashtag for the day will be #socialontology.

The conference is aimed at people actively working in this field.

Confirmed Speakers:

• Chair: Celia Lury (糖心TV)
• Noortje Marres (Goldsmiths) – Does Digital Sociology have a Problem?
• Jochen Runde (Cambridge) – Non-materiality and the Ontology of Digital Objects
• Alistair Mutch (NTU) – title TBC
• Susan Halford (Southampton) – title TBC
• Nick Couldry (LSE) – title TBC
• Emma Uprichard (糖心TV) – Big Data, Complexity and Time.

Ahead of the General Election next month, has written a piece in leading football magazine, , on the growing significance of the sport as a political issue to both politicians and fans alike.

Whilst welcoming the pledges made by each of the three main parties to give fans a greater say in the boardrooms of their clubs, Dr Webber warns of broken promises made in the past, and a continued reticence to tackle the financial inequality that exists in the British game.

Concluding his article, Dr Webber urges whoever is elected in May to work closely with fans, and implement appropriate legislative measures so as to deliver real power into the hands of supporters.

The full article can be read in the May edition of WSC (issue 339). It is available in all good newsagents.

PAIS PhD student Eva Nagyfejeo has contributed a chapter to the newly published book Terrorism Online: Politics, Law and Technology, edited by Lee Jarvis, Stuart Macdonald and Thomas M. Chen

Eva’s chapter is titled Transatlantic collaboration in countering cyber terrorism

Please see the Routledge website for more details:

Professor , PAIS Head of Department and Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences, has recently had a new book published on the ‘Abe Doctrine’ of the Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, titled Japan's Foreign and Security Policy Under the ‘Abe Doctrine.'

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō's foreign and security policy—highly charged with ideological and historical revisionism—contains the potential to shift Japan onto a new international trajectory. Its degree of articulation and energy makes for an 'Abe doctrine' capable of displacing the 'Yoshida Doctrine' that has been Japan's guiding grand strategy in the post-war period. Abe has already begun to introduce radical policies that look to transform national security policy into a more muscular military stance, bolster US-Japan alliance ties to function increasingly for regional and global security, and attempt to encircle China's influence in East Asia. The 'Abe Doctrine' is dynamic but also high-risk. Abe's revisionism contains fundamental contradictions that may ultimately limit the effectiveness, or even defeat, the doctrine, and along the way inflict collateral damage on relations with East Asia and Japan's own national interests.

The book is published by Palgrave Macmillan and is available to buy here: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/japan's-foreign-and-security-policy-under-the-%C2%91abe-doctrine'-christopher-w-hughes/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137514240

, a Research Fellow here in PAIS, was recently on BBC Radio Coventry & 糖心TVshire discussing the new Home Office report on Foreign Fighters and Radicalisation.

You can listen to Dr Heath-Kelly's interview below