This book examines how digital platforms are reconfiguring the parameters of agency and reflexivity in contemporary social life. Drawing on Margaret Archer's social realist framework, it moves beyond treating platforms merely as tools or environments to conceptualize them as distinct sociotechnical structures with emergent properties and powers that shape human action without determining it.The book develops the concept of platform and agency to explore the temporal dimensions of s...

This is your indispensable guide to navigating the rise of generative AI as an academic. It thoughtfully explores rapidly evolving AI capabilities reshaping higher education, examining challenges and ethical dilemmas across the sector.It provides useful strategies for using generative AI in your scholarly work while upholding professional standards. This practical guidance addresses four core areas of academic work:Thinking: How to us...

Social media has become an inescapable part of academic life. It has the power to transform scholarly communication and offers new opportunities to publish and publicise your work, to network in your discipline and beyond and to engage the public. However, to do so successfully requires a careful understanding of best practice, the risks, rewards and what it can mean to put your professional identity online.Inside you′ll find practical guidance and thoughtful insight on how to appr...

Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades. Long fascinated with the problem of structure and agency, Archer’s work has constituted a decade-long engagement with this perennial issue of social thought...

The last decade has seen the emergence of an increasingly high profile and politically active asexual community, united around a common identity as 'people who do not experience sexual attraction'. This unique volume collects a diverse range of interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical work which addresses this emergence, raising important and timely questions about asexuality and its broader implications for sexual culture. One of the most pressing and contentious issues within academic...

This volume engages with post-humanist and transhumanist approaches to present an original exploration of the question of how humankind will fare in the face of artificial intelligence. With emerging technologies now widely assumed to be calling into question assumptions about human beings and their place within the world, and computational innovations of machine learning leading some to claim we are coming ever closer to the long-sought artificial general intelligence, it defends humanity...

Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.As social media is increasingly becoming a standard feature of sociological practice, this timely book rethinks the role of these mediums in public sociology and what they can contribute to the discipline in the post-COVID world.It reconsiders the history and current conceptualizations of what sociology is, and analyzes what kinds of social life emerge in and through the interactions between ‘intellectuals’, ‘publics...