Tara Brabazon podcast

Tara and Mick continue to hack through morphic fields.  They explore how theorists of morphic fields define and apply consciousness.  Yes, this is another hippy-inflected podcast.

What happens when a PhD student goes deeply into a research literature and needs to get out of it again? Mick and Tara talk about the morphic fields literature and how to hook this research back into his doctoral thesis.

Anne and Tara talk through the changing context and environment of early childhood education, and the relationship between 'a service' and 'learning.'  

What is the sound of food?  Tara presents an artefact to accompany a written exegesis.  The goal is to probe the sociology of the senses, with attention to the relationship between food and sonic culture.

Do you feel closed in?  Do you want to leave the planet because of war, terrorism, violence and xenophobia?  The concept that captures this tendency is claustropolitanism.  Steve and Tara discuss claustropolitanism, and the popular cultural texts that capture it:  Top of the Lake, Breaking Bad, The Tunnel, Orange is the New Black and The Fall.

These theoretical times are also accelerated times.  What is the role of momentum and speed in our understanding of identity and popular culture?  Tara and Steve talk about accelerated culture and accelerationism, and the countervailing forces of slow culture and slow food.

What happens to a working class when there is no longer work?  How do we think about middle class in relation to a digitized, globalized, casual workplace?  Steve and Tara talk about reproletarianization and its relationship with Guy Standing's Precariat.

How did the Global Financial Crisis impact on our understandings of social relationships and identity?  Has foreclosure become a 'global condition'?  Tara and Steve probe the concept of foreclosure and its relevance to theoretical times.

Why are methods so boring in the contemporary university?  How can the theories of method be enlivened and enlivening in the humanities and social sciences?  Steve and Tara translate and transform Paul Virilio's Bunker Archaeology to develop a new way of thinking about space, identity, ethnography and surveillance.

Does sociology have a future?  How does the discipline - and the scholars within it - manage neo-liberalism, xenophobia, terrorism and gated communities?  Steve and Tara explore the concept of 'claustropolitan sociology' as part of their 'Theoretical times' series.