Tag Archives: academia

Discipline and Punish: The Challenge of Teaching

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

While I was preparing a syllabus for a new course, two entertaining sayings jumped to my mind. The first was made by the master — Michel Foucault. During one of his lectures at Victoria University in Toronto in 1982, he … Continue reading →

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We Make our Careers in Networks

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

I recently came across an engaging and illuminating article “On the Acrimoniousness of Intellectual Disputes” written by a prominent American sociologist Randall Collins. Not just researchers and academics will find this paper relevant and thought-provoking because it tackles the inner … Continue reading →

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The Feature of an Intellectual

Posted on June 6, 2020 by Oleg Komlik

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that … Continue reading →

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Manufacturing Personal Happiness

Posted on October 29, 2019 by Oleg Komlik

by Edgar Cabanas‏* Happiness is one of the most pervasive, fast-spreading, and controvertible phenomena of the twentieth century. Grown into an obsessive pursuit, a lucrative industry, and a flawed albeit very popular science, the pursuit of happiness has woven itself … Continue reading →

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Political Economy: Origins, Meanings, Changes

Posted on September 14, 2019 by Oleg Komlik

“Political economy should be a human science.”                                                                    … Continue reading →

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Probably the best “Acknowledgments” ever (5)

Posted on August 4, 2019 by Oleg Komlik

“Contrary to the fashion in most prefaces, I will not add that “all mistakes and shortcomings are entirely my responsibility.” That is sheer bourgeois subjectivism. Responsibility in matters of these sorts is always collective, especially with regard to the remedying … Continue reading →

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Syntactic Structures: Noam Chomsky’s First Ever PowerPoint Presentation

Posted on July 21, 2019 by Oleg Komlik

Alternative headlines for this historic event: Understanding Power [Point] or Power [Point] Systems or Chomsky on Mis-Education 🙂 — courtesy of Open Culture  *** Join Economic Sociology and Political Economy community via Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / Instagram / Tumblr / Reddit / Telegram

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Galbraith vs. Friedman — “The emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform, the one on which all else depends”

Posted on November 23, 2018 by Oleg Komlik

John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the most famous and influential American economists and public intellectual of the post-WWII era. Galbraith, who leaned toward post-Keynesian economics embracing an institutionalist perspective, was a very prolific writer and his books (The Great … Continue reading →

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Sociology Journals and Network Proprieties of the Matthew Effect

Posted on August 21, 2018 by Oleg Komlik

by Luca Carbone* Science is a political field. As Bourdieu peremptorily said “the scientific field is the locus of a competitive struggle, in which the specific issue at stake is the monopoly of scientific authority” (1975: 19). Shifting a little the … Continue reading →

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C. Wright Mills on Knowledge, Power, and the Moral Duty of the Intellectual

Posted on August 10, 2018 by Oleg Komlik

An eminent and brilliant sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was deeply concerned with the responsibilities of social scientists in the post-World War II (American) society. Therefore he advocated for engagement of intellectuals in public life in contrast to merely conducting distant observations. … Continue reading →

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Probably the best “Acknowledgments” ever (4)

Posted on July 17, 2018 by Oleg Komlik

  “This work has been carried out despite the economical difficulties of the authors’ country. The authors want to overall remark the clear contribution of the Spanish Government in destroying the R&D horizon of Spain and the future of a … Continue reading →

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On the wandering and exilic being of knowledge seeker

Posted on February 25, 2018 by Oleg Komlik

An eminent Saxon scholastic theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096 – 1141) noted in his monumental encyclopedic treatise Didascalion: “All the world is a foreign soil to those who philosophize… It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, … Continue reading →

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Probably the best “Acknowledgments” ever (3)

Posted on November 22, 2017 by Oleg Komlik

Erving Goffman, a preeminent sociologist and one the most influential scholars of the post-war social science, was greatly impressed during his graduate studies by the works of the British social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Two decades later, Goffman — known for his witty … Continue reading →

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The Virtue of Having Nothing to Say

Posted on August 13, 2017 by Oleg Komlik

Gilles Deleuze: “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather force them to … Continue reading →

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Academic conferences — a true story ;-)

Posted on July 17, 2017 by Oleg Komlik

😉 See more memories of these unique intellectual fetes here and here 🙂   *** Join the Economic Sociology and Political Economy community via Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / Google+ / Instagram / Tumblr

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