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Influential voices have argued for a sociology which acknowledges the way we are co-constituted with a range of non-human species as part of the condition of life on this planet. Despite this, sociology has generally retained a conception of the social that is centred on the human. This paper argues for the inclusion of non-human animals in sociological agendas, focusing on the emerging field of the sociology of violence. It examines the institutions and processes through which non-human animals are subjected to different forms of violence, most notably, mass killing. The practice of killing animals is routine, normative, institutionalized and globalized. The scale of killing is historically unprecedented and the numbers killed are enormous. The paper argues that this killing of non-humans raises questions around inequalities and intersectionality, human relations with other species, the embedding of violence in everyday practices and links between micro and macro analyses. These are questions with which the new sociology of violence might engage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Google Books N-gram corpus contains an enormous volume of digitized data, which, to the best of our knowledge, sociologists have yet to fully utilize. In this paper, we mine this data to shed light on the discipline itself by conducting the first empirical study to map the disciplinary advancement of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century to 2008. We analyse the usage frequency of the most common terms in five major sociology categories: disciplinary advancement, scholars of sociology, theoretical dimensions, fields of sociology, and research methodologies. We also construct an overall index deriving from all sociology-related key words using the principal component method to demonstrate the overall influence of sociology as a discipline. Charting the historical evolution of the examined terms provides rich insights regarding the emergence and development of sociological norms, practices, and boundaries over the past two centuries. This novel application of massive content analysis using data of unprecedented size helps unpack the transformation of sociocultural dynamics over a long-term temporal scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a version of 'live sociology' that enacts and engages with the openness and processuality of events. This is initially explored through a focus on everyday objects that, in their relationality, 'misbehave', potentially challenging standard sociological framings. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers, it is suggested that such objects can be understood as 'idiotic' - possessed of an incommensurability that enables social scientists to 'slow down' and reflect upon 'what is busily being done' (not least by the social scientists themselves). This responsiveness to the idiot object is then contrasted to the proactive idiocy of Speculative Design. Here, artefacts - probes and prototypes - are designed to have oblique and ambiguous functions that allow both their users and designers to open up what is at stake in particular events. Examples taken from past and current research are used to illustrate how speculative designs can open up what 'the neighbourhood' and 'energy demand reduction' can be. The paper ends with a discussion of a possible 'idiotic methodology' and its implications for the conceptual and practical doings of social scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of digital social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods, and this paper explores the phenomenon in relation to two specific digital methods, online network and textual analysis, arguing that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with their distribution, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the redistribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a redistributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, and both, I argue, involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm, namely critiques of the authority effects implicit in citation analysis. As such, these methods offer ways for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, to endorse and actively pursue the re-distribution of social methods online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I outline one strand in a genealogy of 'liveness', exploring the role of media in its emergence as a privileged spatio-temporal organization of experience. In order to consider the opportunities afforded by current developments in 'live methods' I then explore some of the implications for sociology of not simply studying practices of mediation but of inhabiting media, of being in medias res. Here I propose an amphibious sociology, for the potential it offers sociology to deploy methods reflexively in more than one medium, contrasting the methods of making distributive middles to the methods of establishing measures of representativeness, and exploring the opportunities and pitfalls of participation, or being in the middle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Savage and Burrows (2007) have argued that one way to invigorate sociology's 'empirical crisis' is to take advantage of live, web-based digital transactional data. This paper argues that whilst sociologists do indeed need to engage with this growing digital data deluge, there are longer-term risks involved that need to be considered. More precisely, C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' is used as the basis for the kind of sociological research that one might aim for, even within the digital era. In so doing, it is suggested that current forms of engaging with transactional social data are problematic to the sociological imagination because they tend to be ahistorical and focus mainly on 'now casting'. The ahistorical nature of this genre of digital research, it is argued, necessarily restricts the possibility of developing a serious sociological imagination. In turn, it is concluded, there is a need to think beyond the digitized surfaces of the plastic present and to consider the impact that time and temporality, particularly within the digital arena, have on shaping our sociological imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norbert Elias was unusual amongst sociologists of his generation in placing international relations at the centre of sociological analysis - and he was ahead of various theorists of the state who argued in the 1970s and 1980s for enlarging the boundaries of sociology to include relations between states. In Elias's process sociology, international competition for power and security, and 'elimination struggles', have led to larger territorial monopolies of power. In the case of 'civilized' societies, inner pacification has developed alongside preparation for, and repeated involvement in, interstate war. Elias argued that there is no parallel to the 'civilizing process' in international relations, but he observed that higher levels of human interconnectedness have created pressures on people to become better attuned to each other's interests over greater distances. However, many groups react against perceived threats to power, autonomy and prestige and, in general, everyday orientations have lagged behind advances in international interdependence. For Elias, the sociological challenge was to understand how the species can acquire greater control over the processes of global integration. This paper discusses the place of international relations in Elias's account of the civilizing process; it maintains that the approach should be linked more closely with the 'English School of international relations' and its analysis of 'civility' and 'standards of civilization' in world affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper that aims to make a contribution to the sociology of skills. It explains that a research, which suggests that skills and their transmission are the properties of communities, leaves unanswered the question of how information may be explicitly transmitted and acquired as part of the process of leaning a skill. It further discusses, studies of skill accept that skill acquisition occurs within a culture; it also examines in detail, which aspects of skills can be explicated and which cannot. Such a second-order study is presented here. It identifies a quasi-quantitative measure of skill acquisition-hardness. This measure is useful in understanding how task uncertainty is resolved in practice and how new skills are learnt. It explains learning how hard something is and how hard one should go at it is a part of becoming a skilled person. It mentions that the question of the transfer of skills is deeply sociological so long as one thinks of skills as being the properties of communities.