Journalist, author, broadcaster
In 2010, it was politicians’ expenses. More recently public ire was – rather fairly – targeted at tabloid journalists and their nimble telecommunications skills. Now it’s bankers and their egregious bonuses. RBS and Stephen Hestor has dominated the news agenda for the last few days and, given State stakes in a number of high-street lenders […]
‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,’ Fredric Jameson, a leading theorist of post-modernism, wrote in 2003. Not anymore it isn’t. If the culmination of Francis Fukuyama’s Whiggish ‘End of History’ was the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 – scuttling liberal democracy’s […]
Supporters of Occupy Edinburgh were thin on the ground at the city’s sheriff court on Wednesday, 25 January, Robert Burns Day. Only 15 or so activists went to protest against their eviction from St Andrews Square, outside the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland (whose chief executive has just received a £963,000 bonus). ‘Oh, […]
Thanks to a grant from the Simon Cumbers Fund, I spent time in Egypt before Christmas researching female youth unemployment after the fall of Hosni Mubarak. On the eve of the 1st anniversary of the Tahrir Square protests, my piece on the issue of jobless young women appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Business Post. Sara Ahmed, […]
I appeared on the excellent Today with Pat Kenny program on RTE on January 12, talking about Scottish independence referendum vote and what an independent Scotland might look like. As the Today with PK site says, ‘This is shaping up to be the UK’s most serious constitution crisis since southern Ireland quit the union in […]
Boston College-Belfast Project case and its ramifications for academic freedom and social inquiry. From Times Higher Education. The folk tale about the academic who accidentally deleted his data is older than the PC, but have you heard the one about the researchers who asked their institution to destroy all their work? No? Well that’s exactly […]
In 1936, Robert Merton published a seminal paper entitled “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action” in the American Sociological Review . Seemingly minor events, the then 26-year-old argued, can have profound, unanticipated implications. The “law of unintended consequences” was born. Mohammed Bouazizi was the same age as Merton when he provided the digital age’s most […]
Is there an alternative to robber baron chairman asset stripping your club? I spoke to an innovative new venture through in Paisley, to turn local club St Mirren into a Community Interest Company. This feature originally appeared in February 2012 edition of the excellent When Saturday Comes: Billed as a ‘national day of action’, November […]
My thoughts on what Scottish Independence campaign – and independence itself – might mean for Northern Ireland, from Scotsman January 11. ‘Do you want Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom?’ Doubtless it’s the kind of phrasing David Cameron had in mind when he demanded a ‘fair, clear and decisive question’ on Scottish independence […]