Joining us for the Summer School

Here are some details about the summer school for those who have registered. We were inundated with applications, leading to some difficult decisions but we hope anyone who wasn’t successful will consider applying again for the next year’s summer school.

The Structure of the Summer School

There will be a primary focus each day, with a lead speaker (listed below) joined by a discussant from Cambridge. Each of the following speakers will talk for around 30–45 minutes before the discussant’s response opens out the session into a broader discussion:

4th September: Linsey McGoey on Generating Theory
5th September: Simon Susen on Reading Theory
6th September: Nicholas Gane on Writing Theory

We intend to work on writing and specific ‘tasks’ in breakout groups after talks, and then gather back to discuss contributions each day. We are currently finalising the details of these breakout sessions but we hope to encourage use of social media in order to facilitate external participation in our discussions. There will also be opening and closing sessions, facilitated by Jana and Mark, drawing out the connections between these substantive sessions.

The current plan is to start midday on the 4th and finish by noon on the 6th. If this might prove complex for your travel plans, please get in touch with us to discuss.

Where To Stay During the Summer School

We strongly suggest booking a College room — a good aggregate website is here: http://www.universityrooms.com/en/city/cambridge/home. Colleges closest to the Department of Sociology (where the School will take place) are Emmanuel, Kings, Christ’s, and John’s, but Cambridge is overall rather small so most distances should be within 15 minutess on foot. The address of the Department is Free School Lane, CB2 3RQ, in case you want to do some Google-maps-related hunting!

How To Get To the Summer School

There is useful information on the Cambridge website about travelling to the university via Car, Train, Bus or Plane. If you’re unsure about anything, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.

How To Prepare for the Summer School

A few people have asked us how to prepare for the summer school. We will soon circulate a list of suggested readings for each session (don’t worry, it won’t be more than two or three articles per session), but in addition to that we will be publishing a series of blog posts that engage with the topics of the summer school. We will soon distribute more information about this, but we will encourage you to write a short blog post, introducing yourself and your reasons for participation. We hope this could be a way for people to become acquainted with each other prior to September.

The Practice of Social Theory

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Passionate about social theory? Want to learn more about how it is created? Interested in seeing theory being made, rather than just read or applied?

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