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Laurence Cooley

@lpcooley.bsky.social

2.2K followers 1.9K following 132 posts

Politics lecturer, University of Birmingham Work on the politics of deeply divided societies (mostly Northern Ireland these days), including power-sharing, demography and the census. Recently also thinking about Lough Neagh. UCU rep. #firstgen

Posts Replies Media

Laurence Cooley @lpcooley.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

This entry I wrote for a reference work that's more expensive to buy than I could ever have imagined when I agreed to contribute now has two citations tracked by Google Scholar, both attributing things to it that it doesn't say. Absolutely cursed.

Screenshot of a quote, "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. We will resist and there is nothing you can do to stop us", in a journal article about the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, incorrectly attributed to an encyclopedia entry I wrote about census politics in deeply divided societies.

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Laurence Cooley @lpcooley.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

Proud of my friends, neighbours, fellow "mast avengers".

Screenshot of a Guardian headline, "'A mini Battle of Cable Street': the English neighbourhoods still grappling with the meaning of the flags", with the words "Mast avengers" in red above.

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Laurence Cooley @lpcooley.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Quite the unexpected citation! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Screenshot of the text:

Conclusion

Social psychologists have created an orderly and predictable world of theory development and hypothesis testing within which to practice their science. Yet, ironically, the things that are most predictable (e.g., that the participant will write a number to answer a Likert scale rather than set their questionnaire on fire) are usually out of scope of their models. However, it is easy to imagine circumstances where "setting on fire" would be a socially meaningful response to a questionnaire (e.g., Cooley, 2024), but which would be forever out of sight if valid survey responses are our only view of the world. This paper has indicated ways in which a complex systems view, supported by developments in computational modelling, can help our discipline actualise its promise to become a "science of movement".

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Laurence Cooley @lpcooley.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

I finished reading this this weekend. The amount of research that clearly went into it shines through, and given the news from Syria, the tough closing chapters feel all the more relevant today.

Elif Shafak's novel There are Rivers in the Sky

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Laurence Cooley @lpcooley.bsky.social · 22/10/2024

Very kind of Peter to include me in this. I was enjoying a particularly good pint of Guinness in a Dublin pub after #PSAI2024 when all the follow notifications started coming in. It might take a while for me to follow back but I'll get to it.

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