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Robert Dingwall

@rwjdingwall.bsky.social
840 followers 2.1K following 382 posts

Consulting sociologist, researcher, writer and entrepreneur. Medical sociology; sociology of law; STS; ethnomethodology; CA. Re-post does not imply endorsement.

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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Have you seen Ruth Hawker's chapter in C.Maggs, Nursing History:The State of the Art (1985)? I think this may have come from a PhD thesis.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"Not for sale in the EU" is just a fall out from the interaction between the Good Friday Agreement on the status of Northern Ireland and Brexit. Says nothing about the safety of the product. If you like it, buy it!
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Elizabeth Taylor @elizabethtaylor47.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Do Americans realise most liberal democracies have solved this issue by… not killing our own citizens?
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Ed Granter @edgranter.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Primary School's not for everyone. That's why we're partnering with UKFlue, the nation's leading chimney solutions company. We'll give 4-9 year olds* the opportunity to train as a professional sweep, creating good, decent paying jobs for kids.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
They turned up on Day 1 and got on with it (spraying glaze on pork pies and scrubbing used baking trays for sausage rolls)
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Des Fitzgerald @desfitzgerald.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
It's banal but the use of "inevitable" by the "research on research institute" is a performative of course It becomes inevitable because people close to centre of power keep saying it's inevitable.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Because US public health treated pandemic management as a purely technical issue rather than recognising the opportunity costs and normative issues.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Whatever happened to the idea that we were preparing graduates for jobs of tomorrow that didn't exist yet? This stuff is locking grads into yesterday's jobs.
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Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
'Britain’s debate about universities has become strangely one-sided. We scrutinise the supply of graduate skills....Far less attention is paid to the demand side: whether Britain’s economy is creating enough high-skilled opportunities to make full use of the talent universities produce.' Good stuff
hepi.ac.uk
Universities Produce Talent. Economies Produce Returns. - HEPI
Join the Policy Institute at King’s College London and HEPI on Tuesday 15 September, from 6.30pm to 7.45pm, at Bush House, London, for a free event exploring the future of higher education in England....
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Possibly a movement of jobs from hotels to other tourist services? Liverpool BID claim this has happened for them, with strong multiplier effects.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
How long before the leaders of responses to outbreaks of infectious disease will call the social scientists at the same time as they call the immunologists? The most sophisticated biomedical science is useless unless it can survive in the wild. www.socialsciencespace.com/2026/09/misi...
socialsciencespace.com
‘Misinformation’ and the Control of Ebola
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is clearly proving very hard to control. Much of the difficulty must be put down to the armed conflicts on the ground, which complicate th
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Was talking to a public health professional yesterday who said that the pandemic was the first time it felt like a *National* health service rather than a bunch of SMEs all doing their own thing.
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Rachel Cunliffe @rmcunliffe.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The more I think about it, the more the idea of treating couples who live together but choose not to marry like they've entered into a secret stealth marriage is an insult to all relationships - married and non-married alike. This week's New Statesman column www.newstatesman.com/politics/fut...
newstatesman.com
Treating cohabiting couples like they're married is a mad idea
A new campaign group wants to offer couples the same rights whether or not they've tied the knot
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
The problem is poor quality piping of a small number of tunes familiar to US tourists. The authentic pibroch is a quite different matter and shows just how eloquent the instrument can be...
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
More points than shots on goal...?
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Rense Nieuwenhuis @rnieuwenhuis.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Good thing to note that social sciences are, indeed, not as simple as rocket science. Insights into China's one child policy by Susan Greenhalgh, quoted in @newyorker.com
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Merchant Adventurers’ Hall @merchantshallyork.org · 31/08/2026
Happy Bank Holiday Monday! Is it that sunny in York? Sadly not - it is a Bank Holiday after all. ☔️ Is that blue sky photoshopped? No that was real but who doesn’t love a cloud? 🤨 Is the Hall always that beautiful? You betcha. 😍
We are looking at one side of the Hall from the garden. We are peering through climbing flowers on a pergola to the timber frame, yellow ochre plasterwork and brick masterpiece beyond.
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
I am posting my metaphor focused post on the OpenAI/Huggenface affair again, but with added references to analyses done since which all sound alarm bells makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/07/a...
makingsciencepublic.com
AI, metaphors and control
In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
"Ice is mountain glue but it is losing its adhesion. This is a a slow process but it can accelerate suddenly because it takes much more heat energy for ice to melt then merely to warm." From today's Observer editorial.That #metaphor should be more widely used in #scicomm of climate/glacier collapse.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I got good results from just pasting the name of the US moisturiser I have used for years - but no longer travelling as much and extortionate import price - into the Google AI and asking it to list identical UK products. Had to experiment with a couple but now getting equal results at 1/3 cost.
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
For weekend readers, a bit of history of genetic engineering, public engagement and bioethics #histsci makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/28/a...
makingsciencepublic.com
Asilomar 1975 and 2025: Speech acts and the performance of responsibility
On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caugh…
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
This week's post is a bit of a mixture of linguistics, responsible innovation, bioethics and history of science, focusing on Asilomar and the role of the public #linguistics #histsci makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/28/a...
makingsciencepublic.com
Asilomar 1975 and 2025: Speech acts and the performance of responsibility
On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caugh…
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
I always thought it was important to have a postdoc for a second supervisor as part of my responsibility for their professional development. Helps them build a CV too. I would like to think I passed on good practice but you would have to ask them about that!
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Edward 'the ş̶̭̤͙̪̩̮͐͂̐̈́ẘ̶̧̗̱̻ě̷̞̯̘͇͙͈̃̈́̉́̇́͐͝͝ą̸̨̡͚̞͕͔̩͑͘͜r̵̞̮̃̾͂̀̔͋͒͐̓̓̚͝ͅw̶̡̳̱̘̱̩̼̞̣̋͌̒̈́͛̕͠ǫ̷̛͇̱͚̗͆̋̾͆̀̉̌͠ḽ̸̡͇͖̺̤̟̞͒̔̀̊́́̆̆͛͆͗̅͝͝f̸̣͔̝̥͔͍̔͂̂̋͗̉̾̊́ͅ' Reynolds-Paustian @edward-reynolds.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
In #ConversationAnalysis we explore the notion of epistemic rights, the interactively managed ways we humans have of assigning who gets to know what. Typically in interaction thoughts, attitudes and desires are treated as individual, something you typically cant speak for another on. AI THREAD 1/
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
This week's post is about a rather interesting #AI #metaphor: watermark, looks innocuous but isn't.... #AIMetaphorObservatory #scicomm makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/21/a...
makingsciencepublic.com
AI watermarks: A placebo metaphor?
I have written about AI slop and AI fakes as part of my work here on the ‘metaphor observatory’ in the era of generative AI. So, when I saw posts on Bluesky about ‘watermarks’, I pricked up my ears…
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
The idea that money is a social construct is mainstream economics. It is basis of the whole cryptocurrency idea - money is just what people say it is...
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Back in the day, if we wrote truthful numbers, we got the form returned to insert the orgaisationally correct ones...suspect this would be the case with a lot of universities. A nice sociological study in the social construction of administrative data...
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Barely noticeable!
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Natalie Bennett @nataliegreenpeer.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Important point @hepi-news.bsky.social. International students "bring different languages, educational histories, cultural assumptions & lived experiences. Students encounter different ways of thinking about knowledge, authority, responsibility, community www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/08/17/t...
hepi.ac.uk
The hidden cost of declining international student numbers - HEPI
For those attending this year’s party conferences, join HEPI for our 2026 Party Conference fringe events, at the Labour Party Conference on Monday 28 September in Liverpool and the Conservative Party ...
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
A quick and rather personal reflection on #wildfires, here there and everywhere makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/16/m...
makingsciencepublic.com
Making extreme weather personal, again: Wildfires in the US, the UK and Germany
On 4 August a wildfire started near where my sister lives in New Mexico. This was not unprecedented. Indeed I have written here on the blog about fires there in 2011 and in 2022. What was unprecede…
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Simon Cox @simonfrcox.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
If you MUST message me about a national emergency DON’T SAY I “should not undertake any activity that could start a fire” SAY “do not do anything that could start a fire” You’re not drafting legislation, you’re talking to people many of whom have a reading age of 6.
gov.uk
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Well, well, well. Just come across this passage, written in 1842, by Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, published in English as A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842). The real criminal is 'society'. Robert Owen had similar thoughts a little earlier.
Since the crimes which are annually committed seem to be a necessary result
of our social organization, and since the number of them cannot diminish
without the causes which induce them undergoing previous modifi cation, it
is the province of legislators to ascertain these causes, and to remove them as
far as possible. . . . Indeed, experience proves as clearly as possible the truth
of this opinion, which at fi rst may appear paradoxical, viz., that society prepares
crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is executed. Hence
it happens that the unfortunate person who loses his head on the scaffold,
or who ends his life in prison, is in some manner an expiatory victim for
the society. His crime is the result of the circumstances in which he is found
placed.
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Cold War Steve @coldwarsteve.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
The Haywain 2026
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Steve Bullock @guitarmoog.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
UK: Fuck off foreigners. Do not come here. We will treat you appallingly. We will blame you for everything. We will charge you a fortune for impossible admin processes. There is nothing for you. Do NOT come here! Also UK: Why will no one come to our universities? www.theguardian.com/education/20...
theguardian.com
UK universities face ‘financial crisis’ amid collapse in international students
Higher education figures call on Labour to reverse tax on fees and warn institutions at risk of ‘going under’
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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
For thousands of years, a solar eclipse has been a prophetic harbinger of a spectacular, epoch-making event. Just saying. #VoteBinface #Clacton
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SSSI & SI Journal @sijournal.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
New Issue of Symbolic Interaction - Vol.49 No.3 Table of Contents - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15338665... #sssi #interactionism #emca
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Symbolic Interaction: Vol 49, No 3
Click on the title to browse this issue
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Written in response to the Wall Street Journal but also relevant to the Arday fall-out... Why Sociology Should Not Be Liquidated www.socialsciencespace.com/2026/08/why-...
socialsciencespace.com
Why Sociology Should Not Be Liquidated
“Once again the season of the anti-sociologists is upon us…[a]curious admixture of illogic and sentiment…makes up the creed and canons of anti-sociology.” Those words come from Robert K Merto
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
The badgers and I have not managed to come to an accommodation in more than 30 years. I tried rewilding part of the garden as a meadow but they much prefer digging in the middle of the lawn.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
We don't have a hosepipe ban here yet - but we do have badgers who are being a real nuisance digging up the vegetable patch that I am watering rather than the lawn, which is their usual target but is now too hard!
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
For weekend readers my contribution to the AI 'going rogue' controversy, through the lens of metaphor analysis, focusing on the metaphor scenario: container-journey-container #AI #metaphor #scicomm #linguistics makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/07/a...
makingsciencepublic.com
AI, metaphors and control
In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Depends whether hourly-paid supervisors get a professional rate. 15 years ago I charged £300 per supervision hour, to cover preparation, etc. Some departments chose to pay, others didn't. Not my problem. Unis should not get away with the insulting rates they pay for tutorials, etc.
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Brigitte Nerlich @bnerlich.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
I struggled a bit with writing about the AI 'going rogue' incident, but here is my take, using the concept of 'metaphor scenario' to gain some insights #Ai #metaphor #AIMetaphorObservatory makingsciencepublic.com/2026/08/07/a...
makingsciencepublic.com
AI, metaphors and control
In the early 2000s, during the dramatic but now almost forgotten outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle, I wrote about war metaphors and the issue of projecting control over an ‘out of …
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Always enjoyed his work at the relevant age. Shame if most has been allowed to go out of print - I hope your book finds its publishers.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
The whole PhD process - supervision and assessment - seems to have been compromised by churn and institutional incentives that continue to be relevant. There will be a lot more PhD students abandoned by the loss of their supervisors...
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
OfS could legitimately commission an inquiry - by consultants if necessary - into PhD supervision and examination at LJMU and the appointment processes at the universities involved. These are critical to confidence in the sector. The CV stuff and wider EDI claims could be left to others.
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Do you have a better one, Margot? I cannot see that this matter rises to the level of a statutory public inquiry and who else could take this kind of overview with leverage over at least some potential witnesses. The Office of Research Integrity has no powers to intervene.
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Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Opinion: “My investigation into alleged plagiarism was undertaken seriously – journalistic enquiries should not be a matter for Scotland Yard,” writes Times Higher Education (THE) journalist @jgro-the.bsky.social on the Jason Arday case #edusky #highered ow.ly/list50ZwHI8
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Perhaps the UK government could be equally active?
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
As usual @apsmunro.bsky.social is a model of good sense More Fuss About Filters open.substack.com/pub/alasdair...
open.substack.com
More Fuss About Filters
A new RCT of air filtration devices gets heads spinning...again
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Robert Dingwall @rwjdingwall.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Some of us have been saying this for a long time...Deal with access first and hesitancy will be quite a small residual.
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