Hello from Glasgow!
I am currently in the UK and will soon be in residence as a visiting fellow at the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures at the University of Bristol until the end of October. Earlier this week I had a phenomenal time at the International Creative Research Methods Conference run by Helen Kara in Manchester. I’m excited to be opening another call for So Fi Zine submissions while I am in the UK — I opened the very first call for submissions while in residence at Goldsmiths and launched the first edition at the 2017 London Radical Bookfair.
Submissions for So Fi Zine #14 are open now and close on October 31. Send your sociological fiction, poetry and visual art! Full submission details live at sofizine.com/cfs. Please do share this call through your networks and across social media via #sofizine. If you have keen students I am always pleased to talk to them about the project, so feel free to get in touch.
I was sad to hear that Howard Becker died recently. A number of his books sit by my office computer — Telling About Society, Tricks of the Trade, and What About Mozart? What About Murder? Howie, as he insisted on being called, supported So Fi Zine since the first edition and wrote the guest editorial for the second (I asked him, in a true over-excited naive student fashion, to open the first one and he chided me in a very kind way about my tight deadline, saying he was not a journalist and a rather busy person but would happily do the second one given it would be a few months away. I think this is probably the reason I even did a second edition instead of So Fi Zine being a one-off). You can read Becker’s So Fi Zine #2 editorial here. He ended it with an absolutely iconic line: ‘Nuf said.
Next month I’ll also be visiting Cambridge for the Liminal Texts symposium organised by Marc Ortmann and Iris Pissaride, which is part of The Sociological Review’ seminar series. You can register to attend in-person or online. In the morning I’ll be giving a short talk based on this article, and in the afternoon will be running a fiction writing workshop with Iris and the Decolonise Sociology Cambridge group. If you don’t have access to this article but would like to read it, please email me for a copy.