Papers by Stephen Barnard
Technically Together, 2017
This book provides an account of community through the lens of the politics of technology. That i... more This book provides an account of community through the lens of the politics of technology. That is, how do the artifacts, infrastructures, sociotechnical systems and techniques that constitute everyday life influence the answer to “who gets what community, when and how?” This book responds with a conceptualization of community as a multidimensional phenomenon, which aids in the illustration of how different techniques, artifacts, organizational technologies and infrastructures encourage or constrain the enactment of the various dimensions of communality. Later chapters build upon this analysis, asking “How might everyday technologies better support a thicker practice of community life?” In order to describe how more community-supportive technological societies might be possible, the various social barriers to thick communitarian technologies are explored. In other words, what policies, subsidies, institutional arrangements and patterns of thought would need to change in order to ena...
American Journal of Sociology, 2012
The rise of digital technologies is having a profound impact on the practice and profession of jo... more The rise of digital technologies is having a profound impact on the practice and profession of journalism. As a consequence, scholars from a variety of disciplines have fashioned unique but complimentary perspectives to help explain the nature and significance of this transformation. Field theory is a prominent lens through which media sociologists have viewed the dynamics and transformations surrounding the practice and profession of journalism. More recently, communications scholars have developed theories of mediatization to explain the transformations brought about by the ubiquity of media throughout social life. While Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory offers a well-developed toolkit to address the dialectical relationship between structures and practices, its treatment of technology and conceptualization of the field are arguably less well suited to explain the convergent, hyper-mediated nature of contemporary social relations. By contrast, more recent theories of mediatization of...
The proliferation of digital technologies and augmented social relations offer great potential fo... more The proliferation of digital technologies and augmented social relations offer great potential for the vocation of sociology. Although the greatest interest in the digital turn has centered on sources of data, digitality also provides many excellent methodological benefits as well as new and evolving subjects of analysis. This paper seeks to make the case for a more digitally-attuned sociology, and to forge a path in that direction. To accomplish this task, I begin with a brief history of digital sociology—in the U.S. and beyond—as well as a survey of other, related approaches that have gained greater traction in the field. Next, I examine the state of social life in the digitally networked era and make the case for sociology’s need to update its epistemological orientation to put an end to fetishisms of technology and the “real world.” Finally, I outline an agenda for the future of digital sociology along with some suggestions for how it might be accomplished.
Journalism: Theory, practice and criticism
Twitter has gained notoriety in the field of journalism due in part to its ubiquity and powerful ... more Twitter has gained notoriety in the field of journalism due in part to its ubiquity and powerful interactional affordances. Through a combination of digital ethnography and content analysis, this article analyzes journalistic practice and meta-discourse on Twitter. Whereas most applications of Bourdieu’s field theory focus on macro-level dynamics, this study addresses the micro- and mezzo-level elements of journalism, including practices, capital, habitus, and doxa. Findings suggest that each of these elements is undergoing notable change as the journalistic field adapts to the networked era. Furthermore, this article constructs a typology of Twitter-journalism practices and demonstrates Twitter’s role in the transformation of journalistic norms, values, and means of distinction. It argues that these changes have contributed to new opportunities for capital exchange as well as to the emergence of a hybrid, networked habitus that integrates values and practices from the traditional journalistic field with those from digital and nonprofessional origins.
This is a critical dialogue between graduate student and activists in the discipline of sociology... more This is a critical dialogue between graduate student and activists in the discipline of sociology. Critical approaches to the essential question of critical race studies are discussed and evaluated in terms of their ability to develop a theory and praxis for changing the structural and cultural inequalities that constitute the enduring legacy of the colonial project and slavery. Conventional sociological
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Papers by Stephen Barnard