Blog

I just wrapped up T3 (Trimester 3) at Krea University, and my second academic year as an Assistant Professor, and figured I’d share something I’ve been working on. The dashboard below (best viewed by clicking on the link to view it in a new page) pulls together anonymous end-of-course feedback from my three courses this academic year: Introduction to Sociological and Anthropological Thought (SOCL 306), Sociology and STS through Science Fiction (SOCL 346), and Social Media and Society (SOCL 348). In addition to institutional evaluations, I’ve incorporated anonymized information from an open-ended SurveyMonkey survey (that my former Dept. Chair at Nazareth University, Prof. Kim McGann had designed). The dashboard lets you filter by course, read through the student responses, and see some aggregated patterns across a few questions. I’ve tried to keep the interface simple and the methodology transparent (there’s a tab on the dashboard itself that explains how the data was “processed”; and spoiler alert, it’s pretty basic). ...

Self-Hosting for Academics: A Complete Guide to Building Your Own Digital Infrastructure v1.0 N.B: If you come across any errors, or have any suggestions on how to improve this, please don’t hesitate to contact me. What This Is This guide walks through the construction of a personal digital infrastructure — step by step, concept by concept — for an academic reader who has no background in systems administration. It assumes you know how to use a computer, install software, and navigate a web browser, but nothing beyond that. ...

The work of Niklas Luhmann can’t ever be simplified, but I certainly did try. This is an email that I’d sent in response to some of my students from my undergraduate “Sociology and STS through Science Fiction” class at Krea University, who had several questions about Luhmann’s work. For some additional context, we just had finished watching the 2013 movie “Snowpiercer”, and were discussing it in relation to a few different readings. Luhmann’s work came up along the way. ...

The transition from being a Sociologist based in the United States to being a Sociologist in India has been an interesting one to say the very least. In my first term here, I was asked to teach a required course that had been titled “Introduction to Sociological and Anthropological Thought”, which has been a vastly different experience from how I’ve been teaching introductory courses on Sociology in the past. It’s somewhat daunting to blend the histories and particularities of (what have now become) two very distinct disciplines. At the same time, it has been incredibly refreshing to work with literature from Indian scholars that I haven’t read in a long time, or at all for that matter. ...

What started as a satirical post on LinkedIn concerning the ban of Sci-Hub and Libgen in India ended up leading to an interesting interview for C&EN Magazine. I was asked for my comments on the new court verdict to block Sci-Hub in India. The C&EN piece features a truncated set of responses, here are my responses to the interview questions in their entirety (written while I was still an employee at Nazareth University in Rochester, NY, and a few weeks away from moving to India): ...