After a summer break and a bracing return to work it is time to consider how to move this projects forward. I am looking for a method that allows social investigators to ‘escape’ from entrenched conceptual schemes, but retains some purchase on the objects under investigation. Homer’s Iliad helped me to do that in the… Continue reading →

Given the subject matter it is perhaps surprising that there are so many female characters in the Iliad, slightly less surprising in the Odyssey. Homer’s depiction and typification of women is consistent – of the female humans femininity, mothering and caring are emphasized; the goddesses are beautiful – but all the women and goddesses in… Continue reading →

In contrast to Plato, Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1588 – 1679) considered the Iliad to be a ‘dangerous’ text not for reasons of its alleged impiety, but because it was a paradigm for disrespecting sovereign authority. Hobbes identifies two causes of the English Civil War in his 1668 book Behemoth: the History of the Causes… Continue reading →

In ancient Greece, probably from the Archaic period and certainly from the Classical period onwards, Homer was seen as the preeminent poet. More than that he was a symbol of nationhood, a historian who told the Greeks about their origins and ancestors, and also a witness to the actions and character of the gods. Given… Continue reading →

I dismissed using Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as a metaphor for contemporary science a bit quickly in my 2018 paper ‘Homer in the laboratory’, only focussing on the idea of οικος as a metaphor for how contemporary science labs operate. On reflection I think a more sustained reading of formal science, its practitioners and institutions,… Continue reading →

My ‘Homer in the laboratory’ paper that was published in January 2018 was earlier rejected from another journal; this is fairly common in social science and humanities academic publishing and authors just have to get used to receiving criticism. Sometimes reviewers’ comments are helpful, other times spiteful or dismissive. Occasionally they are factually inaccurate. One… Continue reading →

I carried out the field work for ‘Homer in the Laboratory’ in 2015, spending 12 weeks in total in an applied microbiology laboratory. Lab work has always fascinated me and my book, Science, Culture and Society: Understanding Science in the 21st Century (Polity 2016), has extensive descriptions and analysis of laboratory work (not the same… Continue reading →

We have a curious relationship to science, and this makes understanding science, specifically understanding its role in society and its relationship to culture, difficult. By ‘we’ I mean all of us and, in particular, three groups I would like to focus on here.   The general public, the ‘lay public’ as we / they are… Continue reading →

I love science, its workings, its practitioners, its methods and results. I have spent much of the last 20 or so years researching science from a broadly sociological / cultural studies perspective and have thoroughly enjoyed doing that. I’ve published a few books and papers based on my research (most recently Erickson 2015), and I… Continue reading →