Laurence Cooley

@lpcooley.bsky.social

2182 Followers 1854 Following

Politics lecturer, University of Birmingham Work on the politics of deeply divided societies (mostly Northern Ireland these days), including power-sharing, demography and the census. Recently also thinking about Lough Neagh. UCU rep. #firstgen

Screenshot of a quote, "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. We will resist and there is nothing you can do to stop us", in a journal article about the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon, incorrectly attributed to an encyclopedia entry I wrote about census politics in deeply divided societies.
Screenshot of a Guardian headline, "'A mini Battle of Cable Street': the English neighbourhoods still grappling with the meaning of the flags", with the words "Mast avengers" in red above.
Screenshot of the text: Conclusion Social psychologists have created an orderly and predictable world of theory development and hypothesis testing within which to practice their science. Yet, ironically, the things that are most predictable (e.g., that the participant will write a number to answer a Likert scale rather than set their questionnaire on fire) are usually out of scope of their models. However, it is easy to imagine circumstances where "setting on fire" would be a socially meaningful response to a questionnaire (e.g., Cooley, 2024), but which would be forever out of sight if valid survey responses are our only view of the world. This paper has indicated ways in which a complex systems view, supported by developments in computational modelling, can help our discipline actualise its promise to become a "science of movement".
Elif Shafak's novel There are Rivers in the Sky
Two pints of Guinness on a pub table