Eli’s PhD project comprises an anthropological analysis of university culture, and he’s also looking at the socialisation of graduate students. I remember being told as a Master’s student that it was not entirely acceptable to study “our own,” and since I always thought that was bullshit I was really excited by Eli’s commitment to study academia. Anyone interested in institutional space and culture can check out an overview of the project, or read the full proposal (pdf).

I’m especially taken by his observations on fieldwork in French philosophy departments, and this fascinating post on reading as an ethnographic tactic.

- Rob

An arrow in the recreation yard at Camp Delta, Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba points the direction to Mecca, the Islamic holy city, so the detainees know which way to face if the call to prayer sounds while they are outside. Every cell and recreation yard has similar arrows. Photo taken in April, 2006. (U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood)

All detainees at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are given a copy of the Koran. Surgical masks are provided to the detainees so they can keep the Koran off the floor and prevent guards from touching it. Photo taken in April, 2006. (U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood)

(via)

- Anne

A two year action research project run jointly by geographers at the University of Leeds and the University of Leicester. We use the term autonomous geographies to define ‘…those spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship, which are created through a combination of resistance and creation, and the questioning and challenging of dominant laws and social norms.’ The Project looks at how activists make and remake these types of spaces in their everyday lives by exploring their core ideas, beliefs and visions, how they are translated into action, what kinds of spaces for participation and identity are created and what it means to live in-between the overlapping spaces.

See also:
Notes towards autonomous geographies: creation, resistance and self-management as survival tactics (pdf) by Jenny Pickerill and Paul Chatterton
The Surprising Sense of Hope (pdf) by Jenny Pickerill
Demand the Possible: Journeys in Changing our World as a Public Activist-Scholar (pdf) by Paul Chatterton

(via critical spatial practice)

Open Anthropology: Derek Gregory: The Cultural Turn in Late Modern War and the Rush to the Intimate

On the US military’s ‘cultural turn’ through the Human Terrain System program and related efforts: “This carefully staged space of constructed visibility is also always a space of constructed invisibility. And what has been made to disappear, strangely, is the conduct of the war.”

Pruned: Nomadic Hotels and Lighthouses

Extraordinary feats of mobility: transporting entire structures in order to save them from coastal erosion.

- Anne

“What else do we lose when we make people disappear? Passage Oublié is an interactive artwork allowing the public to send messages to a touchscreen kiosk located in Pearson’s International Airport. Messages received are animated along flight trajectories on a map featuring airports involved in rendition flights. A rendition flight is a detainee-transfer practice where people, currently mostly Muslim men, are transported in rented commercial jets to interrogation sites around the world known as black sites. Although there exists a legal form of rendition to hand suspects over to another country, the procedure is also conducted outside any legal system, hence offering no protection for the detainees. Passage Oublié focuses on documented cases of such illegal renditions, known as “Extraordinary Renditions”, which surpass the number of legal renditions. The survivors of Extraordinary Renditions tell of numerous human rights violations. Passage Oublié invites Citizens of the World in transit at Pearson’s International Airport to send text messages relating to these questions: Are rendition flights an acceptable means of dealing with new terrorism threats? How does their use affect a country’s credibility as a defender of liberty? Does the end justify the means when it comes to pre-emptive war on terror? Are we compromising on the liberal democracies’ cherished principle of innocent-until-proven-guilty?

-Rob

Looking back on the French social movements and political significance of May 68 and now looking back on the many retrospective studies published in French to mark the 40^th Anniversary of the student occupations of the Sorbonne and the Ecole des Beaux Arts from mid May to the end of June that year, one is overwhelmed by the sheer number of pages. Not to mention the critiques of this hagiogrpahic literature, recently translated into French, such as Kristen Ross’ May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago UP 2002 ) which takes issue witht he way in which media and intellectuals have recast a predominantly political protest and labour strike into a cultural event in which Anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism, death, violence and workers have been erased.

My pick is Mai-Juin 68. It one of the broadest anniversary anthologies. It shows how the varied social movements interacted during a crisis in the social contract and the legitimacy of governance at the time.

Do you really know May 68?

So begins the publisher’s blurb for Mai-Juin 68 – and I can hear the indignant voices saying “Mais-oui, merde!” But rather than fetichizing the dates of “le soixante-huit“, this book shows how the crisis developed across multiple contexts, including the church, workplaces, schools and in the family. Traditional forms of authority were questioned, put to the test and destabilized. The reactions of institutions and the public at large also contributed to an overall series of events which no one could control. Although there was soon to be a return to ‘normality’ after this ‘liminal’ breach or ‘time out of time’ norms had been shifted and redefined, meaning that in effect a new order was established. New forms of critique, new activities, and new attitudes towards change and hierarchy were introduced. This book shows how May 68 was less of a student countercultural ‘festival’ and in fact a broad and far-reaching moment of collective introspection and democratic change which outflanked the existing institutions and the corporate, religious, academic and political management of change.

This is an informative text, drawing on solid archival, textual and sociological research and analysis. A must have for libraries, researchers and the overall choice of May 68 anniversary books. Available via Amazon.fr

-Rob

Trouble The Water takes audiences on a journey that is by turns heart stopping, infuriating, inspiring and empowering. People leave the theaters wanting and needing to do something – not only about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, but about the underlying issues that remained when the floodwaters receded – failing public schools, record high levels of incarceration, poverty, lack of government accountability and structural racism…”

Looks interesting – let us know if you happen to catch it.

- Anne

William Lamson (2007-2008)

via Wrong Distance

- Anne

The debate has recently been extended in the Toronto Star to the time-space of academe. Stephen Marche observes that this whole kerfuffle is grappling with a moot point given that the market forces of academia “will do away with it long before its intellectual silliness has a chance to become apparent.”

He notes that although philology “is vital to scholarship [...] almost nobody does it now.” Instead, theorists in the humanities and social sciences study “Deleuze or Irigary” since they can “get the gist in six months.” It follows, suggests Marche, that “the old academic books that took a lifetime of lecturing to produce, and which often were readable, and even beautiful, have no place.”

Marche’s suggestion is that the spaces of academe, whether or not neorobiology is able to inform them, do not have the patience for so complex a “problem.” Instead, he implies, with a focus on churning out publications and looking productive, graduate students and faculty develop vague aesthetically-inclined discourses, thereby condemning aesthetics (thankfully?) to an ongoing life of mystery. He explains:

Typically, young academics are given four years to write a Ph.D., during which time they are probably teaching a heavy load, paying their dues as cheap replacements for the professors the university can’t afford to hire. They must also publish articles if they want to be hireable once they graduate. If the student takes too long writing the dissertation, the university stops its financial “support,” which in the humanities is a term that must always be chaperoned by quotation marks. For junior professors, the institutional hunger for publications cannot ever be satisfied. They simply must always produce more — quality is unmeasurable so it is not measured. The spew of publications must be continual and prodigious. In such a system, who on earth is going to go to the trouble of learning neurology? If anyone were foolish enough to attempt it, by the time he or she had written anything, neuroscience would most likely have changed and the work would be worthless. Better and easier to rummage around the archives or the old enthusiasms, and find something manageable, like a dress Queen Victoria wore which you can relate to Great Expectations, or a few untapped sadomasochistic longings of John Donne. Neuroaesthetics is too lousy a gamble. There’s no need to bomb this airfield, the planes were never going to fly anyway.

- Matthew

Whitney Stump’s homemade crosswalk, as seen on Google Maps

Whitney Stump was tired of drivers ignoring stop signs at an intersection in his Muncie, Indiana neighborhood. After futile attempts to get the city to install crosswalks, Stump took matters into his own hands and painted one in at the corner of Dicks and North streets. Then he got arrested.

WRTV in Indianapolis reports:

Stump, a 27-year-old Ball State University graduate student and father, says he was arrested in July on a charge of criminal mischief for creating the crosswalk at the intersection of Dicks and North streets. A police officer then warned him after he went back to touch up the paint in August, and the county prosecutor decided to charge him again.

“If they’re not going to provide a safe environment for me and my community, then I believe I have a moral obligation,” Stump told 6News’ Ray Cortopassi on Wednesday.

Stump said he first asked the city to do the job, thinking crosswalks would get drivers’ attentions and make them aware they needed to slow down.

“I called the street and sign department probably a half-dozen times in the course of six months (to) a year,” he said.

The city of Muncie says the intersection in question doesn’t meet the criteria for crosswalk installation because it isn’t near a school.

Stump missed a court date after he was charged the second time, which led to a 10-hour jail stint. But he says he plans to paint in additional crosswalks at the other three spokes of Dicks and North.

Reblogged from Streetsblog, via Social Design Notes

- Anne