Category: Beyond the Academy

What Educates in DIYbio?

Michael Scroggins May 27, 2014

The Pedagogical Paradox Two human inventions can be regarded as the most difficult, — namely, the art of government and that of education; and yet we are still contending among ourselves as to their fundamental nature. – Immanuel Kant Kant here is referring to the pedagogical paradox presented by education. This paradox of moral authority most often occurs in the context of schooling: How does education, in the sense of external regulation), lead to the internally regulated autonomy of thought and action? Stated more generally, the pedagogical paradox is assuming the existence of something for which education is the precondition. For example, can someone declare oneself to be a biologist and launch an independent course of inquiry without recognized credentials? The pedagogical paradox is also a question of legitimate knowledge; in this case, who may speak the truth of biology? (read more...)

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Cosmos: A Spacetime Conversation

Lisa Messeri May 6, 2014

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, premiered on Fox on March 9, 2014 and will run until June 1, 2014. Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, it is a ‘reboot’ of Carl Sagan’s series similarly titled Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Ann Druyan and Steven Soter serve as lead writers for both series (Sagan also co-wrote the original, though Tyson is not involved in the writing process for this series) and there are clear aesthetic connections between the two series.* Today’s Cosmos, though, is airing on Fox, not PBS, and American science in 2014 operates in a different landscape with a different set of concerns than Sagan’s series of 1980.** There has been an active social media engagement with Cosmos (#cosmos) and many historians of science, STS scholars, and journalists have been blogging and live tweeting their reactions to how the science is portrayed. I recently had a conversation with two historians of science who have been engaged with the Cosmos conversation, Ben Gross (@bhgross144, a research fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation) and Audra Wolfe (@ColdWarScience, an independent scholar), to discuss how Cosmos can offer insight into the current state of science and society. (read more...)

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Associate Editor Intro: Jordan Kraemer on digital culture, tech trends, and why anthropologists can’t predict the future

Jordan Kraemer February 4, 2014

As one of the new Associate Editors for the CASTAC Blog, I want to introduce myself and the kinds of topics I’ll be presenting here. In my work as an anthropologist of media and technology, I focus on how social and mobile media are reshaping experiences of space and place, especially in contemporary Europe. Ethnographic studies of social media have been in the public spotlight recently, when anthropologist Daniel Miller asserted that, for a group of teen users he is currently studying in the UK, Facebook has lost its coolness (“What will we learn from the fall of Facebook?” Nov. 24, 2013). Miller was sharing preliminary findings from a project still in progress, but his findings quickly got spun and distorted, in some cases by tech reporters more interested in Facebook’s stock value than its social implications. Miller and his team found that teen users (16-18 years old) in his fieldsite north of London no longer consider Facebook a cool space to hang out with peers, which isn’t shocking in light of previous research. He attributed this shift both to older family members joining Facebook and to younger users seeking to carve out their own spaces on newer sites. He also predicted that teens will continue using Facebook less and less, relegating it to communication with family. Facebook isn’t going to disappear, he argues, but its use is stabilizing as primarily a platform for adults: “it is finally finding its appropriate niche where it will remain.” (Clip from NBC Nightly News: “Study: Teens leaving Facebook as parents flood site”) (read more...)

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When is the Amateur in Amateur Biology?

Michael Scroggins November 16, 2013

Over the last two years I have been conducting research into amateur biology in and around Silicon Valley. During that time, I have worked as a volunteer in a DIYBio lab and on a pair of laboratory projects, one an unlikely precursor to the Glowing Plant project and another which fell into the dust bin of scientific history. Which is to say, for every project that captures media attention and attracts funding like Glowing Plant, there is an equally interesting project struggling to generate interest and find collaborators. With that in mind, I want to discuss some of the tensions within DIYbio laid bare by success of the Glowing Plant Kickstarter campaign. (read more...)

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Between Apollo and Dionysus

Gabriella Coleman October 15, 2013

Anonymous is a banner used by individuals and as well as multiple, unconnected groups unfurling operations across the globe from Brazil to the Philippines, from the Dominican Republic to India. Since 2008, activists have used the name to organize diverse forms of collective action, ranging from street protests to web site defacement. Their iconography—Guy Fawkes masks and headless suited men—symbolically asserts the idea of anonymity, which they embody in deed and words. To study and grasp a phenomenon that proudly announces itself “Anonymous” might strike one as a futile and absurd exercise or exercise in futility and absurdity. A task condemned to failure. Over the last five years, I felt the sting of disorienting madness as I descended deep down the multiple rabbit holes they dug. Unable to distinguish truth from lies, and unable to keep up with the explosive number of political operations underway at one time, a grinding (read more...)

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DIY and the Future of Photojournalism (mini-CFP)

Jennifer Cool July 3, 2013

Two weeks ago, I answered a CFP from the Incoming Editor of Anthropology Now, Maria Vesperi, seeking short responses to a news story about the recent lay-off of photojournalists at the Chicago Sun Times. My piece, The Dark Side of DIY in Photojournalism and Photographic Ethnography came out this week. In keeping with the CFP, I wrote the piece from the perspective of visual anthropology but the issues surrounding the Sun Times decision to eliminate their entire photojournalism staff are ones that will be familiar to CASTAC colleagues working in computing and new media. The role of computing in the changing character of work in post-industrial economies has been a focus in social research on information technology at least since Shoshana Zuboff’s classic: In the Age of the Smart Machine (1989). While deskilling, downsizing, automating, and “info-mating” were central to this earlier literature, these themes figure less prominently in more (read more...)

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Findings From The Asthma Files

Ali Kenner April 30, 2013

It’s been nearly four years since The Asthma Files (TAF) really took off (as a collaborative ethnographic project housed on an object-oriented platform). In that time our work has included system design and development, data collection, and lots of project coordination. All of this continues today; we’ve learned that the work of designing and building a digital archive is ongoing. By “we” I mean our “Installation Crew”, a collective of social scientists who have met almost every week for years. We’ve also had scores of students, graduate and undergraduates at a number of institutions, use TAF in their courses, through independent studies, and as a space to think through dissertations. In a highly distributed, long-term, ethnographic project like TAF, we’ve derived a number of modest findings from particular sites and studies; the trick is to make sense of the patterned mosaic emerging over time, which is challenging since the very (read more...)

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