This week’s round-up brings us stories on climate change, robot overlords, copyright, and video games. As always, we also ask you to keep an eye out for interesting digital tidbits that we should include in next week’s round-up: you can send them, along with any hate mail, compliments, or cat pictures, to editor@castac.org. (read more...)
Things are more than a little unsettled, lately. The past ten days since the Inauguration have been a maelstrom of activity, leaving many of us feeling profoundly uncertain about our political, technological, and scholarly futures. Of course, we haven’t been passive. Whatever else it has been, the rise of Trumpism has been an occasion for a great deal of anthropological activity. Anthropologists from around the world have been hard at work attending to the emergence of this phenomenon as both scholars and citizens. If our activities at each of these levels have seemed somewhat disconnected, somewhat divorced from one another, it is perhaps a testament to the profound challenge to our inherited sensibilities, our disciplinary and political commonplaces, represented by the transformations we are witnessing. I think, however, that this is in some respects a constitutive feature of our discipline; anthropology has long been haunted by a tension between its ethical commitment to engagement and its methodological commitment to untimeliness. (read more...)
Stories on data archaeology, global medical infrastructures, mushrooms, and open-access futures weekly round out this week’s weekly round-up of cool stuff from around the web. Remember, if you stumble across or create any blog posts, open access publications, or objets d’internet art that you think might fit here, just shoot a link to editor@castac.org. Help break us out of our habitual media itineraries and parochial corners of the internet! (read more...)
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth entry in the Second Project Series. This series explores an often undiscussed moment in professionalization: the shift from the research you began as a graduate student to the new work undertaken as an early- or mid-career scholar. This series is especially interested in personal journeys and institutional features that enabled or constrained this transition. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Lisa. Almost a decade ago, I presented a dissertation outline to my graduate advisor. Scanning the page with rising incredulity, she decreed, “Well, it looks like a great book, but it’s not a dissertation.” Such encounters transformed my protean liberal-arts-trained being into someone who could play the hedgehog-like scholar (Berlin 1953). In his classic essay on The Hedgehog and the Fox, philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguishes the hedgehog, whose work builds one big idea or program, from the fox, who chases diverse ideas without subordinating them to a core claim. Hedgehogs: Dante, Plato, Proust. Foxes: Shakespeare, Aristotle, Joyce. We trickster-loving anthropologists may fancy ourselves foxes. But writing a dissertation reads as consistent with hedgehog culture and personality. The dissertation or dissertation-based book assembles ideas into an edifice, into one Idea. Foxes may lean more toward article-production. Berlin knew, of course, that the distinction was overdrawn. We’re all a bit of both. And, when I completed the dissertation and began to experience the academic job market, I had to learn, once more, when to play the fox and when to play the hedgehog. (read more...)
Starting today, we’ll be posting a weekly round-up of cool stuff from around the web that the editorial collective thinks might be interesting to readers of the blog: posts from other blogs, news stories, art objects, internet ephemera. If you stumble across anything that you think might fit here, just shoot a link to editor@castac.org. Help break us out of our habitual media itineraries and parochial corners of the internet! (read more...)
2016 was a busy year for CASTAC members. The wealth of articles that we can now share through our online directory, books published or soon to be, blog posts made here and elsewhere, and the many great talks in Minneapolis suggest what we have been up to: that is, of course, applying critical anthropological attention to science, technology and computing, and interrogating social practices and systems of meaning and power. We have researched, written, edited, taught, mentored, reviewed, and managed. We have a lot to be proud of and a lot in the works. As an organization, CASTAC has been busy, too. We have continued to grow our presence online, at the AAA meetings, and beyond. In this post, we’ll recap what we’ve been up to this past year and talk about what’s in the works for the year to come. (read more...)
This year has been particularly charged with emotion. The stars that have lit up our Universe for a decade, or a century, have slipped away, one after another: Prince, Bowie, Princess Leia and her Mother. Stephen Hawking, who was doomed to an early death more than 50 years ago, celebrated his 75th birthday this past weekend. One never knows what life puts in our path… Hawking thinks he knows, though, and he is warning us. Hawking, indeed, seems to have become an Oracle, the Faust of the 21st Century. This is how, in 2015, he and Berlioz’s Faust were simultaneously reinvented under the demiurgic hand of the director Alvis Hermanis and the bemused eyes of its Parisian audience at the Opera Bastille in Paris. This was nearly one year ago. What’s next? The one, whose existence and career as a physicist has been made possible thanks to technology, as he likes to recall himself, is now warning us about the consequences of accelerating technological change. In so doing, he is making visible what has been the slogan of my field (Science and Technology Studies) from its inception: that the political, the social, the scientific, and the technical are always intertwined. This we should never forget. (read more...)
Until recently, cryonics typically appeared in the media and in science publications as the butt of jokes or an occasion to delight in scandals, gore, zombies and decapitation. But a convergence of old alliances and new research formations in the cradle of technocivilization have legitimized broadly research into the indefinite extension of life. Today, it no longer surprises me to see prominent mainstream science publications put out serious pieces on cryonics as a credible scientific project. Cryonics, for those who haven’t heard of it, is the practice of freezing and storing human bodies upon legal death, with hopes of future re-animation. In its July 2 issue, The New Scientist carried a cover story called ‘The Resurrection Project,’ with three full features on various aspects of cryonics. In the fall, the MIT Technology Review had published a piece called ‘The Science Surrounding Cryonics,’ written in response to a piece published a month earlier called ‘The False Science of Cryonics’—which in turn was a response to a very popular front page New York Times story documenting the last days of a young woman who, having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, had opted to be cryopreserved upon death. As it has gone about the ever-industrious business of boundary maintenance, institutional science has worked diligently to dismiss cryonics-related work as taboo science. For example, the Society for Cryobiology, the professional association for scientists who work on low temperature preservation of all biological matter, explicitly denies membership to anyone engaged in “freezing deceased persons in anticipation of their reanimation.” (read more...)
