Platypus

Looking Ahead to 2013: A Question of Scale

 Patricia G. Lange  January 10, 2013

The CASTAC community joined together in 2012 to launch this blog and begin dialogue on contemporary issues and research approaches. Even though the blog is just getting off the ground, certain powerful themes are already emerging across different projects and areas of study. Key themes for the coming year include dealing with large data sets, connecting individual choices to larger economic forces, and translating the meaning of actions from different realms of experience. Perhaps the most visible trend on our minds right now involves dealing with scale. How can anthropologists, ethnographers, and other STS scholars address large data sets and approaches in research and pedagogy, while also retaining an appropriate relationship to the theories and methods that have made our disciplines strong? As we look ahead to 2013, it would seem that a big question for the CASTAC community involves finding creative and ethical ways to deal with phenomena that (read more...)

Diana Forsythe Prize: 2013 Call for Nominations

 Patricia G. Lange  January 7, 2013

The Diana Forsythe Prize was created in 1998 to celebrate the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. The prize is awarded annually at the AAA meeting by a committee consisting of two representatives from CASTAC and one representative from the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) . It is supported by the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and Bern Shen. Self-nominations are welcomed To be eligible, books (or article series) must have been published in the last five years (copyright of 2008 or later) Submission deadline is May 1, 2013 (early nominations appreciated). Nominations should be sent via email to Selection Committee Chair, Marcia Inhorn at marcia.inhorn@yale.edu Publishers should send a copy of nominated titles to each of the selection committee members listed below. Marcia C. Inhorn Yale University Department of Anthropology 10 (read more...)

MOOCs in the Machine, Part II

 Jordan Kraemer  January 3, 2013

In Part I, I asked how MOOCs (massive online open courses) are potentially poised to “disrupt” academia thanks to broader structural and economic shifts that need to be addressed independently, while still considering the value of online education. In this second half, I turn towards ways to rethink graduate education as a consequence of changes in academia and the academic job market. —- While MOOCs have become a popular topic of discussion, less attention has been paid to those rethinking the structure of graduate education, to address related issues (including restructuring humanities dissertations and shortening the length of doctoral programs). Notably, Stanford has been moving forward with an initiative to cut the time-to-degree for humanities programs to five years, by soliciting concrete plans from individual departments in exchange for year-round grad student funding. I can’t speak to whether five years is a reasonable length for humanities Ph.D. programs, but it (read more...)

MOOCs in the Machine, Part I

 Jordan Kraemer  December 29, 2012

Digital technologies are transforming communication practices in many settings, and higher education is no exception. In particular, “massive open online classes” (MOOCs) have been garnering attention and provoking questions about the future of college education, in the U.S. and elsewhere. MOOCs could potentially “disrupt” current models of education, according to some like Clay Shirky, but their growing popularity owes much to the current state of the economy (in the U.S. and more globally) and the neoliberalization of the academy, as some critics contend. The conversation about MOOCs needs to take place in the context of broader structural changes in academia, to recognize both their promise and their limitations. In his recent blog piece, Shirky avers that MOOCs will disrupt education just as MP3s and other digital content disrupted established “old media” industries like the recording industry, by changing the “story” of what’s possible: Once you see this pattern—a new story (read more...)

Call for STM/CASTAC Panel Collaboration

 Patricia G. Lange  December 20, 2012

The Science, Technology & Medicine special interest group on the Society for Medical Anthropology is interested in collaborating with CASTAC to put together a double panel for the 2013 AAA meeting in Chicago. We will be putting out a call for abstracts for the panel in a few weeks. In the meantime, we are seeking a co-organizer for the panel from the CASTAC membership. This position will include working with co-organizers from STM to invite senior scholars to participate in the panel, solicit and review abstracts from other potential participants, and help determine the final composition of the panel. Interested parties should contact Christine Labuski (chrislab@vt.edu) or Jennifer Jo Thompson (jjthomp@uga.edu) by December 28, 2012. Working abstract: EMERGENT TECHNOLOGIES, FUTURE PUBLICS In keeping with the 2013 AAA meeting theme of ‘Future Publics, Current Engagements,’ this double panel brings junior and senior scholars into dialogue in order to explore how current (read more...)

Some Thoughts on Computing, Materialism, and the Virtual

 Ian Lowrie  December 11, 2012

In the past decade, social scientists have paid increasing attention to a series of novel approaches to the analysis of materiality. Lately and loosely grouped under the rubric of the “new materialisms,” work by scholars such as Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, and Hans-Jorg Rheinberger has pushed for a robust expansion of our understanding of the social to include the material world. While engaged in a polyvalent intellectual undertaking, these materialists are bound together by their shared assertion of the significance of matter, its properties, and its effects for truly robust social analysis. In a sense, this should be old news to anthropologists; the analysis of material culture has been part of our stock in trade since the foundation of the discipline. However, the new, interdisciplinary focus on the material by these thinkers seems to me to offer an occasion for anthropology to revisit certain issues in the anthropological study of (read more...)

Anthropology and Outer Space

 Lisa Messeri  December 4, 2012

This past summer had some pretty big headlines for the space science community. Venus passed between Earth and the Sun, not to do so again until 2117. Scientists announced that Pluto (the dwarf planet formerly known as planet) had a fifth moon, making it the envy of those of us with a single paltry satellite. Most celebrated, was the landing of a new Mars rover, Curiosity, on the red planet’s surface. Why should we (earthlings, anthropologists) care about Venus, Pluto, or Mars? My current project considers this question by focusing on the planetary science community, those who study planets both in our solar system and beyond. Specifically, I am interested in the role of “place” in the work of these scientists. I don’t mean just the places that these scientists inhabit, but if and how scientists transform planets from objects into places. Scientists understand other planets as places because it (read more...)