Search Results for: lange

Announcing New Positions!

Patricia G. Lange October 23, 2014

As 2014 comes to a close, I’m happy to report that the CASTAC organization and blog have thrived in the past year. Our organization has experienced an expanded groundswell of participation throughout the year, and at our annual CASTAC meetings. The CASTAC Blog has also seen an exciting range of content and new voices. In an effort to expand its organization and leadership, CASTAC is now seeking an Outreach Manager who will be responsible for promoting the CASTAC organization and working with the blog team. The CASTAC Blog is also inviting applications for two new Associate Editors, who will solicit new authors and content, and helm posts in their particular areas of specialty. For more details see below. Please forward this announcement widely! (read more...)

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Knowledge Transfer, Transparency, IT: An Infrastructure Report from Co-Chairland

Jennifer Cool August 31, 2014

“Does CASTAC still serve a purpose?” “Should it continue?” This was the discussion at the first CASTAC meeting I attended at the 2006 AAAs in San Jose. It was like coming upon a cadre of fascinating people who share your intellectual proclivities only to hear tell of how this had been a most excellent and renown party—a veritable Cambrian explosion of Anthro-STS—but that was back before you got here, and there was beer. (read more...)

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Greetings from Paris: A View from Ethnografilm 2014

Patricia G. Lange April 21, 2014

Recently I had the pleasure of attending an exciting new film festival called Ethnografilm, a showcase of ethnographic and academic films that visually depict social worlds. Helmed by the festival’s Executive Director Wesley Shrum (Professor of Sociology, Louisiana State University), the event took place April 17-20 at Ciné XIII Théâtre, a unique venue in the Montmartre district of Paris. The variety of films was indeed impressive, and ranged from old-school anthropological investigations of “disappearing worlds” to animations that stimulated the eye and illustrated interactive tensions in visual forms. Despite fears about the disappearing anthropologist filmmaker, it was interesting to see that Jean Rouch’s classic film Tourou et Bitti (1971), which was screened on Saturday night, played to a packed house! Given that co-sponsors included the International Social Science Council and The Society for Social Studies of Science, it is perhaps not surprising that the festival included many technology-related films. Themes included both opportunities and tensions in areas such as online interaction, ethics, “primitive” technologies, and high-tech bodily enhancements. Below I profile a few of the films I was able to screen. (read more...)

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Welcome to the New Team for 2014!

Patricia G. Lange January 14, 2014

The CASTAC Blog is pleased to announce our new team for 2014. Joining our Web Producer Jordan Kraemer is our new Associate Web Producer Angela Kristin VandenBroek! Angela brings to the position significant experience in web design and development, and was the recipient of an EduStyle Award. We are excited to have her on board! I will be continuing on as Editor and will oversee the Blog’s content. At the same time, we are very pleased to announce our new team of Associate Editors (AEs) who will be responsible for bringing exciting new content to the Blog! Below please find their names and contact information listed for your perusal. Please feel free to contact them if you have ideas for blog posts in their areas! (read more...)

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Happy Birthday to The CASTAC Blog! We Need YOU!

Patricia G. Lange November 5, 2013

Well, this week marks The CASTAC’s Blog’s first birthday, and I think cake is in order! I’m ordering chocolate of course! It has been a wonderful and exciting year as we have kicked off a new blog that is dedicated to exchanging ideas about science and technology as social phenomena. We thank everyone who has posted about their research or their opinions on a staggeringly impressive range of topics, from drones to steampunk! I look forward to all the wonderful posts and commentary that we’ll see in the coming year! The CASTAC Blog is now working through some growing pains! We are pleased to announce that it is time to expand our team! We are seeking 6-7 Associate Editors and 1 Associate Web Producer to ensure the continuously high quality of content that you’ve come to expect from The CASTAC Blog. The job duties and descriptions are as follows: Associate (read more...)

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4S Meeting Preview!

Patricia G. Lange October 9, 2013

The forthcoming meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is packed with exciting panels, papers, and activities that advance classic STS topics while exploring new themes that are emerging on the horizon. We hope to see many of you there, and we encourage in-person connections while we are all in the same place! Of course, one can never adequately cover a whole conference in a single blog post, but it is safe to say that this year’s 4S is chock full of exciting papers—and for the first time, stand-alone films—that tackle a dazzling array of 4S topics. The conference offers numerous panels that update the discipline’s understanding of long-term issues of interest including: scientific communities in action, risk, environmental crises, sustainability, epistemologies, religion, and food. Yet, new dimensions of these topics are also being explored. For example, although food has been of scholarly interest for quite some (read more...)

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Rethinking Scale in Social Media: An Ethnographic Perspective

Jordan Kraemer July 23, 2013

Scale has been a recent buzzword in discussions of social and digital media, as our editor Patricia G. Lange traced out in her January retrospective post. From MOOCs to Big Data, emerging communication technologies are making possible (and visible) large-scale interactions that have been attracting attention from many quarters, including anthropology. I want to revisit this conversation by discussing further what scale means in the context of networked media, especially social and mobile technologies. Is scale the new global? On the cusp of the new millennium in the late 1990s, there was a lot of buzz over the global reach of the Internet, linked to broader interest in how new communication technologies were entwined with globalizing processes. The World Wide Web itself was envisioned as spanning the globe, while globalism infected the popular imagination. Nearly twenty years on, the Internet has yet to bring about global equality or democracy, though (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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