Category: observations

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ESRC benchmarking review places UK Human Geography at the top

Over on his blog Pop Theory, Clive Barnett points out that the ESRC have completed an international benchmarking exercise that argues strongly that British Human Geography is world-leading. As Clive says: ‘say it loud, say it proud’, heh. This news has also featured heavily in my twitter stream this morning…

Clive suggests this is the take-home paragraph:

“Our unanimous conclusion from the evidence presented to us is that human geography in the UK is innovative, vibrant, and in most sub-fields is the world leader. Its students and staff are gifted and committed, its research outputs are disproportionately influential, read and referenced throughout the English-reading world – and, in translation, beyond. It is radically interdisciplinary and with the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has become an exporter of ideas and faculty to other disciplines. In the 1960s and 1970s the overseas export of geographers was substantial, and though slower today and more likely to be two-way, this trade in academic knowledge continues. UK geographers have an art not only for innovation but also for synthesis and a large number of the seminal publications (books as well as articles) continue to have a UK origin. So too among the major disciplinary journals – the UK publishes more than its share. Bibliometric indicators reveal that both in volume and in citation impact UK human geography exceeds the scores of other countries and almost all UK comparator social sciences. Cumulatively, this evidence supports the conclusion that human geography as a whole in the UK ranks first in the world.”

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Letterpress Theory – Univocal Press

The publishers Univocal Press are publishing some interesting work, in the form of lovely books, from a number of philosophers that are becoming increasingly of interest, and dare-I-say important, to those of a theoretical bent across the humanities and social sciences. I only recently stumbled across their blog, which seems to be worth following. The video below, for example, was posted – which features an interesting documentation of the savour-faire still perhaps necessary to make books. Plus, its a lovely video.

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Malabou talks – Critique of Foucault & Deconstruction of Biopolitics

A little while ago Stuart Elden re-blogged a post from the Foucault News blog that contained a video recording of Catherine Malabou’s European Graduate School talk entitled ‘The Deconstruction of Biopolitics‘, which is well worth watching (embedded below). That post links to an earlier post that includes another video recording of Malabou, offering a ‘critique of Foucault‘ (also embedded below).

I recommend watching both videos for a critical engagement with Foucault’s later work. I also find it interesting to think about this line of argument in relation to Stiegler’s engagement with Foucault’s work, particularly in Taking Care.

Catherine Malabou, philosopher and author, talking about Foucault’s deconstruction of biopolitics. In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses Hobbe’s Leviathan model of sovereignty, biopolitics as disciplinary power, the relationship between biology and politics, Agamben’s critique of Foucault and the function of symbolism in psychoanalysis in relationship to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan focusing on non-sovereign power, biopower, the individual body, will, the notion of organism, the structure of kingship, power relations, intentionality, resistance, self-subjugation, transgression and sexuality.

In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses the unity of the symbolic and biological, a new theory of power outside the model of language, the genealogy of relations of force, the somatic in place of the symbolic, functionality as the materiality of bodies and a new notion of life in relationship to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Levinas focusing on sexuality, the vocabulary of war, sensation, corporeality, the living body, bare life, Homo sacer, animality, poetry, sovereignty and the absolute value of life.

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Methodical walking

Walking can be a really helpful and valuable exercise not only for health reasons (in the broadest sense) but also for thinking and discussing.

As a postgraduate student at Bristol I helped with the ‘walking the city’ exercise for the first year students that asked them to walk a ‘transect’ of the city centre, paying attention not only to those indicators of the historical and social origins of the city landscape and the contemporary political economic actors in play but also, drawing on John Wylie’s work, to pay attention to how walking through the landscape of the city feels. In fact, the inimitable Keith Bassett published an interesting paper articulating a field trip exercise drawing on this method–the paper is called “Walking as an Aesthetic Practice and a Critical Tool: Some Psychogeographic Experiments“.

Some of the most provocative conversations I had as a PhD student, challenging my perceptions of my own research and how it fitted within broader discourses, took place on foot–particularly to and from pubs.

In my current role, at the DCRC, we organised two ‘walkshops’ with Do Projects‘ Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim, which invited participants to think about the ways in which networked technologies collect, display and act upon data collected within the city landscape.

The motivation for this post though is that I was interested to find out that Annemarie Mol hosts a monthly ‘walking seminar‘, during which the participants ‘talk-walk about various issues concerning academic work’. The rationale is that ‘talking-while-walking enhances thinking in ways not attainable behind a desk or in a seminar sitting down’. The associated website is well worth a look.

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Alexander Galloway on Deleuze & computers

I am indebted to @furtherfield for posting a link to the blog communication+1, which has a YouTube video of Alexander Galloway giving a talk, at the at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (December 2nd, 2011), on ‘Deleuze and Computers’.

The inimitable Galloway identifies Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” as a highly significant piece of thinking about life in a digitally mediated society.  The talk is really interesting and I have reproduced below most of the post from communication+1, including the YouTube video:

Abstract:
Could it be? Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will lie in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” a mere 2,300 word essay from 1990? Such a strange little text, it bears not the same Deleuzean voice so familiar from his other writings. Cynics will grumble it falls short of the great books of ’68-’69 or the radical collaborations with Félix Guattari during the 1970s. In the “Postscript” he indicts capitalism by name. He raises his wrath against corporations and television shows. Yet his frame includes the culture at large, not just the mode of production. He talks about snakes and surfers and other features of the dawning millennium. He references such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Paul Virilio, Franz Kafka, and most importantly Michel Foucault. He tells us exactly what is wrong with the business sector, as well as with the prisons, schools, and hospitals. It reads almost like a manifesto, the “Manifesto on Control Societies.” In this talk we will investigate the last few years of Deleuze’s life, a period in which he elaborates, however faintly, an image of what it means to live in the information age.

This talk was made possible by the UMass Graduate School, the University Libraries, UMass Free Culture, and the Department of Communication.

Recorded by JC Sawyer, produced by Zach McDowell

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Updated wordpress!

Well, I don’t blog all that often anymore, hence this blog page isn’t the homepage – I am however writing at least weekly blog posts for my day job – see http://www.dcrc.org.uk/blog.

Anyway, I resurrected some old knowledge and reminded myself how MySQL works (sort of) and followed the lovely and simple instructions on wordpress.org so this site is now running on <cue pitiful synthetic fanfare> WordPress 3.1.

This means those nasty error messages have gone from the top of the page (which were caused by a recent server upgrade).  I’m hoping to blog a bit on here again, although it will remain infrequent, heh.

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7 templates for self-promotional tweets

In the year-long period I have been using Twitter I feel that there a few trends to how to not-too-subtley promote oneself as a person whose opinion on life, the universe and everything the world ought to follow.  The seven sentences listed below are a sort of deconstructed set of templates that illustrate how to employ this form of self promotion. Simply fill in the [square bracketed] sections with an example of what is described between the brackets. Enjoy! –

  1. The thing that bugs me about [contemporary cultural phenomenon] is [vacuous self-interested navel gazing]
  2. Why hasn’t anyone created [app on one platform] for [other platform preferred by opinionated twatterer]?
  3. Looking for [anally specific thing]. Wasn’t there [something similar] done by [vague allusion to something else]?
  4. You know that thing where [I demonstrate I want to be pithy but just show I’m a bore]
  5. When I was [somewhere I think demonstrates that I’m cultured and/or wealthy] I met [first name of a person I don’t really know but I think this shows I’m connected] who [does this thing that everyone must believe is terrribly worthy in my post-colonial Western view] – please support them! [link]
  6. [Random inane quote] – [person you’ve never heard of] #[hashtag of conference that shows quite how important and well travelled I think I am]
  7. [Random phenomenon in the world] in [place that shows I travel] is [annoying or delightful]

NB: This is a bit of fun… please don’t take it seriously!!

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William Gibson: The Zero History of waiting for the Great Dismal

[Originally posted on the DCRC website: http://www.dcrc.org.uk/blogs/william-gibson-zero-history-waiting-great-dismal]

Last night I attended William Gibson’s Bristol Festival Ideas talk.  This blog post represents some reflections on Gibson’s relationship with futurity as it came through in the question and answer session.

William Gibson’s appearance at his Bristol Festival of Ideas talk was delayed by an unanticipated train incident, an apparent ‘anomoly’, as Gibson quipped, for trains are ‘never’ delayed in the UK. This was a fittingly unanticipated eventuality – for the evening proved to focus on the characterisation of the future. Launching straight into a reading of an entire chapter from Zero History. In an unexpectedly high pitched and quite raspy voice, Gibson recounts a section of the character Milgrim’s story. Expressing his witty and insightful eye for detail, in the world crafted by Gibson for Zero History, Cafe Nero is ‘a tasty alternate reality Starbucks’. Gibson’s protagonist is investigating military fashion on behalf of global marketing company, ‘Blue Ant’, not least because ‘military contracting is essentially recession proof’. Indeed, the author proclaimed, the bulk of the 21st century street fashion for men is the fashion of the middle of previous century’s military. This forms a part of the basis for the book’s narrative.
Continue reading “William Gibson: The Zero History of waiting for the Great Dismal”

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Global coffee harvests and their arrival in the UK

As my coffee geekery has no bounds I have compiled these tables for my own use, so that I can remind myself when to expect particular coffees to be available here in the UK. Obviously people involved in coffee professionally probably know these things but I thought it may be of interest to a couple of other people. The inimitable Sweet Maria’s have a more complex table showing the full harvest period, the best harvest period, the full shipping period and the nest shipping period. I have used this alongside Mercanta’s loose reporting of when they expect particular countries’ harvests to arrive (cos Mercanta source a vast chunk of the [good] coffee that comes into the UK). I’m presuming things take quite a long time, so the periods listed here align with the ends of Sweet Maria’s periods. This sort of matches up with how the Cup of Excellence country programmes function too.

Country Harvest Arrival in UK
Brazil September October-April
Colombia November-December & May-June January-February & July-August
Costa Rica March April-July
Guatemala December-March April-July
Honduras February March-June
Nicaragua March April-July
El Salvador March May-August
Ethiopia November-February April-August
Kenya February April (possibly more in September from a ‘Fly Crop’)
Rwanda October December-January
Dominican Republic February-April (long season) April-August
Panama (for those who’re lucky!) March April-June

This table shows the most likely times for coffee to be arriving from the respective country.

Jan Feb Mar Apr May June July Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec
Bolivia X X X
Brazil X X X X X X X
Colombia X X X X
Costa Rica X X X X
Dominican Republic X X
El Salvador X X X X
Ethiopia X X X X
Gautemala X X X X
Honduras X X
Kenya X X X X
Nicaragua X X X X
Panama X X X X X
Rwanda X X
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Blogger apathy, the death of Bloglines and missing links

This year I have been mostly… blogging on the variety of sites attached to the Digital Cultures Research Centre’s network of events and projects – not least our recent conference Paying Attention which addressed the issue of the ‘attention economy’ (see the website for more details). The conference was held in Linkoping, in Sweden, and funded by the European Science Foundation. We were fortunate to have a varied and interesting collection of speakers including Tiziana Terranova and Bernard Stiegler, who were both superb.

Having written the above, I doubt anyone will read this, not least because I don’t really blog much at the best of times and its been even quieter of late. However, I have been spurred to action because of the announcement of the imminent demise of Bloglines, for which I have remained a faithful user for around five years, mostly due to laziness! I’m probably going to avoid the obvious move to the big “G” (as in the internet services company not ‘him upstairs’!) and switch over to NetVibes. An immediate cause for reflection in this circumstance is the number of ‘saved’ blog posts from the feeds I follow which I intended to write about here and haven’t got around to discussing. So, for want of a better strategy – I’m posting them here as a sort of archaeology of my Bloglines account [continued below].
Continue reading “Blogger apathy, the death of Bloglines and missing links”