February 5, 2007
Alfred on Biopolitics and Modernity Feb 10
Our Alfred helped to organize the upcoming Graduate Conference on Vietnamese Studies. He’s also a discussant on one of the panels:
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Everyone Blog!
To get our blog going, it was decided at today’s Labinar general meeting that everyone should post a blog about either “the” problem of their ongoing research or “a” problem that is concerning them at the moment, explaining why it is important. Everyone should try to do this within the next week. The entry needn’t be long or especially detailed. A couple of succinct paragraphs will suffice.
The purposes of the Lab Notes blog are:
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1. to develop a space for intellectual conversation outside of the classroom;
2. to allow the group to stay informed about what other members of the group are both thinking and doing;
3. to share information, resources, readings, anecdotes; and
4. ultimately, to discover resonances between domains.
Wordpress (the blogging software we’re using) provides most html codes that you’ll need: for boldface, italic, blockquotes, linking to other websites and photo uploads.
A few tips about blogging (picked up in my I-School class last term):
1. use an effective headline (that captures the point of the post)
2. include links in your post as often as possible. Linking improves traffic to the site and allows others to find your post. Linking is considered the art of blogging, captured in the blogospheric motto: “Link as you think.” Discoveries are a great aspect of blogging: sharing things that people might not otherwise know about or find themselves.
3. write clearly and grammatically — although a blog is relatively informal, the writing should not be sloppy.
Notes from General Labinar Meeting Feb 4
Today Anthony Stavrianakis, Mattias Viktorin, Limor Darash, Amelia Moore, Alfred Montoya, Jerome Whitington, Emily Chua, Paul Rabinow, China Scherz, and I met today to discuss our activities this Spring. Kevin Karpiak, Adrian MacIntyre, and Erin Mahaffey couldn’t make the meeting due to schedule conflicts.
Most importantly we discussed the new blog and the less-new wiki. Anthony has been named the Lab Notes blog administrator, so all concerns among our group should be forwarded to him: stavrianakis@berkeley.edu
Also discussed:
– We decided against having a regularly scheduled face-to-face meeting. On the other hand, we hope to have at least one “event” a month throughout the term.
– Paul reported that he and Gaymon are working on a draft statement on
“contemporary equipment.” Amelia and Mattias will be arranging a event
around it.
– Right now the Lab Notes blog has a glitch that requires anyone commenting to log in first. We are attempting to fix this now so that anyone can comment. Only those logged in will be able to post, but anyone will be able to comment.
– I appointed myself the “wiki gardener” and will keep the “current event” section
of that updated, so that everyone can look there for meeting times, dates,
upcoming events. Just click on: this link. If you have questions about using the wiki, you can direct them to me, but of course everyone should be actively editing and adding to the wiki as he or she likes. People who haven’t put something about themselves on their individual wiki pages, should try to do so, at least their contact info.
Anthropology + Army = Really Smart Counterinsurgency!
An interesting story in the Washington Post describes the Army’s turn to a slew of doctors, of the uniformed Ph.D. variety, to undertake some deep thinking with respect to counterinsurgency in Iraq. One of the head folks of this new circle is an Australian soldier-anthropologist, Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, whose increasingly famous piece on the topic has turned heads throughout the Army. The warrior-intellectual has appeared in a new guise!
Why bring this up here? My curiosity is sparked by this decision, less because new thinking is needed in Iraq per se, but more because of a presumed recognition that individuals holding doctorates in the social and political sciences might be able to “think through” the problems of insurgency in a more effective manner than the old-school, non-Ph.D.-holding military types. In addition to this nagging thought I have that these first-order observations about insurgency leave little room to think about *how to think* about problems, there is the more pertinent question of what the social sciences can, should or do “add” (or not) in the production of this kind of knowledge, specifically in this present moment. Some members of ARC have probably put some thought into this question of the knowledge that the social sciences can and should produce in these or similar contexts (not to mention the institutional relationships between social science and the state and its defense apparatus); it be interesting to see this point taken up for awhile. - Dale