April 24, 2007
Event: Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, 30th Anniversary
UC Press and University Press Books
Invite You to an Author Event with
Paul Rabinow, author of
Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco
Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
5:30-7:30, Tuesday, May 8, 2007
2430 Bancroft Way (located directly across the street from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley and its renowned Zellerbach Hall, on Bancroft Way, between Telegraph and Dana)
In this landmark study, now celebrating thirty years in print, Paul Rabinow takes as his focus the fieldwork that anthropologists do. How valid is the process? To what extent do the cultural data become artifacts of the interaction between anthropologist and informants? Having first published a more standard ethnographic study about Morocco, Rabinow here describes a series of encounters with his informants in that study, from a French innkeeper clinging to the vestiges of a colonial past, to the rural descendants of a seventeenth-century saint. In a new preface Rabinow considers the thirty-year life of this remarkable book and his own distinguished career.
Paul Rabinow is a Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A., M.A., and PhD. at the University of Chicago. Professor Rabinow is arguably most famous for his work with Michel Foucault during Foucault’s time at Berkeley. His work has consistently centered on modernity as a problem: problem for those seeking to live with its diverse forms, a problem for those seeking to advance or resist modern projects of power and knowledge. This work has ranged from descendants of a Moroccan saint coping with the changes wrought by colonial and post-colonial regimes, to the wide array of knowledges and power relations entailed in the great assemblage of social planning in France, to his work of the last decade on molecular biology and genomics. He now calls this approach an anthropology of reason.
April 23, 2007
What is a problematization?
Inspired by comments Colin and Limor have made over on the VSS blog I wanted to propose for explicit discussion (again) the question: what is a problematization? Rather than re-state the basic question that everyone is asking, let me just quote a part of Colin’s question (Limor’s is along very similar lines):
April 22, 2007
Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times Online NGOs, intelligence, terrorism…
This just in from “The Sunday Times Online“. It covers all our bases - NGOs, intelligence, terrorism, chicken analogies…
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
NGOs - intelligence service to deter peace -Wimal
Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) came under a vicious attack this week by Wimal Weerawansa, JVP Propaganda Secretary and Parliamentarian who said that they act as intelligence services to promote disharmony among different ethnic groups in Sri Lanka.
“NGOs like Berghoff Foundation together with other such organisations act as an intelligence service to deter the current drive to abolish terrorism,” he said addressing a cross section of prominent business leaders and NGOs in the country as the keynote speaker at a Business for Peace event organised by the Federation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
Highlighting the importance of sovereignty, he said many who talk about peace now aspire for short term gains in reality. “We are used to living with short term aspirations. For some these short term aspirations which translate to short term gains prompt them to talk about peace that they hope to achieve on a short term period,” he said.
He accused the ‘white gentlemen’ of corrupting the government mechanism over a period of time and said they have no right to point the finger at Sri Lanka and say that the country is corrupt. Drawing parallels to the chicken farms in this regard, Weerawansa said that the chicken farmer will feed the chickens excessively not because he loves them, but to later kill them and sell them for profit. “This is what has happened to Sri Lanka. Every Tom, Dick and Harry offers grants and aid to the country, which we readily accept because we think short term. By giving us this aid so freely what they do is meddle with the right to take decisions regarding our own affairs,” he lashed out.
April 17, 2007
Biopolitics
This paper by Bruce Braun brings Deleuze back into the biopower conversation. Might be worth discussing here. Some critical comments on the piece have been posted on the vital systems security blog.
April 16, 2007
UC Berkeley: “Biotechnology in the 21st Century”: Biosecurity Lecture Series
“Biotechnology in the 21st Century”: Biosecurity Lecture Series Lecture | April 18 | 7-9 p.m. | Faculty Club, O’Neill Room
Malcolm Dando, Professor of International Security and Director of the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre at the University of Bradford, UK
Goldman School of Public Policy
A series of 50 interactive seminars carried out over the last two years in six countries on three continents has shown that most practicing life scientists see little connection between the work they do and biowarfare and bioterrorism. Yet careful studies, for example in the US National Academies Fink and Lemon reports, show that there are real reasons for concern in that the ongoing revolution in the life sciences could facilitate malign misuse around the world. The presentation examines some of the relevant characteristics of modern biotechnology and assesses its potential impact on international security. Three future scenarios ranging from the benign to the malign are then outlined. Despite the obvious dangers, and the difficulties of agreeing effective international action, it is argued that there are opportunities to build on the relative success of the 2006 6th Five Year Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) and that life scientists can make an effective contribution to strengthening the prohibition of the malign misuse of the life sciences.
510-643-4581
New York Times commentary “Bioterror or bioerror…”
Can Humanity Survive? Want to Bet on It?
My first reaction was a sigh of relief. After all, the 1947 doomsday prediction marked the start of a golden age. Never have so many humans lived so long — and maybe never so peacefully — as during the past 60 years. The per-capita rate of violence, particularly in the West, seems remarkably low by historical standards. If the clock’s keepers are worried once again, their track record suggests we’re in for even happier days.
But there’s one novel twist that gives me pause. When the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced two weeks ago in Washington that it was adjusting the clock, it was joined in a trans-Atlantic press conference by scientists at the Royal Society in London. One of them was the society’s president, Martin Rees, a new breed of doomsayer.
Dr. Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge and Britain’s astronomer royal, doesn’t just issue gloomy predictions. He doesn’t just move the hands of an imaginary and inscrutable clock. (Its keepers have never explained what one of their minutes equals on anyone else’s clock or calendar.)
No, Dr. Rees is braver. He gives odds on doomsday and offers to bet on disaster. In his 2003 book, “Our Final Hour,” he gives civilization no more than a 50 percent chance of surviving until 2100.
Dr. Rees is not a knee-jerk technophobe — he expects great advances as researchers around the world link their knowledge — but he fears that progress will be undone by what he calls the new global village idiots. He’s sure enough of himself to post an offer on Long Bets, a clever innovation on the Web that Stewart Brand helped start with money from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.
Long Bets is a nonprofit foundation that calls itself an “arena for competitive, accountable predictions.” It lets anyone make a prediction and take wagers on it, with the proceeds going to a charity named by the winner. The bets made so far are from $200 to $10,000, on topics ranging from the driving habits of Americans in 2010 to whether the universe will stop expanding. Mitchell Kapor, the software guru, is betting that in 2029 no computer will have passed the Turing test (by conversing so much like a human that you couldn’t tell the difference). The physicist Freeman Dyson’s money is on the first extraterrestrial life’s being found somewhere other than a planet or its satellite.
Five years ago, Dr. Rees posted this prediction: “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” He reasoned that “by 2020 there will be thousands — even millions — of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster. My concern is not only organized terrorist groups, but individual weirdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses.”
He didn’t get any takers on LongBets.org, which seems to me a missed opportunity. So I’ve posted an offer there to bet him $200 — not a huge sum, but enough to put both our reputations on the line. I realize that betting on disaster may sound ghoulish, but neither of us will personally profit (if I win, the money goes to the International Red Cross). And I think bets like this serve a purpose.
Besides stimulating public debate, they focus the issue and discipline prophets. No matter how good their intentions, prophets face strong temptations to hype. In the current issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. Rees wryly describes what happened in 2003 when he turned in a manuscript titled, “Our Final Century?”
“My British publisher removed the question mark from the book’s title,” he recalls, “and the U.S. publisher changed it to ‘Our Final Hour.’ Pessimism, it seems, makes for better marketing.”
It doesn’t make for better public policy though. Heralds of the bioterror apocalypse have actually worsened the problem of bioterror, as Milton Leitenberg points out in a 2005 report for the Strategic Studies Institute of the United States Army War College.
Mr. Leitenberg is a scholar at the University of Maryland who has been studying biological weapons for decades — and debunking wild predictions. Dr. Rees is not alone. Senator Bill Frist called bioterrorism “the greatest existential threat we have in the world today” and urged a military effort that “even dwarfs the Manhattan Project.”
Such rhetoric, Mr. Leitenberg says, has had the perverse effect of encouraging terrorists to seek out biological weapons. But despite the much-publicized attempts of Al Qaeda and a Japanese group to go biological, terrorists haven’t had much luck, because it’s still quite hard for individuals or nongovernmental groups to obtain, manufacture or deploy biological weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Leitenberg says the biggest threat is of a state deploying biological weapons, and he notes the encouraging decline in the number of countries working on this technology. Meanwhile, though, America has been so spooked by the horror-movie scenarios that it’s pouring money into defense against biological weapons. Dr. Leitenberg says that’s a mistake, both because it diverts resources from more serious threats — like natural diseases and epidemics — and because it could start a new biological arms race as other countries understandably fear that the United States is doing more than just playing defense.
It’s possible, as Dr. Rees fears, that terrorists will get a lot more sophisticated at biotech in the next decade, or that researchers will make some terrible mistake. The technology is getting cheaper and spreading rapidly. But so are the tools for preventing and coping with mistakes.
Whatever happens, I don’t expect biotechnology to pose an “existential threat.” The disaster predicted by Dr. Rees would be horrific, but humanity has survived worse, like the flu epidemic of 1918 that killed tens of millions of people. I know there are fears of new microorganisms or nanobots gobbling up our species, but I’m confident we’d somehow stop the Doomsday Clock from striking midnight.
In fact, the wager I’d really like to make with Dr. Rees is that we’ll make it to 2100. I’ve posted that prediction on Long Bets, and I’d be glad to give him better odds than the 50-50 chance he gives civilization of surviving the century.
I even think one of us might survive to see the payoff, although my techno-optimism has its limits. I hope some version of me will be around in 2100, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
April 14, 2007
Report on Syllabus Project Meeting 2
Amelia, Limor, Mattias, Alfred, and I met on April 11 to go over the original suggestions for the Anthropology of the Contemporary syllabus. I’ve summarized our discussion in the form of a skeletal syllabus. It was agreed that the syllabus shouldn’t focus on the conceptual issues of the anthropology of the contemporary as a mode of inquiry because that would be more of a graduate level undertaking. Rather, we felt it should focus on “problems.” Part One of the course would introduce the problem as a new approach with more theoretical readings, setting conceptual foundations. Part Two (Contemporary Problems) would focus on specific contemporary problems. Read more »
Intelligence Center Launched at California State University
Intelligence Center Launched at California State University, San Bernardino
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif., April 13 (AScribe Newswire) — The two young men stood before the assembled audience in the darkened room delivering an estimate of China’s domestic stability over the next 15 years to the unseen national intelligence officer for East Asia.
Typically from these types of briefings, intelligence agencies develop analytical reports and recommendations that ultimately play a role in developing national policy.
But though the officer, Lonnie Henley, is a frequent audience for this type of executive briefing, the presentation wasn’t at the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon or even the CIA. It was an exercise at Cal State San Bernardino and the analysts are graduate students from the university’s National Security Studies program. And Henley was there to comment on the presentation.
The event was one of the highlights of the Friday, April 13, official launching at Cal State San Bernardino of a unique consortium of seven California State University campuses working in collaboration to prepare students for work in the world of national security and intelligence. Cal State San Bernardino is the lead campus in the project.
The California State University Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence, CSU-ACE is the product of a multi-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, provided through the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The seven campuses are working together to prepare students for careers in intelligence through a full academic program and field experiences. In addition to Cal State San Bernardino, CSU-ACE also includes California State University campuses from Bakersfield, Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, Northridge and Cal Poly Pomona.
U.S. Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Redlands, spoke at the event, which was held at CSUSB’s Santos Manuel Student Union.
Professor Mark T. Clark, director of the CSUSB National Security Studies program, said the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence program has several components, including the development of skilled candidates for national intelligence service, a scholarship program for travel abroad for language study and cultural immersion, regional national security-related conferences and seminars, and summer outreach programs for high school students.
The National Security Studies program at Cal State San Bernardino is one of just three such programs in the United States, along with those at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a Fairfax, Va., satellite campus of Missouri State University. The intelligence community has frequently recruited at CSUSB, and the university’s NSS students also have gone on to work for legislators, the Governmental Accountability Office and the military.
Curricular programs on the seven consortium campuses are designed to help students with language acquisition, critical thinking and writing, foreign studies, graphic information system-related skills, national security and intelligence studies, and graduate studies in related programs. Top students will have the opportunity to earn funding to participate in summer travel-abroad programs.
Clark said that aside from the seven-campus CSU consortium, only nine other universities in the nation have been funded for such a program. However, the CSU consortium is unique with its multi-campus collaboration.
The center also will launch a summer national security institute for high school students this summer at Cal State Long Beach. Clark hopes the high school outreach efforts will encourage students to graduate from school and prepare for college by providing them with seminars and information sessions on regional studies, cultures, languages and technology.
April 9, 2007
Syllabus Project Meeting Wed @ 10 a.m.
We’ll meet Wednesday at 10. The Gifford Room is booked then so we’ll need to find another venue. Does anyone have suggestions?
Everyone should review the wiki page contributions to date.
Remediating Event
From the UC French Dept. email list:
My name is Minh-Khue Bui and I am part of the BAM/PFA Student Committee.
This Wednesday, April 11, the Committee is presenting their last event of
the school year, Cine/Spin. It is a performance that fuses french cinema
with live music and if you think it would interest those in the French
Department (faculty and students), I would greatly appreciate it if you
could forward this email to them. The details of the event are as
follows:On Wednesday, April 11, at 8 p.m., join us for an entirely new event where
we invite Cal student DJs to mix live to classic film from the early
twentieth-century.The film is Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct” (Zero de Conduite), an
irreverant story of student rebellion at an oppressive boarding school.
The DJs are four Cal students we’ve invited to spin the film a whole new
contemporary soundtrack.Stick around after the screening for our After School Special, with food,
DJs, and prizes for best prep school get-up.Cine/Spin
Wednesday, April 11, 8 p.m.
Pacific Film Archive Theater
2575 Bancroft Way (up the stairs opposite Urban Outfitters)Admission:
General $8
Cal students $4Stick around for our After School Special
* Picture Day * Snack Time * DJsDress:
Prizes for best PREP SCHOOL CHIC (think blazers, knee socks, oxfords, ties
… )Brought to you by the BAM/PFA Student Committee, the Pacific Film Archive,
and KALX FM. With special guests UC Berkeley Jazz Ambassadorial Quintet.Sponsored by Bows & Arrows