January 18, 2008
Google.org Announces Core Initiatives to Combat Climate Change, Poverty and Emerging Threats
Google Offers a Map for Its Philanthropy
See Google.org for all project areas
One of the 5 areas is named Predict and Prevent:
“Google.org supports efforts to empower communities to predict and prevent events before they become local, regional, or global crises, by identifying “hot spots” and enabling a rapid response.”
The three most interesting grants within the Predict and Prevent project area:
$5,000,000 multi-year grant to establish this nonprofit organization focused on improving early detection, preparedness, and response capabilities for global health threats and humanitarian crises
Global Health and Security Initiative:
$2,500,000 multi-year grant to strengthen national and sub-regional disease surveillance systems in the Mekong Basin area (Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and China-Yunnan province)
$450,000 multi-year grant to conduct in-depth research into the use of online data sources for disease surveillance
January 15, 2008
Europe equivocates on biofuels
New York Times: Europe May Ban Imports Of Some Biofuels Crops
BBC: Europe rethinks Biofuels Guidelines
December 10, 2007
CFP: How Is Anthropology Going? An Inquiry into Movement, Mode and Method in the Contemporary World.
CFP: How Is Anthropology Going? An Inquiry into Movement, Mode and Method in the Contemporary World.
This panel asks a misleadingly simple question: how is anthropology going? The prime assumption of such an inquiry is that there exists, today, a diversity of anthropological valences and that such diversity is a productive element of the discipline. Beyond that, however, we intend to ask about the various possible modes of contemporary anthropology—the diverse manner by which different anthropologies move. By asking this, we mean to initiate inquiries in several further directions: Although it has long been accepted by various Derridean anthropologies that differences between domains of inquiry are in themselves productive of analyses, we want to ask, within that framework how anthropologies can remain open, or vital; in other words, how are various anthropologies made possible, so that they can exist within a diversity of approaches and loci? In shifting the topic of anthropological methodology in such a way, we are particularly interested in the motion that is enabled at the intersection of two classic formulations of the political: aesthetic persuasion and ethical orientation; how are people, places things, etc.—including anthropological text and theory—put into motion?
We imagine at least three different ways in which panel papers might engage the above question: 1) Through papers that document the forms of movement—be they of an ontological (people, things, ideas, images) rhetorical (e.g., genres of persuasion) nature; 2) Other papers might ask how such movement is made possible, or even necessary, in the contemporary world. Such papers might go beyond documentation towards a questioning of the various orientations available within the contemporary anthropological toolkit and, in so doing, essay an assessment of the discipline as such (the second sense of the phrase “how is it going’?); 3) Yet another approach to the above question might consider the very fact that anthropologists are asking such questions at this particular moment and attempt to explore what this fact might tell us about the contemporary world.
Please submit paper abstracts of 250 words or less and title to Karpiak@berkeley.edu by Thursday, December 13th 2007.
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 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
April 3, 2007
Povinelli 290 Lecture
Elizabeth Povinelli gave a 290 lecture yesterday worth attending. The room was packed and the lecturer (whatever one might think of the piece) presented a serious effort at thought. These two facts alone make the event a red letter day in the Berkeley anthropology department. It seems so little to ask for, but one does have to wonder why there are so few such events in the department throughout the year. Certainly Berkeley could attract people who people at Berkeley want to hear from. But that’s another story…
I wanted to reflect on the talk here because I think it’s relevant to some of the conversations we’ve had in labinar settings and it intersects a good deal with the manuscript of conversations we read between George Marcus and Paul last September. And I also had questions about it that I wasn’t able (or prepared) to ask yesterday and so thought I would do so here. Read more »
March 20, 2007
Syllabus Project — Steps 1 and 2
Further to my earlier post: a group of us met yesterday (those who could make the very short-notice meeting). Because we could decide only so much with a minority of us there and with limited time, it was decided that we would begin with readings and try to work then toward a structure, rather than begin with a structure and work toward the readings. Mattias has begun a wiki page on the ARC wiki, to which each of us need add two readings, with an explanation of why you think it should be included. Please include bibliographical information, and page numbers for your selections. Comments should be added through the “discussion” function of the wiki. You all might want to click “watch this page” on the syllabus project page so that you know when someone has added something. We already have three or four people’s suggestions (thanks to those folks).
Given this development, I’d like to suggest a new plan from the one above:
1. Everyone post his or her suggestions within the next few days.
2. Second face-to-face meeting will be the week after spring break (not the week of April 15). During this meeting, we will discuss structure again and then decide on our next step. For this meeting everyone should review everyone else’s suggestions and comment on them. We need to find a time when as many of us can come as possible. To that end, I’m proposing that we meet at my house for an “anthropological salon,” Friday, April 6, at 5:30. I live straight down College Avenue in Rockridge.
3. But, if that isn’t convenient, I’ve also made a “shared calendar” page on the wiki, which is no calendar but just a list of days of the week next to which I ask that everyone write the times they are always unavailable. From that we can determine in fact if there is any time when we are all free. I’m not sure there is!
Onward.
March 19, 2007
Mattias Viktorin Today — ROOM CHANGE
Mattias’s brown bag will not be in the Gifford Room but in Hearst Gym, Room 21. Same time: Noon.
March 17, 2007
Syllabus Project
I think we need a project that will get us working together this term in a more formal way, since little energy is being generated on the blog (no blame intended). I propose that we begin to work on a syllabus for an upper-level undergraduate class on the anthropology of the contemporary—as has been discussed before. Paul intends to teach such a class in the spring of 2008. I see us proceeding as follows:
1. Have a face-to-face brainstorming meeting—preferably, before spring break—to discuss how we want to proceed, setting up a schedule, proposing (perhaps) an early structure, and (perhaps) assigning particular parts to particular people.
2. Proceed from there using the wiki both to work on the document, using the discussion function to go back and forth.
3. Have another face-to-face meeting during the week of April 15 in which we review our work.
4. Make a final draft by April 24.
5. Have a final meeting where we present the product of our labor to Paul and have a full meeting discussing it. Paul won’t participate until the final meeting.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. This isn’t Paul’s project, it’s ours. It’s an experiment in collaboration around something that we all have in common: thinking about what an anthropology of the contemporary might look like. We all have something unique to contribute based on our own projects conceived as anthropology of the contemporary, and we all have something to gain from it. Whether Paul uses the syllabus or not is not the point. It’s for us all to work together to confront an “anthropology of the contemporary.” How are we doing it? How would we teach it?–as if we were just told by Rosemary Joyce that there were a departmental crisis and we’d been called upon to put a class together, quick. Simply posting the syllabus on the ARC website could be another foreseeable final purpose of the project.
2. It will be very hard for anyone who doesn’t attend the initial face-to-face meeting to participate on the subsequent work, so we need to find a time when everyone can come. I know this is hard. I propose the following dates/times: tomorrow after Mattias’s brown bag (1:30); or Thursday at 4 p.m. If these times don’t work, suggest others. We may have to wait until after spring break, but let’s see what might be possible this week.
3. Finally, I know everyone’s busy but I also know that everyone’s busy with things that are directly relevant to this very subject. To that end, I think we could use Amelia’s field statement (which she posted last week) as a starting point. It contains a section on “the anthropology of the contemporary.” Let’s have it be our “starter.”
Please reply with comments, confirmations, time suggestions, etc. I’ll take silence to mean you’re not interested in being involved.