comments on a star editorial on copyright

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comments on a star editorial on copyright
if interested, it's a little bit of a rant, but still (i hope) interesting and slightly informative.

A link to the editorial is at the top of that page, but is here again:
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/442594

happy friday!

temple uni. (philadelphia, pa) exchange programs

... none of which require you to actually go to Philadelphia (tho' i have heard it's a wonderful town):
http://www.temple.edu/studyabroad/programs/summer/index.html

thought i'd share it because it's not all anthropology, and not all in Japan. (tho' no costa rica, there is Ghana, Jamaica, Mexico, Senegal, and Spain...)

it is, however, not inexpensive.

-k

Paul Kingsnorth on Renewables in Apr. '08 Ecologist

thought a few might be interested in this (maybe CEO Hoicka most):

in the April 2008 issue of Ecologist, Paul Kingsnorth writes about the storm brewing in Lewis about a massive, 181 turbine wind farm. here are some highlights from the article.

The battle of Lewis [a contested site of a 181 turbine wind farm] is not the easily-told story of greens versus anti-green reactionaries. It is more complex, and more interesting, than that.
The question that hovers above it all is currently echoing around the world, and will only grow louder: in the fight against climate change, will the environment have to be destroyed to save the environment? Can the ends justify the means?
(26)

The amount of maize needed to fill the tank of a Range Rover with ethanol fuel would feed a person for a whole year. Fill your tank every two weeks for a year and you have taken enough food out of circulation to feed a hungry village.
(27)

Ironically, it now seems that biofuels don't even do what they were intended to: new research has revealed that, once the 'carbon cost' of clearing land for biofuels is taken into account, virtually every biofuel crop actually produces more emissions than the fuel it replaces.
(27)

The lesson to be learned from all this is a sobering one. Renewable energy technologies as we currently know them are incapable of providing anything like the amount of power we have come to expect from fossil fuels. Even if technologies improve, which they will undoubtedly do, they will not do so fast or cheaply enough to prevent the growing conflicts over land that the spread of large-scale renewables is already provoking.
...
[G]reen technologies can have a distinctly un-green downside. And green technologies – any technologies – on this sort of ['mega project'] scale are going to be undemocratic, top-down, unaccountable and, potentially, very destructive indeed.
Scale, in the end, is all.
(28)

interesting and highly relevant stuff, even if he may be a little more polemics than research.

CfP Rethinking Extractive Industry: Regulation, Dispossession, and Emerging Claims

This might be interesting for the environmental side of things, and it looks like a big, local conference.

2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

Rethinking Extractive Industry: Regulation, Dispossession, and Emerging Claims

March 5-7, 2009, York University, Toronto

The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC),
together with the Extractive Industries Research Group (EIRG), both
located at York University, are hosting a conference entitled
“Rethinking Extractive Industry: Regulation, Dispossession, and Emerging Claims.” Taking place from March 5 to 7, 2009 as part of the University’s 50th anniversary and CERLAC’s 30th anniversary
celebrations, the conference will bring together cutting-edge research on the socio-ecological, spatial, and political-economic dimensions of industrial extraction. Through critical theoretical reflection and policy-relevant analysis, three tracks aim to advance our understanding of the social regulation of extractive industries in its broadest sense.

While we are open to a range of conceptualizations, we particularly
invite proposals to the following three tracks:

Track 1: The Political Economies and Ecologies of Extractive Regimes

The first track examines the political economy and ecology of the
contemporary global regime governing investment in extractive
industry—in particular, its financial, socio-economic,
spatial/geographic, and ecological-natural dimensions. Key questions include: How is it that particular national and global regimes of extraction have emerged around particular natural resources? What are the historical dimensions that shaped these regimes? And how do contemporary global financial flows influence the possibility of regulating their at once ecological and socio-economic contradictions? Possible panel themes include: Socio-environmental Histories of Extraction; The Political Economy of Resource Control; and Socio-Natures of Particular Natural Resources.

Track 2: Critical Explorations of Emerging Accountability Mechanisms

The second track seeks to map out developing notions of accountability in industrial extraction and their expressions in a variety of regional sites. Papers revolving around particular global/regional cases will identify key actors accountable for extraction and to whom they are accountable, who regulates and enforces these relationships, and which actors and interest groups are included or excluded from the process.
Many of these papers will focus on transnational accountability
mechanisms, their significance, and the particular challenges presented by these emerging forms of governance. Possible panel themes include: Formal Corporate-Community Agreements; Science, Environmental Assessment and Accountability; and Transnational Lawsuits.


Track 3: Global/Local Encounters: Civil Society, States and Corporations

The final track identifies how social response, including active
protest, has been central to shaping socio-environmental regulation and to restructuring industry-community relations. Here we seek to identify what forms of social mobilization have been most effective in improving the conditions of affected communities. We also wish to explore issues of representation and legitimacy in civil society organizations and the ethical and political dilemmas raised by transnational advocacy efforts. Key panelists will be invited from social movements and organizations, and will include representatives of Canadian First Nations, historically marginalized social groups in extractive sites, and NGOs involved in more critical advocacy work. Possible panel themes include: Critical and Comparative Studies of Indigenous/Community Consultation; Critical
and Comparative Studies of ‘Successful’ Social Movements; and Global
Networks for Corporate Accountability and Oversight.

Proposals should identify the track(s) most appropriate to your paper and include an abstract of up to 150 words. Please also name
authors/co-authors, institutional affiliations and contact addresses.

Please send proposals by post or email by June 30, 2008 to:
Organizing Committee
York University/CERLAC conference on extractive industry
240 York Lanes
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
eiconf@yorku.ca

Notes from Congress '08

hey there from Vancouver;

the transcript to the keynote to Congress 2008 has been posted on the UBC site. the title is intriguing, tho' it strikes me as odd for someone for whom it does actually matter to ask and answer whether "universities really matter."

anyway, i look forward to reading the keynote (i've been horribly bad at attending, and selfish at taking a vacation); here it is (as a PDF file):

Stephen Toope: "Crossing Borders, Contesting Values: Do Universities Matter?"

CCA presentation at Congress '08 - see you there!

Here's the abstract for my upcoming presentation at Canadian Communications Association conference @ Congress '08 in Vancouver. I'll be presenting on Friday morning, bright and early at 9am! Hitch a ride if you need to, but be sure to swing by!

Kris Erickson, Independent Scholar, Coordinator, Arts TA Development Program, Ryerson University
Between Two Worlds: Envisioning "Born into Brothels"

Born into Brothels (2004), a documentary film by photographer Zana Briski and filmmaker Ross Kauffman, occupies a unique place as a cultural object. Ostensibly the chronicle of a collaborative, intercultural, participatory photography or “photovoice” project with the children of sex-trade workers in Calcutta, Born into Brothels documents Briski’s encounters with her young students in and beyond the camera workshops she organizes for them. Yet more than simply a collaborative project, the film is also a journalistic account, a narrative authored at least as much by Briski and Kauffman as by the children whose images constitute the filmic space, and whose photographs punctuate the storyline. Since its release, the film’s supposedly neutral portrayal of these children and the products of their photographic education have been both celebrated and criticized, earning at once an Academy Award (as best documentary feature in 2005) and sharp criticism from social advocacy groups in Calcutta and in North America. This paper will analyze several images from the film in order to better understand how the products of contemporary visual communication like this documentary might successfully blur the boundaries between aesthetic representation and political agency. Because this film presents a rare glimpse into what teaching and learning looks like, it is an important text which highlights what I see as a pedagogical impulse underlying key discourses of contemporary media makers and media systems. In this paper I explore what the film attempts to teach us—about photography as well as about cultural practice—and consider what we might actually be learning from it in the end. As questions about the nature of truth and subjectivity, knowledge and information continue to be raised with respect to emerging communicational technologies and new media practices, a critical understanding of the increasing complexities of our visual worlds becomes crucially important.

Notes on Capra's Hidden Connections

Fritjof Capra's work rests on a common premise that, "To build a sustainable society for our children and future generations, we need to fundamentally redesign many of our technologies and social institutions so as to bridge the wide gap between human design and the ecologically sustainable systems of nature" (pp.98-99). This kind of broad statement raises a lot questions for me: how did current technologies and social institutions get built? who was included/excluded? who will be included/excluded from future attempts to redesign systems? how might 'our' understanding of "sustainable systems of nature" be spatially and temporaly particular? how do gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity factor into the way "sustainability" is framed?

My notes so far:

- The subtitlte is "Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability." This "science of sustainability" refers to the application of systems thinking to an understanding of life that connects "form, matter, process, and meaning" by means of one concept: the network.

- Goal: to build organizations that mirror life's adaptability, diversity, creativity. How would you know if these organizations were fundamentally different from existing ones?

- How to balance "community" with openness to the outside world?

- Questions of authenticity

- Companies need to foster communities of practices within their structures, but do communities of practice need companies (e.g. think of relationship between Arts TA and Ryerson)?

- Is it possible to communicate experiential knowledge? How does this "tacit knowledge" change when it becomes "a thing to be replicated, transferred, quantified, and traded" (116)? Think of Freire's discussion of agrotechnology.

- To what extent is Capra fundamentally transforming or reproducing global capital relations? A shift from computer time to biological time, from profit to sustainability (as guiding value), but how did profit become the guiding value and how will that change?

- Biotechnology can work when it "respects" nature. Who defines "nature"? pp. 201-202

- why do academics adopt positions not supported by existing research? (e.g. Carl Wieman's attack on the "lecutre" and Capra's attack on genetic determinism p. 205). The desire for community belonging can trump the will to dissent--this applies to graduate students too.

- ecoliteracy and ecodesign: www.ecoliteracy.org

- p. 239: system 1: nature; system 2: human community; system 3: circulation of scientific knowledge through the international community. Is this like Latour's discussion of the cave, and Science as the mediating language between human community and nature?

- Capra often refers to the reputation of his sources, sort of like a contrast between credible and non-credible people/communities?

- Overall, this book doesn't make me feel included, but rather more like a spectator to what is already going on (here are all the problems, but just sit back and relax cause it's all being taken care of). If the technical and conceptual realms are ready to go, where's the social? Is political will just a policy issue around tax incentives? what about public education around ecoliteracy? Democracy?

- In my Master's thesis I arrived at the conclusion that: 1) meanings of nature frame understandings of the form and function of urban greenspace; 2) meanings of nature are socially constructed over time and space; 3) at the Ecology Park in Peterborough, "good" human-nature relations mirrored "good" human-human relations, especially around ideas about diversity, health, community, and respect. How might these conclusions fit with Capra?

PhD Program Plan

I mentioned how FES is quite fond of writing plans to guide your academic studies. If this exercise is done well, it can be very useful. The PhD Handbook outlines the steps towards making the Program Plan (and much more) but, at this point, we would probably find more interesting just to consider the sections of the plan:

• Personal context of inquiry
• Current research interests
• Key terms and definitions
• Tensions and questions related to these interests
• Comprehensive areas with preliminary biblioigraphy
• Timeline
• Potential advisory committee
• Needs

At FES, first-year PhDs do this in the first term of study and it is revised later on. The dissertation proposal is separate (and after the comps). It might sound a bit prescriptive but, as an admirer of plans, checklists and "to do" lists, I think it will be of great help!

the craft of academia: final round, the phd

thanks for stimulating conversation last night, dudes. i hope i didn't come off too didactic or preachy—the catholicism in my family history sometimes makes me fervent about certain things. i think last night i was going off on the craft of academia, and how i believe what we do as phds is training and rehearsal for that craft. (craft's a big term, but in brief: not suggesting that it's only learning the ropes of academia that's involved in acquiring the phd-craft; but there's also a matter of pushing the boundaries to shift what it means to be academics, struggling to change what needs changing in the structure/institution/industry, etc.—in short, craft knowledge as both a matter of professionalization and a matter of radicalization and change)

so what follows is all my belief—clearly to be taken with a grain of salt, but worded with conviction as it is firm belief for me... take from it what you will.

1) writing needs to be a daily act—time of day, duration of writing activities, nature of immediate environment: i think these all need to be both reflected upon very carefully and varied to determine best fit for our needs. i wonder if we need to get out of strict and rigid habits, or whether we need to form them...

2) everything goes into the phd—which is to not to mean we spend every waking hour and every sleeping one dreaming about our dissertation; but i think we need to reflect on how our interests and passions about everything from Barney to Foucault (no comparison intended!) need to be deeply considered. i guess it's about finding a balance, perhaps between carving out discrete chunks of time to spend with family and friends away from work/research, and about allowing oneself to think about research/work during these times without rushing to a keyboard.

3) befriend technology, yet remain a luddite—i was talking about RSS feeds from journal providers, joining email listservs for areas in our field (even peripherally), organizing our interests in refworks, and probably setting up a wiki or blog to order thoughts and gain some writing and web development experience... yet part of me wants to build tables, paint watercolours, and forget all about the hi-tech stuff. i guess the point is to recognize where tech can kill creativity and innovation, and to be skeptical of it for that reason, and for the other ways we let it dehumanize us (is this thought overly dark?)

anyway here's a hit list of some programs i find useful (i'll only mention the free stuff).
+ Firefox is the web browser of choice for doing research: it allows you to "add on" different features, like Zotero, which is a bibliographic research tool.
+ Thunderbird is a great email program that lets you organize and archive your email better than doing stuff only online. it's a bit of a pain to set up, but once you do, you should be sailing. it also allows you to bring in RSS feeds so you can bring all your research into here, a kind of one-stop place for daily mail and news...
+ GMail is the only online mail service that i use, mostly because it's a great interface, but also because, once you create a Google account, you have access to all the other free stuff Google has created (like Blogger, Calendar, Scholar, Documents, and so on)—this is all great stuff for if you're not working from home, but are mobile (esp. during classes in first year). Useful too, because Google Documents are totally compatible with the Microsoft Word format
+ Foxit reader is an alternative to Adobe PDF Reader, and really nice because it lets you annotate PDF files: specifically, make highlights and add comments—Adobe doesn't let you do that!

...here's some of the writing/editing resources i mentioned, too
+ Howard Becker's kind of the guru for social science writing, in my opinion. very clear and direct writing, and a narrative style that directs his readers away from snap judgements toward more analytical, multi-faceted, and responsible thinking on a topic. (I would recommend hitting a library or a used-book store to peruse them first: you might find one to be better than another [or you might find one for cheaper than what Amazon or Chapters sells it for...])

Writing for Social Scientists | Telling About Society | Tricks of the Trade

(i'd also recommend his book on Art Worlds which, even though it's about the social construction of systems of artistic practice, i think there's a great deal of what's said that informs how systems of scientific practice operate...)

anyway, that's the list for now—any more to add? thanks for listening & i'm sure the conversation will continue...

bruno latour at U of T: notes on method

first, latour's work is ground-breaking. for that reason alone it is difficult to understand since we are ill-equiped both to understand the precise ways in which certain words are meaningful, and in the more general patterns of how such words form discursive patterns. i've read a bit of him through howard becker (in the latter's telling about society [2007] for example), and have appreciated his thoughts more directly through what little i've read of science in action (1987).

i thought the audience, at least judging by the majority of responses and some conversations i had afterward, was a little cold (inhospitable even) to what he was proposing. then i thought, what a wonderful illustration of his premise: namely, that matters of fact have become matters of concern in the sciences. audience responses revealed thinkers more interested in (concerned with) semantics, it seemed, than the content of latour's talk. some, i'd argue, were more concerned with positioning themselves as various personae (mostly academically) in the room than they were with engaging latour's specific arguments, suggesting more a thing or two about institutional politics and ego-formation in hierarchical systems than about anything to do with problems about objectivity. (an exception: peter ryan's review, while brief, is at least even-handed and more giving to the territory latour was stridently marching through.)

perhaps i'm not the best person to ask (because i had far fewer qualms than did others about how he was framing things, and was more interested in what he was getting on about), but here are a few things i got from his talk.

1. first, that some objectivity can still be asserted in natural and social scientific research. however, the ways in which it's to be asserted have changed (i.e. objectivity cannot be divorced from the networked and interacting systems, local and global, of which everything is a part). i think this is what he was suggesting as a tension between the object and thing: he used the example of the challenger space shuttle (as object, symbol of scientific progress, and as thing, exploded scraps of forensic meaning) to suggest that there's a continuity of meaning between the two that often gets obscured (too often, and too quickly) as one assumes certain dominant interpretations of an object, rendering other equally viable interpretations invisible, even those which it is clear are no less important (like faulty o-rings known in advance to be faulty).

by way of comparison, and as an example entirely out of personal interest, i think of the photograph—any photograph. the last thing that's ever seen of a photograph is that it is a photograph: it's always, primarily, a photograph of something. yet to discount from any interpretation the enormous and elaborate systems of technological, economical, political, cultural and other forms of organization that have contributed to an author creating that image is to misread it entirely. (something we almost invariably do, of course, but that's another matter.) it's a representation, after all: an object holding some validity (contextual meaning), but not necessarily complete facticity (definitive or universal meaning).

thus what i gather latour means by taking an "object-oriented" approach is for researchers to pay attention less to the object as the source of meaning (which is ultimately partial and contingent), but to the object as a nexus of qualities, characteristics, and valuations. not as a fact, but as a vehicle (a rhetorical vehicle?) through which facts among other values (concerns) can be found, such as political orientations, struggles for real and symbolic power, and so on.

2. from this ultimately pragmatic position, how we choose our methodological and representational tools and why we do so is crucial to our practice. we'll do best, he suggests, to make this methodology explicit, rather than implicit. doing so will allow us to broaden our repertoire of representational techniques, sharing research findings in more ways than simply monographs or peer-reviewed journal publications, and work iteratively to refining representational forms. as our lack of knowledge in some of these areas becomes evident, greater collaboration becomes necessary as our practice expands outward to connect with others who possess better craft-skills in certain areas than do we ourselves. as our work needs to be shared amongst a broader-ranging audience of participants and collaborators, it has a greater likelihood of becoming more widely communicable and meaningful to a broader network of stakeholders. Both of these possibilities are politically progressive: first in making improvements to the ways institutional research gets conducted and shared; and secondly in engaging others in more meaningful, pragmatically grounded questions.

anyway, some rough thoughts. would love a ping back or two, especially if you feel i'm being unfair at all, or non-objective in my estimations ;-)