Projectories

I’m back from a three day course on Men and Masculinities in Helsinki. It was quite interesting with a lot of time for feedback on your own work. The lectures ranged from the history of critical studies on men to the man as a cyborg machine. I met a lot of interesting and fun people, and learned a lot. You can see all the courses here.

Men and Masculinities
The aim of the course is to give an advanced introduction to critical studies on men and masculinities. An overview of currently important theoretical approaches will be presented and discussed, along with their intersections with other related debates, such as those on globalisation, patriarchy, postcolonialism, queer theory. The course will also examine more specific issues, such as men’s and boys’ relations to education; class, race and ethnicity; organisations, management, technology; migration; violence; representations of men.

Men and Masculinities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Research

Wow. I thought social constructionism in science was on the way out. That there was going to be a material turn. Doesn’t look like the white house agrees with me.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Ron Suskind, from “Without a Doubt,” The New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004.

Via [Relevant History: Quote of the day]

Drexlerian dreams and other politics of science

Fascinating Wired article on Eric Drexler and the hectic politics of science.

For all-things-nano, albeit from a rather uncritical perspective, check out Howard Lovy’s nanobot. Related is Lawrence Lessig on Stamping Out Good (Nano)Science.

For a more critical take (i.e. critical of science as well as politics) take a look at work by Daniel Greenberg, as well as Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy or classic social and cultural studies by Sharon Traweek and Karin Knorr Cetina. And for the more philosophically minded, you can’t beat Isabelle Stengers.

Purse Lip Square Jaw