Projectories

I have returned from the course with John Law and Vicky Singleton in Oslo.
The course was a five-day action-packed adventure (batteries not included).
We had 16 hours of lectures in one week, an ample reading list, and one day
devoted to a very short collaborative research project. I really enjoyed the
lectures by John Law and Vicky Singleton, both of them being very talented lecturers.

It really felt like I had some missing pieces from a puzzle filled in by the
course. Especially the link between Foucault, post-structuralism and ANT was
valuable. The emphasis on material relationality connected with discursive relationality
kind of made ANT’s goals and method clearer in my head.

John Law’s reading of Shapin and Shaffers article ‘Pump and Circumstance’
was also quite extraordinary. It connected Donna Harraway’s remake of
the modest witness to the enlightenment project, and to our contemporary view
of science, as well as Bruno Latour’s slide from Shapin and Shaffers ‘matters
of fact’ to a new focus on ‘matters of concern’. Moving STS
from deconstruction to re-production. Whatever that may come to mean.

Hilarious!

What follows is the epic saga of a random instant message that came to me
from a stranger this weekend, asking whether I wanted to be paid to write
a college paper for her. Bitch didn’t know she was fucking with a comedy
writer….

A Week of Kindness Blog

Sharon Traweek is coming to Tema-T on thursday. She’s giving a talk
on Hybridity. Invitation below.

Title: Hybridity
Lecturer: Sharon Traweek, Associate Professor at UCLA
Time: Thursday 27 th of
January 2005
Place: Lethe, Tema House, Linköping
University

Sharon Traweek is an Associate Professor in the History
Department at UCLA. She has held positions at MIT, UC San Diego and Stanford
University. She has done research in the fields of anthropolgy, cultural studies
of science, international relations, Japan studies, science and technology
studies, science education and women’s studies. Some titles from her
publication list are: Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy
Physicists (1988); Generating High Energy Physics in Japan: Moral
Imperatives of a Future Pluperfect (2004).

Tomorrow will be the first time I hear the new professor at the department
speak. He’s from Uppsala University, one of
the oldest and best universities
in Sweden. He has written about the history of the natural sciences, astronomy,
cartography, and experimental physics. He is a sociologist of science, and
uses methods from the Edinburgh school. He is also the editor of Lychnos:
Annual of the Swedish History of Science Society.

It’s going to be great fun to hear and meet him.

According to the Institute
of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Incorporated Subversion comments:

Couple of obvious gripes are that the fact that this is based solely
on ’academic achievement’ (Alumni of an institution winning Nobel
Prizes and Fields Medals, Staff of an institution winning Nobel Prizes and
Fields Medals, Highly cited researchers in 21 broad subject categories, Articles
published in Nature and Science & Articles in Science Citation Index-expanded
and Social Science Citation Index) and yet this is highlighted, um, *possibly*
in the graphic tucked away in the top left corner… otherwise this is “The
top 100 World Universities” (no mention here, for example, of ‘based-on-what’!)

Second one is that I’d love to see a corresponding study on how happy
teachers & students were with their institutions correlated to to this.

Incorporated Subeversion

Via: Alex Halavais & Incorporated
Subversion

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

Tomorrow will be the first seminar in the seminar series that I am arranging for the Technology and Learning Project I’m a part of. In the seminar Patrik Hernwall is presenting the theoretical foundations of his research project Virtual Society.

The Virtual Society project tries to tie together educology (the scientific study of learning) with a number of other disciplines in an attempt to understand how digital technology affects our experience of the world.

Hernwall and his project team are interested in how “cyberspace generates new kinds of experiences, where the relation between body, space and technology might challenge established understandings on what it meansto be human” (Hernwall, Virtual Society – The emergence of everyday life in cyberspace)

The seminar will start at 13.00 in the Olympos room in the D-building, Linköping University.

During this fall the research program that I am part of, Technology and Learning, will host a series of seminars relating to our research.

You can find more information on the seminar series and the research program here.

During the 20th century the use of technology has often been combined with expectations on technology as a rejuvenating force in pedagogics – these modernizations have more often than not been arduous to fulfill. Implementation of technology often takes longer than expected due to inertia emanating from disregard of social, cultural and economic factors. The trust that technology advocates put in educational technology has generally met with resistance from both students and teachers. The split between educational reality and vision is also noticeable in contemporary belief in different online educational schemes in higher education, both nationally and internationally.

In the research program Technology and Learning we investigate the relation between technology and learning from techno-sociological and pedagogical perspectives. The educational system is one of the social fields where the encounter between new technology and social inertia is made apparent.

Technology & Learning