Speaking together

Speaking together is a bit like children in parallel play: sometimes they do the same thing, sometimes they play together, sometimes they are on different tracks entirely. But it takes place in the same space, and is one aspect of that constructionist learning as play that working with the stories of knowledges allows for.

[ACP is happy to present Parallel Play at Silvershed, NY, a three-woman show, featuring the work of Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Lee Maida and Jen Smith. The work in Parallel Play considers the materiality of bodily effort and pleasure as it intervenes with craft, sexuality and politics. Communal strategies of dialogue and intervention inform the exhibition. Click image for link.]

11 comments:

Bryan said...

Hi All, following our discussion of "frontier" as Tsing used, here are the various places I identified with frontier:

Frontier(s):
o Not just edges; they are particular kinds of edges where the expansive nature of extraction comes into its own" (27)
o Frontiers are deregulated because they arise in the interstitial spaces made by collaborations among legitimate and illegitimate partners: armies and bandits; gangsters and corporations; builders and despoilers. The confuse the boundaries of law and theft, governance and violence, use and destruction.” (28)
o An edge of space and time: a zone of not yet – not yet mapped, not yet regulated. It is a zone of unmapping: even in its planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned.” (28)
o “aren’t just discovered at the edge, they are projects in making geographical and temporal existence.” (28-29)
o Make wildness, entangling visions and vines and violence; their wildness is both material and imaginative.” (29)
o “Energize old fantasies, even as they embody their impossibilities.” (29)
o “not a natural or indigenous category. It is a traveling theory, a foreign form requiring translation.” (31)
o “not a “place or even a process but an imaginative project capable of molding both places and processes.” (32)
o “Frederick Jackson Turner describes the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization (1994: 32).” (32)
o “not a philosophy but rather a series of historically nonlinear leaps and skirmishes that come together to create their own intensification and proliferation.” (33)
o “the frontier is made in the shifting terrain between …” (33 – see p. 33 binaries)

- Resource frontiers:
o Space in which “entrepreneurs and armies were able to disengage nature from local ecologies and livelihoods, “freeing up” natural resources that bureaucrats and generals could not offer as corporate raw materials(28)

- Technofrontier – the endless frontier made possible by industrial technology.” (31)

- Frontier-making (32, 33)
o destructive forests and indigenous cultures.” (32)
o “the frontier is made in the shifting terrain between …” (33 – see p. 33 binaries)

- Salvage frontier (32) – “where making, saving, and destroying resources are utterly mixed up, where zones of conservation, prodction, and resource sacrifice overlap almost fully, and canonical time frames of nature’s study, use, and preservation are reversed, conflated, and confused.” (32)

Anya Galli said...

"How Big Brands can Save Biodiversity."
In light of this week's reading, I thought this provided a completely different approach, language, and story about biodiversity from corporate standpoint.

Jason Clay, president of the WWF, recently gave a TED talk about shifting "sustainability" to be a pre-production consideration for big corporations. He claims that 100 (multinational) corporations control 25 percent of the production and trade for the 15 biggest food commodities in the world. When these companies demand different standards (eg decreased chemical use, carbon offsets, pollution reduction etc), production of these commodities can be pushed toward a more "sustainable" approach.
The video and transcript can be seen here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_clay_how_big_brands_can_save_biodiversity.html

I found the talk interesting as well as troubling. It seems that the standards being implemented will not change the existence or prevalence of monoculture/plantation farming, but simply the methods used for production. I believe corporations participate because they want more control and power in the market, not because they have a vested interest in the well-being of people or the planet. For example, cocoa is being genetically modified so that it will be more prolific, allowing less trees to produce more crop, and more land to be available for "something else." I doubt that "available" land will be used for anything other than another corporate monoculture crop.

Here, it is clear that "sustainability" and "biodiversity" are border objects with shifting definitions depending on who wants to benefit.

From the TED website: "Jason Clay's ideas are changing the way governments, foundations, researchers and NGOs identify and address risks and opportunities for their work. He brings people together to improve environmentally sensitive practices in agriculture and aquaculture. Jason's goal is to create global standards for producing and using raw materials, particularly in terms of carbon and water. He has convened industry roundtables of retailers, buyers, producers and environmentalists to reduce the key impacts of producing soy, cotton, sugarcane, salmon, shrimp, mollusks, catfish and tilapia."

jarah said...

Hi all,
I posted this over on my own site earlier today, but since it was inspired by Anna Tsing's book, I figured I should probably cross-post it over here as well...

LOLcat bible, international talk like a pirate day, knowledges gained and lost


it’s international pirate speak day… people all over twitter and fb are either speaking ‘pirate speak’… “Yarrr! Here we be at Ye Olde Elme Tree in Cambridge Towne, enjoyin’ a wee jug o’ grog. Shiver me timbers and avast me hearties! (@songthrushoncam)”

…or are telling their kids to do so ( one as he dropped them off at church) (@billamend).

who came up with this idea, and why did it end up becoming popular? what does it mean to talk like a pirate? what are the assumptions about being a pirate that might play out in attempting to speak like one? what about the ‘real’ modern day pirates we read about in the news? do we speak their languages to speak like a pirate? what happens if we do?

Nestled in amongst these arrgs and timbers ashiver, I came across a link to the LOLcat Bible. no, this is not a bible of LOLcat ness, but the Judeo-Christian bible being translated, verse by verse into LOLcat. (lolcatbible.com).

I don’t even know where to begin.
NOTE: I can only post so many characters in the comments- so go read the rest at:

LOLcat bible, international talk like a pirate day, knowledges gained and lost

Kristi said...

OK, on a lighter note, thanks A LOT for the discussion last time of mahjong (or however it is spelled!). I am now totally addicted and probably need to drop out of grad school to devote more time to it!

Unknown said...

Hey All,

I stumbled upon this event while doing some research for another course:

http://bookfair.redemmas.org/

It looks pretty interesting and I am intrigued by a lot of these sessions. The 1pm session on Sunday (Learning from Latin American) reminded me of some of the discussions we were having in class. I am thinking of taking a break from work just to attend that session if anyone wants to ride along...

Feel free to email me and we'll put it all together.

See you Tuesday!

Cristina

Anya Galli said...

I kept thinking about this quote after class on Tuesday. I love the idea of "broadening the joining" beyond the realm of identity politics. I think Tsing does just this in Friction.

“When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining — I’m broadening the joining.”

— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Oliver said...

WMST 601 class presentation 10-19-2010

Hey Everybody

So for my part of the presentation at least i have somewhat of an e-handout. This website was hugely useful in trying to map Foucault and his place in my thoughts so i thought it may be useful for you as well.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

Thanks

Oliver

jarah said...

in light of the first essay, I thought this was an interesting article about medical knowledges and not asking the right questions in research...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/2/

Anya Galli said...

MRSA and gay male populations in the Castro District of San Francisco in 2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7188741.stm

There was a lot of controversy over the media explosion surrounding this, with many questions about how the research leading to the findings was conducted and how it was reported.
From the SF Department of Health website: "A study about CA-MRSA in San Francisco was published in a medical journal in January 2008. That study article reported that multi-drug resistant MRSA infections were more common in gay men and other men who have sex with men in San Francisco. For this and other reasons, the article suggested that MRSA might be a sexually transmitted disease (STD). However, the study was not designed to answer the question of whether MRSA is in fact an STD. The media focused a lot of attention on this journal article at the time."

Unknown said...

Hi everyone!

In continuing my trend of "overthinking" - and I say that only because my thinking about love has detracted from the thinks I should be thinking about in order to accomplish my academic tasks - I have been investigating other perspectives on love and came across this three volume work by philosopher Irving Singer, entitled "The Nature of Love." You can find out more about it on the MIT Press website here (sorry I am not well-versed in html embedding of links and such):

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?aid=1411

Scroll halfway down to view the trilogy.

Also..... Singer applies much of his theories on love to and through the examination of operas by Mozart and Beethoven in this work:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12072

Lastly, if you don't have time in your graduate schedules (har har) to read the entire trilogy, there's a nice little crash course quickie here:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11706

Again, all of the above works approach "love" from a purely philosophical perspective, and are written by a philosophy professor at MIT.

If any of you have seen these before and are familiar with them, I'd appreciate your perspective!

Isn't this mild weather fantastic??

Have a wonderful day everyone!

Angela

Anonymous said...

when 'conservative' women consider themselves feminists...

Meet the young feminists"