The last couple of days (which feel like a week) have been frantic with teaching, covering for a couple of absent first-year tutors and then doing my usual Tuesday Global Governance rush. Some of the Monday classes were interesting - I was prepared for the class, but not for having to unexpectedly take two at the same time! I ended up taking students out to the lawn, splitting them into groups and then giving them discussion questions, moving between the groups and guiding them where necessary. It seemed to work reasonable well.
Two of my second-year tutorial classes are still a little shy, and some days it's hard to get discussion going. This is a problem I'm familiar with, and I'm trying strategies that have worked in the past (open-ended questions, splitting the class into smaller groups), although of course I'm open to suggestions.
The main 'problem' that I'm having is with my more talkative class. They have so many interesting things to say, they do the reading, and they're very enthusiastic. I have to keep cutting people off so that we can get through all of the questions, so that everyone gets a chance to talk, and so that we can run through different perspectives on each issue. Right now the class is taking my benevolent dictatorship well...I've taken to assigning off-topic or circular or too-long topics to "the cafe you guys are going to after class to carry on the discussion".
What I would really like, though, is for students to direct the discussion a little more, rather than me cutting them off or bringing them back to the topic. I'm not sure whether it is possible for students to build the necessary set of behaviours in a 45 minute class, though. Any ideas? I may ask the students themselves, too.
I've had a few glancing contacts with the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal over the last few years, and the work they're doing has always struck me as very urgent. As well as mainstream academic work, they've made a lot of links with activist groups, and have provided a space (and equipment) for young documentary film-makers to get their message out. I have a feeling that I don't know even a tenth of what they do - their website alone is a fascinating resource for scholars of civil society.
Last night I found out that the centre is at risk of being shut down because of political pressure. It seems that this may be averted; I hope so, because I'm looking forward to seeing where the centre goes in following years, and I think it has a lot to offer in terms of building solutions to South Africa's many challenges.
Those of you who catch public transport in Perth will probably have seen ads for Transperth's anti-graffiti campaign. I find many of these ads quite disturbing, particularly one that reads "even the toughest taggers cry their first night in jail", over a picture of a young person sitting in a dark prison cell. The effort and threats involved seem to be completely out of proportion.
Generally, I find the response to tagging interesting. Even people who argue that graffitti is a legitimate art form often say that they disapprove of tagging because it's not particularly artistic. I used to have a similar viewpoint, but I've started thinking about it more... firstly, from a few interviews with graffiti artists, I get the impression that tagging has been a response to increasingly strict anti-graffiti policies. As graffiti artists found it harder to get spray paint, were targetted by police, and had their work covered up more swiftly, they switched to tagging, which is quicker and doesn't involve putting all effort into one big work that might be painted over the next day. Secondly, I find many of the ads in public spaces far more offensive (sexist, promoting 4wds, etc) than I find tags.
So it's been good to see that there have been some responses to the anti-graffiti campaigns, including comments on online stories and the graffhero pasteups* I've been seeing around: 
I've also been enjoying the 'urban craft resurgence' graffiti - while I was in Brisbane I saw some nice knitted graffiti (little covers for the parking meters), and Radical Cross Stitch in Melbourne have just been on a bit of a spree protesting against the rampant land speculation (and associated homelessness), encouraging people to think more about land use and housing issues.
I meant to put up one more picture of some crocheted graffiti, but I stumbled on this** and had to end on this note: 
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* Image from flauntster.
** Image from knitboy1.
I've been doing a bit more research for my chapter on the Indian opposition to GM crops (despite my firm promises to myself that I would stop researching and get on with writing), and have been trying to work out the exact relationship between Mahyco (and Indian seed company) and Monsanto (a multinational seeds-and-much-more company).
In doing so I stumbled onto political friendster, which attempts to build an accessible list of links between "players in the political game". It's a good idea, and my first glances through it suggest that it could be quite useful. Monsanto's page certainly makes for interesting reading, although I'd be using the information as a starting point rather than a final (citeable) source.
With the Olympics fast approaching, attention continues to be focused on China's human rights record. I've been particularly struck by reports that protests will be allowed, but only within designated spaces and after applying for approval five days in advance.
I've just started reading Luis Fernandez's Policing Dissent, in which he looks at how democracies, particularly the US, have changed policing strategies in order to more effectively control social movements. From what I've read so far, the use of permits and other 'social control' measures in the US (and in Singapore and other places where WTO and World Bank meetings are held) are not so very different from what's happening in China at the moment.
I argued in my APSA paper democratic governments' attempts to control modern technologies and online spaces are on the same end of the spectrum as controls exerted by authoritarian states - I think this is equally the case for these other attempts to control dissent.
Despite having presented at a conference before, and having given several lectures, I was rather nervous about my presentation. Presenting seems to be something of a hit-and-miss affair at the best of times, and several papers I saw were given to an audience of two or three, or received quite antagonistic and unconstructive questions. That said, many people get great feedback, and I was quite delighted by the response to my paper. Some of the questions and comments I received helped me to clarify my position on topics I hadn't had time to address in the presentation, and a few brought up issues that I haven't addressed and will need to cover in my thesis.
My favourite question, though, went something like this: "this sounds like a very important issue - how can I get involved?"
I still feel that my paper (which you can read on the side bar of this blog, under 'publications') needs work. I'd like to tighten up the argument a fair bit before I submit it to a journal. Still, that single question has gone a large way towards making me feel good about my work, and helping me feel that I'm making an important contribution.
I'm just back from a couple of political science and international relations conferences, OCIS and APSA, wading through my inbox and keen to get on with my thesis.
Looming deadlines mean that I don't feel I can do justice to the papers I went to, although I will mention a couple of my favourites. Ever since I read Freakonomics, I've been bothered by the argument put forward in one of the chapters that legalising abortion cut crime (the reasoning being, more or less, that abortion means fewer unwanted babies, particularly to poor mothers, and that unwanted children of poor mothers are more likely to become criminals). Kate Gleeson argued in her paper that most of the debates about this claim have been, implicitly or explicitly, arguments about race, and have not addressed the central assumption of the argument: that legalising abortion means more women have abortions. Gleeson argued that abortion is not just another market good - people might choose to buy a pair of shoes based on how much they cost, but women get abortions because they feel they need to, not because they're cheap.
I also really enjoyed Nick Henry's paper on violence and non-violence in the Burmese pro-democracy movement. He argued that there are numerous ideological and practical links between armed and non-violent groups which are overlooked when we push the first group into the 'guerrilla movement' category and the second into 'civil society'. His work seemed to mesh well with a paper given by Tristan Dunning on Western perceptions of Hamas and Hezbollah, although I still haven't had time to read either paper properly.
Take a look at your bookshelf, or your references list for your latest article/chapter. How many authors there are women? How many are white? How many are likely to have had very similar life experiences to your own?
I am disappointed in myself when I occasionally realise that I've prepared a lecture that does not reference any women, or anyone from a non-Western background. I am disappointed when I hear speakers cite tens of white men and no women at all.
It's a complex issue for me, and one that I've had many arguements about. The standard reply is, "well, there are no women [usually I argue about women, since gendered names are easy to pick] writing in this field/genre." Or "I just get the work that interesting, I don't pay attention to the author's background. Surely you don't want me to read things solely because of who they're written by?" I'm ambivalent on this. On the one hand, I don't think that women (or Guatamalans, or *** people, or whoever) necessarily write differently from white, heterosexual, middle-class men. And I definitely think that Westerners (and men, and those otherwise privileged) have valuable things to say, and can fruitfully engage with other perspectives. On the other hand, I think that if you're only reading work (or even fiction) by people who are 'like you', you're probably getting a narrow perspective on life.
One solution, I think, is to step into new genres/areas rather than simply looking for authors with different backgrounds in the same area. Maybe the area/genre that fills your bookshelf (or bibliography) is entirely dominated by white men (or white women, or...) - getting another perspective might mean looking at the critical theory in that area, or stepping into an alternative genre, or browsing independent publishers.
It's something I try, but don't always succeed at.
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Picture from kiwanja.
I recently had a paper accepted for the Australian Political Science Association conference, with no revisions required. Hurrah! At the same time, I suffer from the usual academic perfectionism...I can't help feeling that it still needs restructuringeditingresearchetcetcetc. When I asked my (secondary) supervisor what they thought, the reply was: well, how urgent is it, this thing you're trying to say? Who needs to know about it? Does the paper you've written get that point across?
It was a refreshing reminder: I'm not publishing because I want to get publication credits. I'm publishing because I feel like my ideas are important, because I want people to listen and think and act.
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Picture from Lorenzo Cuppini.
These days, I get a lot of my news from podcasts, and I use them to keep up to date about some of my research areas. Here are the podcasts I've been listening to lately:
From ABC/Radio National:
* The Media Report: good coverage of media developments, a lot of which is relevant if you're interested in politics and the new media.
* AM, and sometimes also The World Today for news.
* Big Ideas
* The Science Show
From around the web:
* Cory Doctorow's craphound podcast
* The Nature podcast
* The BBC's Digital Planet
* The World's Technology podcast
I'm still keeping my eyes out for good podcasts on activism/social movements/grassroots politics, so I'd be open to any suggestions. Do you listen to podcasts? Are there any that are particularly useful for your research?
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Image from chotda.
A couple of days ago, I found a poster for the Young Liberals' 'Make Education Fair' campaign tacked to my door. Concerns are couched in terms of the need to protect 'diversity', 'inclusivity', and 'dialogue', familiar concepts from the left, except that the claim is that students who don't run with the standard left-wing line are being excluded and silenced.
It's hard to evaluate these claims without access to systematic empirical evidence. Janet Albrechtsen's article on the campaign cites a couple of examples of Australian students being pushed to agree with left-wing perspectives, but these could be isolated incidences. I can also think of a few examples of being pushed to agree with right-wing perspectives (which again, could be isolated incidences).
I'm willing to accept that there is a reasonable chance that the climate within tertiary education tends to be more supportive of left-wing thought, at least in the arts and humanities. This doesn't necessarily mean that other perspectives are not allowed to flourish, or that students are silenced or marked down when they express other viewpoints. I certainly don't think that extreme left perspectives are the norm, and I believe there are many departments and disciplines that are far from left-wing. I also think that it's important to take into account the wider societal context - we certainly do not live in a society which stifles socially conservative or pro-free market opinion.
On an individual level, it can be hard to attain balance when teaching, especially when you're teaching subjects that you're passionate about and deeply involved in. Currently, I don't make what I feel will be inevitably vain attempts to hide my own perspective. Rather, I try to give students access to a range of arguments and sources, and challenge them to think more about the viewpoints they hold. I ask them to provide evidence for claims they make (whether or not I agree with them), and I want them to reason through the bases and consequences of their assumptions.
The campaign seems to have fizzled out - I wonder if it's because students (and staff) don't feel that it's relevant? I'd be curious to see what other people within academia think.
Recently, a student came up to me after a lecture and asked me where to start reading. They wanted to know which books had been important to my own intellectual and political development, and get some ideas for books that would give them an intelligent critique of the world.
I was stuck. There are a lot of books that made an impression on me, but hardly any of these have been traditional works of political theory or analysis. Work by Gloria Anzaldua, Rosseau, Christine Pisan, John Stuart Mill, Noam Chomsky, Peter Singer, Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, Hakim Bey, and various anarchist writers (as well as many others I've forgotten, I'm sure) has contributed to my ideas, in a diffuse way. Recently, I've found we are everywhere, Stuffed and Starved, The Rebel Sell, Free Culture, I Love Bees and Beevor's The Spanish Civil War interesting (among others). There are also many autobiographies that have been important to me - I doubt I would think the way I do today if I hadn't read about Simone de Beauvoir and Frida Kahlo.
In the end, though, I think that the most influential work for me has been, and continues to be, efiction. A while ago I lent a friend Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, and when they returned it they said it seemed to be my manifesto. Books like Woman at the Edge of Time, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt... they stick with me because they answer the niggling questions at the edge of political theory ("Yes, but how will people find the time to engage in deliberative democracy?" "How do we get from here to this imagined utopia?" "What changes will human nature allow?"). Not just that, but they are beautiful. This is something that we forget at times, in the social sciences as well as in activism... that it is not just about arguments and struggle, but also about capturing the imagination, finding ways to enjoy life and find hope. Something I must remember as I try to meet the looming deadlines.
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The picture is from Flickr user Franco Folini.
The lecture slides are available for download here.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Last night I went to the first of three sessions on Biological Art that SymbioticA is running through UWA Extension. I've been writing a lot about science and technology (or, rather, 'technoscience', to use a rather muddy concept developed by Latour and Haraway), and I can't help but see resonances between the issues I'm discussing and the questions raised by Oron Catts and other biological artists.
Ethically, our increasing ability and willingness to manipulating life opens up fundamental questions about how we relate to and fit into the world around us, and what rights and responsibilities we have to other living beings. Stem cells, artificial intelligence, biomechanical creations and other semi-living beings also invite a reopening/rethinking of older questions about how we define life; at which point does a Thing become a Being?
Some of the complexities here fascinate me, and they are tangling my work up into a messier creation than it once was. Work in the life sciences (as well as in physics and other areas) seems to be leading away from a mode of scientific inquiry in which Things (and Beings that are en-Thinged by the process) are taken out of their context and studied in isolation, classified and prodded and neatly filed away. Instead, 'complexity' and 'emergence' and 'entanglement' are the new buzzwords, and everyThing is connected to (and interacts with) everyThing else, the border between Thing and Being made blurry by sub-atomic particles and networks and molecules that seem to act unexpectedly, that implicate the observer and demand that they be seen as involved. Yet at the same time there is this claim among some scientists that we are Nearly There, at the point where everything becomes understood - DNA will be an open book, the Theory of Everything will arrive triumphantly to be printed on millions of t-shirts, and we will be able to fix global warming with iron filings in the ocean and carbon-gulping trees. Like Oron, I am skeptical about the extreme positions on science and technology today, both the terror and the utopianism.
Politically, and it seems artistically also, some of the big questions are about the context in which research is taking place. The increasing privatisation of research and ever-widening intellectual property regimes have already attracted plenty of commentary, and I won't go on about them again now. Here, again, there are complexities - while these trends limit non-elite involvement in the life sciences (and many other areas), SymbioticA and other biological art projects seem to be part of the broader movement working to democratise access to and involvement in the production and exploration of new knowledge sets.
Oron's exploration of the different relationships artists have with science and technology were most thought-provoking for me in a personal sense. I've been exploring, to a limited extent, the way in which academics and academic institutions are implicated in the struggle over science and technology. There are elements of openness and democracy within academia (such as the peer-review process), but at the same time academia as an institution has always relied on the division between experts and non-experts, on the notion of knowledge production as undertaken only by the sanctified few. I think many academics are open to and excited by collaborative and open research, although there are also many who are clinging desperately to their status.
Writing means that I think more about these questions - what language do I use, how do I fit it together, how much of myself (my messiness, my delight, my embodied reality) do I remove to fit the standard model of objectivity? I like work that reshapes this process of idea-sharing, Gloria Anzaldua's use of Spanish and poetry, writers like Marge Piercy and Kim Stanley Robinson who present alternative futures through fiction.
I'm looking forward to learning more about how artists at SymbioticA deal with the questions I'm trying to answer, and finding out what new questions there are to think about.
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Photo from flickr user TM - I crochet!
There are millions of children around the world that don't have access to the basic necessities of life - enough food, clean water, healthcare, education, security. So it seems a little crazy that the One Laptop Per Child Foundation is trying to not only give all children a laptop, but to start with some of the most disadvantaged children in the world. Amazingly, the group have managed to produce a rugged, kid-friendly, US$200 laptop, and it's not shipping.
A couple of weeks ago I received my XO, which I bought through the Give 1, Get 1 program with a little help from some American friends. It's taken me a while to get used to the operating system, which is linux-based, and a little different from what I'm used to. Some aspects are easy to get the hang of (click on an activity to open it, use the circle on the home screen to judge how much processing power you have left, click on a circle in the network screen to connect to a network). Other aspects take a little more getting used to, like the absence of folders - all of your files, including those on thumb drives, just show up in a long list, which you can search or order by type or date modified. The laptop itself is strong, light, dust-resistant, and has great wireless reception. The keyboard is tiny, but it was designed for tiny fingers. I've typed on it for a couple of hours at a time and while it takes some getting used to it's usable. The screen folds down into an e-book reader, and you can read the screen in the sunshine.
As well as all the reasons that I love it, I can see good reasons for kids to love it. It comes with plenty of activities - basics like word processing, browsing, and calculating, but also three different programs for making music, programming tools, a video and sound recording/photo-snapping activity, and an activity for measuring the distance between laptops using sonar. The activities are suitable for different skill levels - you can push a button to make a sound, or you can layer different instruments to make something more complex. Every activity has a "share" option, so you can interact with and share files with other kids.
The big questions I have about this aren't about the hardware or software. I've seen enough hardware hacks (both in the Global North and the Global South), and enough of what the open source community can do, that I am utterly sure that the XO is going to evolve into an even cooler, even more useful gadget, for all kinds of people, in all kinds of different ways. But any technology is part of a broader system...
The availability of the XO and other cheap laptop options, like the Asus Eee, (re)open a lot of questions that can't be answered by looking at the laptops in isolation.
How will kids, the most vulnerable section of society, hang on to these incredibly cool and useful things? How much of a difference will it make to their lives? Will governments buy them? What will the environmental effects of producing so many (admittedly environmentally friendly) laptops? Will the production of affordable computing be decentralised? Will this encourage a shift to open-source software throughout the world? Does access to computers actually make the world a better place in any important respects?
There are answers, or the beginning of answers, to some of these questions (at least, I certainly hope there are because they make up a large part of my thesis). Others will start to be answered in coming years, as long as we see particular technologies as part of broader systems of power and meaning.
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Photo courtesy of Inju, taken by Ahmad Dan-Hamidu.