Well, now that visa problems prevent euro travel this summer, i might as well turn my mind to what’s in my dock, what’s moving across my desk, what’s in the hopper, and what need concentrated work. Summer’s a time when we must turn ourselves more than ever to productivity concerns, hmm?
It would be nice to see what you’re processing too. In that sense this space could do some of the more traditional bloggy thing, that is, frame and bring attention to the products of our labor. [ We both tend to enjoy focusing on the processes of our co-ponderings, so we rarely mention our actual output here! ] Or, as Chris K. suggested, think about linking to actual products, ours or others.
I like our focus on process, and ideas, so this isn’t a suggestion for radical redirecting, really. Just thinking aloud about stuff, so ok, here’s an attempt to link it:
Tactical Biopolitics is out, the end product of a couple years’ work. It was a fun project to work on, but perhaps because it draws in so much of the interdisciplinary frames we’ve been working in and around and on, as it neared completion, I could only think of the people who could’ve also been a part of it, like Michelle’s writing-in-progress about foucauldian/deleuzian takes on the body, population, health and the state, and Adele Clark’s important work on feminist health politics.
Also out earlier this year was a short piece in CNS which drew some quick links between feminist media arts (such as work by Beatriz and Natalie), feminist environmentalist photography (work by Connie), and traditional red/green concerns of justice and environments.
Postcolonial Computing: About ready for submission is a piece mainly authored by Paul Dourish and his grad student Lilly Irani, in which I had input over the past 6 months (some of my bleariness many mornings last January / Feb was because of this project). The piece is addressed to the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, and works basically as a critique of some popular, essentializing modes of analyzing culture and computation. It deploys postcolonial studies and STS as a way of redirecting attention to transnational histories and co-constitutive technological dynamics.
Also in the background is a joint project with CS professor Susan Sim and her graduate student Marisa. (Note: Lilly and Marisa, both graduate students in Informatics, are excellent writers. It’s been so interesting to see my computational colleagues train their grad students to become like colleagues by their 2nd or 3rd years; this happens so much later in the humanities, and of course collaborative writing rarely happens in the humanities, especially with grad students. I wonder about that a lot.) Anyway, we’re all 3 currently interested in particular dynamics of software – the politics of code, the practices of sharing, the distributional political economies of piracy, etc. This paper in progress is on Code.
Feminist Environmentalisms in South Asian History is a piece in progress with Shubhra, dogged by the vagaries of our lives, travel, competing interests, and so on. The topic of the piece and the fact of feminist transnational/ immigrant lives seem to really bring things together in ways that are both exciting for thinking with, and frustrating for scheduling! This is a really fun piece but I fear it has been back-burnered for years now and continues to be.
Proper Knowledge is the reason most other things are being back-burnered. It is way too full of different ideas, needs to be tamed and packaged so people other than me can stand to read it.
I submitted that book review today, Aug 1 (Omnia El Shakry, The Great Social Laboratory) – recall that I was reading it at the Clayman, and it seemed down your street too. It’s a really well done dissertation-turned book (clearly inspired by Tim Mitchell’s work), and my only regret is that it sets out to single handedly rediscover the importance of technoscience to modernity ! This seems laughable to us, but sadly, the truth of the new interdisciplinarity is that students and faculty alike are retreating to clearly demarcated fields, and although they may read a half dozen books outside their disciplines, the boundaries remain quite predictable. Thus she can claim that there are very few works on non-european nationalism and its efforts in scientific knowledge production; I recall the claim made by a Clayman visitor that there existed no work in postcolonial science studies. It’s curious indeed.
At any rate – the book, esp part 2, on peasants, and part 3, on population, are worth a read for your work on bangladesh, population, development [tho, note, she makes a distinction between development, as used by PArtha Chatterjee, and welfare, as used by early 20th C Egyptian nationalists. The distinction isn't very convincing to me - at the very least, it needs som genealogical work into the two terms, I'd think.] – although i was struck by the absence of reference to work by you, adele clark, laura briggs, ashwini tambe, antoinette burton, etc on the feminist side and even conventional refs like david arnold, ajay skaria, donald moore, etc on the history of science and environment.