New ‘Discover Anthropology’ website

The RAI’s new anthropology website is up and running

Via Anthropologist About Town

This week in sustainability news

Hacked emails?: Two months have passed since the University of East Anglia had their climate research emails and raw data hacked. But were they really hacked?  Although the investigation is ongoing, it looks like the UEA information may have been easily located on servers which were available to the public.  Hacking would have been unnecessary – one would just need to know where to look for the information.  Environmental Research Web has pieced together the play by play developments in the story.

Green countries: The Environmental Performance Index 2010, undertaken by the Yale  Center for Environmental Law & Policy is out. I like lists and, for some reason, I’ve really been looking forward to this one. Switzerland, my new home, ranks second behind Iceland and just above Costa Rica, Sweden and Norway. The EPI’s results are based on a range of environmental factors including ecosystem vitality and the environmental impacts on human health.  The final report will be out 12 Feb.

Sustainable fashion: “Aren’t the words ’sustainable’ and ‘fashion’ mutually exclusive? Isn’t the concept itself an oxymoron? Isn’t fashion by definition an endeavor that is designed to change, to chase novelty, to constantly present something new?” These are the questions Lucy Collins is exploring at Worn Through after attending a panel on sustainable fashion in NYC.  She takes a closer look at the fashion industries’ negotiations with sustainability, highlighting the tensions within the industry itself. The need to create a standardised understanding of what sustainability means to the fashion industry is tangled up with the difficulties of marketing sustainably produced garments because of the supposed stigma attached to them.  She specifically notes that Barneys pointedly removes any labels which mention eco production.  Collins picks up on the themes running throughout the panel – quality, craft, methods of production & consumption, and individualism – and makes her own recommendation for improvements in sustainable fashion: a cross-disciplinary think tank to address the future of fashion.

CC photo by Jean-Marc Kuffer, 2007

Research & publishing in higher ed

The Center for Studies in Higher Education recently published their report, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication.  The research was aimed at understanding how universities and university faculty “value traditional and emerging forms of scholarly communication,” including what is needed to make a name for themselves, become tenured and be promoted.  The research was conducted through mostly in-depth interviews and a few focus groups.  The overarching questions were:

•    What will scholars in various core disciplines want to do in their research and with their research results, and what new forms of communication do or do not support those needs?

•    How will scholars want to disseminate and receive input on their work at various stages of the scholarly communication lifecycle?

•    What are the emerging trends in research and publication practices?

• What is the scope and depth of pent-up demand for new models of
communication in various sectors/disciplines?

•    How do institutions and other stakeholders support these faculty needs, if at all?

Their findings served as a bit of a wake-up call for me.  Granted, their seven disciplines were archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music and political science – not anthropology.  And all disciplines are well established research fields, not more recently developments departments like media & communication studies.  Still, I was surprised when I saw the strength of the reaction against blogs:

“Among most of our interviewees, blogs were simply off the radar as a source of scholarship and are generally viewed as a waste of time because they are not peer reviewed. ‘You have to have some standards! How in the hell are you going to judge the quality of what’s on a blog?’ ‘…who has the time! There have to be some filters!’ There was, however, limited mention of ‘good’ blogs in economics, astrophysics, political science, archaeology, and history (that often serve simply as more sophisticated versions of the subject listserv and are used in much the same way: for finding out about new developments or events in a field and for making general announcements). But again, the particular scholars we interviewed generally said they do not spend time following them (even those who maintain their own blogs).”

Ouch. And that’s with one-third of their sample being grad students, postdocs, librarians, and IT people??

Liz Losh already has a post up, Do You Want the Bad News First? Or the Really Bad News?, where she writes that the study is “a must read among promoters of the digital humanities who want to promulgate Web 2.0 technologies … [but] … contains some grim assessments about the institutional barriers to the production and evaluation of digital scholarship, online outreach, or networked knowledge in the academy.”  I wouldn’t disagree there.

Here I was thinking that the academic world, or a least the little corner of it that I see on regular basis, was pushing against the more traditional forms of publishing; working with new models which place more emphasis on collaboration (see the webnographers wiki), openness (see the open access anthropology project) and exploring digital culture (see Digital Ethnography).  I naïvely assumed that the response on the institutional level would be to notice and respond.  But perhaps the response is just slow.  According to the report: “It was the opinion of some interviewees (but certainly not all) that experimentation with new publication genres may be outpacing the ability of tenure and promotion committees to adapt appropriately.” What the report does note as “a major irony” …  “is that tenure and promotion committees are not often exposed to new forms of scholarship because faculty are not presenting them as part of their dossiers (or these genres are not being categorized as research).”

Another surprising to me were the  mechanisms mentioned for sharing work: “Personal websites are ubiquitous, even if used only to post a short bio or C.V. Some scholars also post course lists, working papers, and links to published papers. Blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, Twitter, etc., were not cited as common ways in which scholars broadcast and receive information.”  Eh? Anthropology blogs are heavy on useful information about recent research and i’ve found them to be one of the easiest methods of keeping up to date with trends in the discipline, especially in areas which don’t directly relate to mine.  In fact, there are many anthropology blogs chronicling research in progress – Decasia, Loomnie, An Anthropologist Goes Techno, fishers surfers and casters, and Anthroblogia – and the combination of following twitter feeds along with listservs is my preference for finding out about calls for papers or upcoming conferences.

But what was most disheartening to me was the message for young scholars: “…focus on publishing in the right venues and avoid spending too much time on public engagement, committee work, writing op-ed pieces, developing websites, blogging, and other non- traditional forms of electronic dissemination (including courseware).” This doesn’t really set the stage for change.  However, the report concludes from the responses of the young scholars that they might not be the ones to look toward for change, anyway: “There may be a trend among young scholars in all fields, and particularly graduate students, to be especially leery of putting ideas and data out too soon for fear of theft and/or misinterpretation. Given these findings, we caution against assumptions that “millennials” will change the landscape of scholarship by virtue of their facility with technology.”

Here’s hoping this prediction will turn out to be wrong.

Stitch ‘n Bitch, craft & blogging

Stitch’nBitch: Cyberfeminism, a Third Place and the New Materiality

by Minahan & Cox, 2007, Journal of Material Culture 12(1): 5-21

Abstract:

We discuss the emergence of a new craft movement known as Stitch’nBitch. Prevalent around the globe, particularly among women, this movement is based locally in places such as hotels and cafes, and virtually using the internet. The women meet to knit, stitch and talk. The groups use new technologies as an enabler and resource exchange. At the same time, their presence can be seen, in part, as a negative response to major political, social and technological changes including globalization, terrorism, damage to the environment and the dislocation of the Information Society. We introduce five themes to assist in the development of a research agenda into this new form of material culture, discussing (1) remedial, (2) progressive, (3) resistance, (4) nostalgic and (5) ironic possibilities. Each is considered in terms of their respective foci on community, cyberfeminism, craft, conservation and comment.

Quick notes:

In the course of formulating a research agenda for stitch ‘n bitch, the article surveys various approaches to exploring this activity where women gather locally for knitting and chatting, while also connecting with other such groups globally via the internet.  The authors briefly touch on the history of crafting and the significance of taking it online, such as shifting crafting from the private sphere of the home into the public realm of blogs and group-meets. Also, traditionally gendered notions of crafting and technology use are able to be redefined and reclaimed in stitch ‘n bitch which combines craft with technology such as blogs.

The authors note that stitch ‘n bitch and other ‘communitarian leisure’ groups should be viewed as a counter to the individualisation of leisure, as highlighted in Putnam’s Bowling Alone, as well as a counter to the notion that the information age has connected individuals to the global world while uprooting them from their local communities.

Activism may be embedded in stitch ‘n bitch, and can be understood as part of a continuation of activism associated with the arts and crafts movements, arising out of the combo of ‘lowly media’ with cultural commentary.

The dichotomy between craft as work and craft as leisure is raised in connection with issues of the digital divide, where the young and relatively wealthy stitch ‘n bitch participants can afford leisure time and have access to the technology which sustains the global group, while other women are unable to access either.

Highlight quotes:

“We propose that Stitch’nBitch may be an example of a new way of connecting that is based on material production using traditional craft skills and yarns as well as the optical fibre and twisted pair cable used for telecommunications.” (p6)

“It is proposed that the emergence of Stitch’nBitch reflects a wish for more self-expression of creativity and social connection at a community level through leisure.” (p8)

“In the sassiness of this youth, we wonder whether the earnestness of the previous remedial, progressive, resistance and nostalgic themes are even relevant. For these women have grown up in the Information Age and have nothing to compare it with; they may be neither trying to remedy its effects nor create a new way, sew up a new society. They may have little to resist, for they are able to move freely between home, work and third place, bringing knitting from the hearth to the pub and contacting each other via the internet in between their meetings. We suggest that theirs may be a playful, ironic comment and an unbundling/ re-forming or even implosion (Baudrillard, 1993) of traditional associations and differentiations between time, place and gender rather than an earnest expression of a strongly-held desire for innovation, restoration or resistance. Rather than nostalgia for what was lost, Stitch’n Bitchers may be expressing melancholy for what never existed, but with recognition that they would never have wanted the lives associated with trousseaux in the first place. Accordingly, we suggest a final, ironic theme where the desire for a return to a past is parodied and presented as melancholic; a simulacrum of a past that never was rather than one to be re-created.” (p17)

This week in sustainability news

Impressive: Every month Beth catalogues and weighs her plastic waste on her blog Fake Plastic Fish.  She has decided to live with as little plastic in her life as possible.  January’s total was 6.4oz of plastic, half of which she already had in her house prior to changing her buying habits over two years ago.  I think my rubiks cube – all 100% plastic of it – weighs more than 6.4oz.  That’s a bit depressing.

Urban gardening: It has undergone a transformation from stereotypically guerrilla tactics to government sanctioned project in Portland, Oregon. As part of the federal stimulus package, vertical gardens will be grown on one side of the main federal building in the downtown area, hopefully cutting energy usage.

Green farewells: Flying is already a surefire way to bloat your carbon footprint.  And that calculation doesn’t include the part of the journey between home and the airport.  In an in-progress study, researchers are trying to determine how much this section of the journey contributes to your carbon footprint.  They are also trying to find ways to encourage the use of public transport to get to airports (one idea is a central city baggage drop off to make navigating public transport easier), as well as brainstorming ideas to implement web-based video stations in airports that could be used to bid farewell to friends and family, thus avoiding the round-trip drive that is required to say goodbye in the airline terminal.

This week in sustainability news

Political ecology/Anthropology: Barbara Rose Johnston talks emerging trends in the relationships between water, culture and power on the AAA blog.

It’s your turn to empty the compost!: What happens when one person in a relationship is more invested in environmentalism than the other?  Well, it looks like they go to therapy.  According to the NYTimes, therapists are noticing a rise in “green disputes”, where couples argue over acceptable levels of commitment to saving the planet.

In the media: There is an interesting discussion between journalists, scientists, and climate advocates at Eurozine on the presentation of climate change in the media.

Design: The latest idea for urban sustainability is a bike lane in the sky!  Cyclists would travel above the traffic on wires.  See more photos on Martin Angelov’s site.

Creating a community of bloggers in the classroom

Here is the video presentation I submitted to the ASAANZ 2009 conference, Re-thinking community in contemporary anthropology.

Abstract

Creating a community of bloggers in the classroom: Student blogging as link between classroom learning and internet discovery

Much has been written about the use of web 2.0 technologies in the classroom and the digital literacy levels of students.  With these themes in mind I implemented student blogging as an experimental element in the second year Anthropology course I co-taught during the first trimester of 2009.

This presentation will situate student course-blogging within a broader discussion of trends in collaborative learning, democratising knowledge, and the role of weblogs in higher education.  More specifically for this Anthropology course, student blogging was implemented in the hopes that it would facilitate open communication between students as well as between the students and the professor.  The experience was also intended to provide a platform where students could begin to develop their own public voice while writing for an audience and exploring different modes of textual and visual expression.  In the process students gained a better grasp of negotiating tensions between public and private domains online.  They also developed a deeper appreciation of the various types of information accessible on the web.  These topics will be covered alongside some of the more specific details involved in creating and implementing course-blogging.

Online tools used

• netvibes
• wordpress
• wetpaint
• scribd
• docstoc
• delicious
• diigo
• yahoo pipes

Online resources mentioned in video

• Ritualblogging – the anth213 courseblog
• Anth213 netvibes page – a sort of homebase
• Mike Wesch video on Web 2.0
• Erkan Saka’s online tools for teaching
• Jill Walker Rettberg’s weblog definition for Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory 2005
• Pew Internet & American Life Project – Riding the Waves of “Web 2.0” &  Twitter and Status Updating
• Max Forte’s cyberanthropology course
• Mike Wesch’s course on digital ethnography – credited with my initial discovery of the potential in netvibes

This week in sustainability news

Sunk: After repeated confrontations over the last several years between The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Japanese whaling fleets, last week a Sea Shepherd vessel was rammed by a Japanese whaling security boat and sunk. The international exchanges over who is at fault are ongoing.  The youtube videos don’t appear to strengthen the Japanese case though.

FDA flip-flop: In 2008 BPA, the chemical often found in hard plastics and canned foods, was safe; now the US’s Food and Drug Administration has changed their views in a report just issued.  Grist has a good take on the toothlessness of the FDA report and the possibility of congressional action.

Coal mining: In case anyone still thought that mountaintop-removal coal mining was a good idea, Donald Kennedy reminds us why it’s not.  The former Science editor and professor emeritus of environmental science at Stanford points out the double whammy that it’s not just burning the coal that is evironmentally harmful; the extraction process itself contributes to deforestation and contamination of rivers and groundwater supply.  bell hooks’ Belonging: A culture of place has a few more interesting essays on environmental stewardship in relation to mountaintop-removal mining in Kentucky.

Oh: And the past decade was the hottest recorded since the record keeping began in the 1850s, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

The Craftsman

A reprint of an American Craft interview with Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman.

“Your most recent book, The Craftsman, is the first in a trilogy devoted to what you call “techniques for conducting a particular way of life.” Can you elaborate on this project?”

RS: “This is a project about material culture in the broadest sense. The Craftsman was about making things well; the second volume, The Workshop, focuses on developing social skills and cooperation; and the third, The Foreigner, will be about environmental design and crafting cities.

The question that ties them all together is: How do we develop skills in the course of making things, whether they are physical objects, social relations, or environments? Underlying this study is a theory I called “situated cognition,” which is the way human beings develop their capacities through craftwork.”

Read the full interview here.

This week in sustainability news

Cap & Trade: Just in time for the Climate Summit in Copenhagen and the leaked Danish papers, Annie Leonard releases her second video – this time focused on cap and trade policies.  Her feelings on the idea: “You can only compromise to a  point before a solution isn’t really a solution.”

Missing trees: You can now add global deforestation to the list of things Google monitors online.   Google announced they would be combining satellite data with their mapping systems and presenting it with cloud technology.

Talking about climate change & the media: media/anthropology links to an interesting discussion on the media and the discourse surrounding climate change in the most recent issue of Soundings.