Did you know that
Only ants and humans are able to “organise themselves into teams” to lift heavy objects [?]
Also, they “call for emergency backup with chemical trail.” BBC Nature
Archive for June, 2012
Ants and humans
27 June 2012“Where are the Volumes, the Volumina?” The Arrival of Peter Sloterdijk
27 June 2012
A commentary on Peter Sloterdijk's Tate Modern lecture by Peter Adey, Harriet Hawkins and Craig Martin
Peter Sloterdijk arrived at Tate Modern on 16 June to give his keynote presentation ‘Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised Immunity’ to the ‘Topology at Tate Modern’ series of public talks and events. Sloterdijk is currently president of the State Academy of Design at the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he is also a Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics.
Nigel Thrift on Peter Sloterdijk
27 June 2012
Peter Sloterdijk was the focus of a special issue of Society and Space in 2009. He recently gave a lecture at the Tate Modern on 'Spatialised Immunity' as part of their Topologies series. He was due to be introduced by former Society and Space co-editor Nigel Thrift, but unfortunately Nigel was unable to attend. Ralf Rogowski took his place on the day.
Latour’s call for co-investigators
16 June 2012For his “An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence” project:
For a philosophy that is empirical and not simply empiricist, investigation offers the only way to ferret out its concepts and then put them to the test before proposing a version that can be submitted to critique by its peers. And yet, even though investigation as a genre benefits from a distinguished and intimidating prestige in philosophy, it is fairly unusual for an author to propose to carry out an investigation with the participation of his readers. This is nevertheless what I propose to do in publishing a book titled An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, alongside a digital site that allows its visitors, who will have become co-investigators, to inspect its arguments and go on to suggest other fields to study, other proofs, other accounts. By means of this arrangement I invite my co-investigators to help me find the guiding thread of the experience by becoming attentive to several regimes of truth, which I call modes of existence, after the strange book by Étienne Souriau, recently republished, that features this phrase in its title.
More here. H/t AIME. The video is definitely worth watching: it provides a succinct and clear summary of what otherwise sounds like a rather complex project.
Between ontology and methods
11 June 2012I only just saw that CSISP at Goldsmiths have posted the audio and video of Richard Rogers and Bruno Latour’s talk on “Digital Societies: between Ontology and Methods” (March 7, 2012 16:30-18:00) on their website.
In this joint event, Bruno Latour and Richard Rogers will present their respective programmes for researching digital social life. If digital networked media are transforming social life as well as social research, what are the implications for our analysis of digital societies? In taking up this question, Latour and Rogers will examine the changing relations between technology, research methods and ontology in digital social life, and what this means for the emerging field of digital sociology.
Latour's Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh
11 June 2012
For the past year and a half, I had been checking the Gifford website periodically and had found nothing about Latour's Gifford Lectures.
But finally there is this:
"Series 2012-2013
The 2012 - 2013 Gifford Lecture Series will be given by Professor Bruno Latour of Sciences Po, Paris, in Feb 2013.
Please check this page for further details in late December 2012."
Materialism and World Politics
6 June 2012
Materialism and World Politics
20-22 October, 2012
LSE, London, UK
Registration is now open here for anyone who wants to attend.
Scheduled Speakers:
Keynote: The ontology of global politics
William Connolly (Johns Hopkins University)
Opening Panel: What does materialism mean for world politics today?
John Protevi (Louisiana State University)
More TBC
Closing Panel: Agency and structure in a complex world…
CfP: Valuation Studies
2 June 2012See the call for papers here [PDF]. Here is the journal website: Valuation Studies. H/t CHARISMA.
Valuation Studies is a new open access journal connecting several vibrant research fields working on the study of valuation as a social practice. To engage scholars with various backgrounds and orientations in discussions about valuation, the journal welcomes papers in different forms, including papers that use or combine a variety of methods, from ethnographic accounts to quantitative appraisal to conceptual interpretation.
The overall aim of the new open access journal Valuation Studies is to foster valuable conversations in a new transdisciplinary and emerging field relating to the study of valuation as a social practice. The journal’s first issue will be available in the first half of 2013.
The journal will provide a space for the assessment and diffusion of research that is produced at the interface of a variety of approaches from several disciplines: sociology, economic sociology, science and technology studies, organisation and management studies, social and cultural anthropology, market studies, institutional perspectives in economics, accounting studies, cultural geography, philosophy, and literary studies. The project emerges out of the increasing synergies between these approaches around one particular ambit: valuation.
Editors:
Professor C-F Helgesson, Linköping University
Senior researcher Fabian Muniesa, Mines ParisTech
