… but only momentarily, from my writing (mainly Ecologies of the Moving Image, which continues to proceed apace, but also the Praxis Forum I’m editing on the Ken Burns National Parks series for Environmental Communication, the paper I’ve been invited to give on green pilgrimage at the Fourth Compostela Colloquium, and the piece I’m writing for Bryant’s and Bogost’s collection, which is shaping up to be quite the anthology, now featuring Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Katherine Hayles, and Tim Morton alongside the previously announced names — OOO continues to widen its sphere of influence, now moving into science studies and feminist theory).
I’ve recently transitioned from a PC (a Dell Latitude that I had really come to like, despite its PC-ish flaws) to a new MacBook Pro, which initially threw me for some loops — the display, for one thing, was so much smaller and less detailed. (It’s a smaller machine.) But I’ve come to like it a lot over the last two weeks.
Elsewhere in the blogosphere: There’ve been some very interesting discussions over at Larval Subjects, Aberrant Monism, Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere (about Isabelle Stengers, Latour, and Owen Barfield, among others), which you can catch in the Shared Items on my Shadow Blog (scroll down on the right; and note that they aren’t in chronological order, because my following of them has not been very systematic recently). And Grist has continued being the best go-to place for environmental news; see, for instance, Joe Romm’s lament about the Obama admin’s increasingly disappointing record. And see Cog Pol Works on right-wing conspiracy theories around the BP disaster, and Mediaology and Wired on the (hilarious!) dangers of ambient music.
A couple of important conference announcements: Staging Sustainability and the Fourth Whitehead Research Project conference, which features an all-star lineup (and which I, unfortunately, will not be able to attend).
Heading back down (like the loons on the lake here, suddenly disappearing to look for some fish, and reappearing a while later somewhere else)…
There’s also American University’s annual “Public Anthropology conference” coming up. From the website:
“Join us for a revolutionizing conference as we work towards building coalitions across diverse social justice movements. We invite community activists, practicing and academic anthropologists and other social scientists, students, filmmakers and interested individuals to join us for two days of collaborative discussions and strategizing about how to better organize and collaborate across various sectors and disciplines to create new social justice alliances.”
Seems like it has the potential to be very interesting. I went last year, and learned about Bryan McNeil’s work with Coal River Mountain Watch, which I’ve found very instructive. Plus, it’s free.
Thanks for this Adrian. It’s good to hear of your writing. And the lake looks amazing.
This media panic about drones is amazing. What about those suspicious sounds around the ordinary American home, like vacuum cleaners, drying machines and air conditioning? Horror of horrors!
And thanks for the pingback on the Inception post too.
Yes, and lawnmowers… They are the worst. (I’ve always been a fan of the old-fashioned ‘acoustic’ lawnmower–that is, if grass needs to be cut at all.)
One thing I haven’t figured out yet is what I think of the drone of wind energy generators. I don’t live near any, but since I advocate for them, I should be willing to have one go up nearby, shouldn’t I?