Feeds:
Posts
Comments

vote

Jodi Dean, whose work I respect a lot, won’t vote in the upcoming U.S. elections. The election, she argues, “won’t do anything but secure a false sense of connectedness from those who do vote to the oligarchy that continues to exploit us.” Mark Lance is agreeing with her that voting is the opiate of the masses, but thinks voting can still be useful.

I can’t vote, since I only live and work here; I’m not a citizen. (There are a few places in the U.S. where I could vote locally, though not federally, but the progressive bastion of Burlington, Vermont, isn’t one of them.) But if I could, I would. Here’s why.

Continue Reading »

world looks back

Kenya_JR_WAH_4214.jpg

French street artist JR (who I blogged about here) has been awarded the TED Prize. Worldchanging shares a number of his images of “the world looking back” here. The New York Times has more on the story. JR’s web site has more photos.

house-of-cards.jpg

For all my skepticism toward most “climate skepticism,” I find the case of Judith Curry very interesting. This recent post at her blog Climate Etc. repeatedly resorts to metaphors like “‘Alice down the rabbit hole’ moments” and “bucket[s] of cold water being poured over my head” to describe her experiences venturing outside the warm world of academic climate science to one that’s exposed to the harsh winds of public and media scrutiny. The post includes an account of her journey from mainstream climate scientist to one who is “sadder and wiser as a result of the hurricane wars [that followed the publication of an article published in the aftermath of Katrina], a public spokesperson on the global warming issue owing to the media attention from the hurricane wars, more broadly knowledgeable about the global warming issue, much more concerned about the integrity of climate science, listening to skeptics, and a blogger (for better or for worse).”

In recounting her story, Curry writes:

Continue Reading »

I’ve been meaning to catch up on the discussions over Buddhism and objects/relations, Slavoj Zizek’s critique of “Western Buddhism,” and related topics, which have been continuing on Tim Morton’s Ecology Without Nature, Jeffrey Bell’s Aberrant Monism, Skholiast’s Speculum Criticum Traditionis, and elsewhere. I haven’t quite caught up, but here are a few quick notes on some of what’s been said…

1) Michael at Archive Fire rightfully points to the virtues of Jeffrey Bell‘s lucidly articulated point that

Continue Reading »

As another political season (leading to the midterm elections) winds down here in the US, people get wound up. Here’s part of something I wrote to a friend who happens to be a Tea Party sympathizer – which surprised me when I found this out, but life is full of surprises, and meeting them mindfully keeps things interesting.

 

[. . .]

“I completely agree with you about special interest groups being too powerful in the U.S. It’s one of the reasons why I originally hesitated to move here when I was offered a job at the University of Wisconsin ten years ago. (The U.S. has ten times as many people, and ten times as many universities, than Canada, so it was likelier that I’d find a job – which I was looking for at the time – in the U.S. than at home.)

Continue Reading »

PicForNewsletterSpainSept2006OGroveLunchFish-709515.jpg

That’s what one of our extremely gracious hosts at the Instituto de Estudios Gallegos, kept repeating during the wining and dining that made up an important part of the IV International Colloquium Compostela. I can now attest that it’s absolutely true. The meals were extended food fests where serving after delicious serving, dish after delectable dish — of locally caught seafood and fish, locally grown meats (which I had trouble abstaining from, 18 years of meatlessness notwithstanding), fresh breads, local wines, and tasty desserts — kept arriving for hours on end, keeping us at the table well into the night from our late starting dinners (10 pm being typical).

Aside from the food and the setting — the gorgeous medieval city and World Heritage Site of Santiago de Compostela — the colloquium itself was very good, with an interdisciplinary mix of researchers including anthropologists, historians, scholars of religion, a few geographers, a sociologist, and a handful of others (including two archbishops presenting on Christian pilgrimage in north Africa and the Middle East) discussing pilgrimage and its relation to conflict and peace in the world’s religions (and, in my case, outside the world’s religions). The plan is to publish the results in book form.

Continue Reading »

100_0497.JPG

Amazing that after 7000 years this 100+ megalith cromlech is standing (once again), and that it was only “discovered” in 1964. (Discovered presumably by those who had a reasonably good idea of what they were discovering…) It is the Almendres Cromlech outside Evora, Portugal.

Continue Reading »

I’m getting ready to head to Spain, where I’ve been invited to give a talk on “green pilgrimage” at the Fourth Colloquium Compostela. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ll be speaking about.

 

Green Pilgrimage: Prospects for Ecology and Peace-Building

Continue Reading »

Fabio Gironi has a very perceptive response to the recent posts at Larval Subjects, Ecology Without Nature, and here, over Buddhism, objects, and relations.

I like his admission that “I have never been – nor [do] I plan to be—a practicing Buddhist or a ‘believer’ of any sort, but the encounter with Nāgārjuna’s philosophy was probably the most exciting intellectual encounter of my career.”

There is something wildly exciting about reading Nagarjuna, even if it may be confusing if not accompanied by a reliable guide (and even if accompanied). My own understanding of Nagarjuna comes largely filtered through his more recent anglophone translators and interpreters: Garfield, Westerhoff, and others, and I’m sure Fabio knows his Nagarjuna better than I do. But I wonder if he sells himself short by shying away from being a “‘believer’ of any sort.” I know what he means here, but I would want to raise Deleuze’s “belief in this world” as an option into an otherwise too staid picture of ‘belief.’

Continue Reading »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XViCOAu6UC0?fs=1&hl=en_US

Paul Ennis’s book of interviews with seven “post-Continental” philosophical “voices” is out now and orderable on Amazon. (The hard copy will be available in late October.) The seven are Graham Harman, Jeffrey Malpas, Lee Braver, Stuart Elden, Ian Bogost, Levi Bryant, and (gasp) myself.

As (U of San Diego’s) Peter Gratton’s blurb says, “Pick up this book and grab a front seat to those whose work will be in short order the landmarks of our post-Continental futures.”

(Note to the philosophically uninitiated: “Continental” refers to one of the two main traditions within academic philosophy, the other being “analytical.” The continent is Europe, since this tradition finds its main sources among French, German, Italian, and other continental European, as opposed to Anglo-American, philosophers. Wafting on the air of cappuccino, perfume, and the sound of accordions in the street, “Continental” is, simply put, more fun.)

And from Paul’s too-kind introduction:

“With Ivakhiv we get a clear indication that the division between philosophy and other disciplines will eventually give way and will do so because the academics of the future are no longer satisfied with the boundaries they have been bequeathed.”

Congrats, Paul, on getting it out, and thanks to Zero Books for making it happen, and for delivering on their promise that “another kind of discourse – intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist – is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.”

Inside Higher Ed has an interesting piece on the just-released National Research Council report ranking doctoral programs across the U.S. Among other things, the report is criticized for the 4-5 year time lag in producing it, its confusing methodologies, inaccuracies in data, and its disciplinary approach (which is ill-suited for evaluating interdisciplinary programs like the one I teach in).

Among the report’s more interesting general findings are the following. (Remember that the data covers doctoral research programs over the period from the early 1990s to 2005-6.)

Continue Reading »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Skip to toolbar