Geographies of Knowledge
This blog is a collection of research updates, rough ideas, and harebrained schemes that I won't have a chance to work through in the near future. I'll publish some of these eventually if there's time. My more polished work can be found via the "Publications" link in the menu at top right. Topics include: … Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about the places of classification, meaning both where it takes place and how different classification systems incorporate space and place. This is in part a reaction to collaborative work I’ve been doing (with a group from the Algorithms Studies Network), since algorithms are (in)famous for traveling across domains without attending to the… Continue reading Placing Classification
Photo credit: Aad Hoogendoorn I was delighted to be asked by De Dépendence to respond with Tina Rahimy to Richard Sennett at an event at WORM in December 2018 (video below), moderated by Farid Tabarki. Sennett was speaking about his new book Building and Dwelling, where he argues in favor of open cities, and against closed, controlled,… Continue reading Recap: Richard Sennett @ WORM
Being Here for Each Other: Accountability, Willem Schinkel, and the #WOinactie Protests So I haven't been involved in the Dutch university protests #WOinactie, partly because, living in Rotterdam, I’m a bit outside the loop and simply don’t know many people in Amsterdam and Utrecht. But I want to talk about one of the most… Continue reading Being Here for Each Other
I'm very excited to have a new article on disaster and body recovery out in Social Studies of Science, with many thanks to the wonderful editors and peer reviewers. The abstract and PDF (open access) are here. I give an overview of the article and its broader context here. The second link goes to the text of… Continue reading Titanic Redux: Bodies as Materials
A whale fall the carcass of a whale as it sits at the bottom of the ocean. A dead whale is a boon for local wildlife, and they swarm it in stages, sometimes reducing it to the bones in a matter of months, although the body can continue to be influential for decades. I first started… Continue reading Whale Falls: Making Opression Remote
Yesterday we launched Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine at the University of Amsterdam! It went very well, and I'm thankful to to everyone who joined us, as well as those who couldn't come but sent along their good wishes beforehand. Here you can access the audio and my slides for the event. (Also see the additional… Continue reading Recap: Book Launch (with Audio)
Annalisa Pelizza and Chunglin Kwa graciously commented on my book, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine during the annual meeting of the WTMC. Among other things, we discussed the politics of symmetry as it is used in science and technology studies (STS); STS literature from the 1980s that already moved away from the lab-field dichotomy; the differences between sumud… Continue reading Recap: WTMC Annual Meeting
The Power Dynamics of Role Playing The celebrated author N.K. Jemisin has written about her problem with orcs, which is related to the ways that orcs build on racist stereotypes. In her words: "Think about that. Creatures that look like people, but aren’t really. Kinda-sorta-people, who aren’t worthy of even the most basic moral considerations, like the… Continue reading Orcing the Other
My first book, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge has just been published by the MIT Press. The MIT page has a summary and quotes from Laleh Khalili and Stefan Helmreich, two people whose work I really admire. The book is available online via independent bookstores in the Netherlands and the US, and it's… Continue reading The book exists!
