Check out this great workshop and lecture (May 18, Amsterdam) on post-Fordist gender, labor, and the city with Linda Peake, organized by Marguerite van den Berg & Carmen Ferri. Willem Boterman and I will be responding. For the workshop, email registration is required, and instructions are here. Entry is free, and lunch and coffee will be provided.… Continue reading The Feminizing City?
Algorithm Island
I've just returned from an excellent Algorithm Studies Network workshop on the island of Sandhamn in Sweden (photos at center and top left). It was organized by Francis Lee and Lotta Björklund Larson, and after every talk they asked us to write our impressions and ideas on sticky notes that were then collected and organized into groups (photo… Continue reading Algorithm Island
Sherlock Explains It All
"From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link to it." "By a man’s finger-nails, by his… Continue reading Sherlock Explains It All
Primate Planet
“My people will crouch and conspire and plot and plan for the inevitable day of Man's downfall—the day when he finally and self-destructively turns his weapons against his own kind…. When the sea is a dead sea, and the land is a wasteland….“ I want to write about the difficulty of being open and responsive… Continue reading Primate Planet
Ephemeral Infrastructures
Recently we've been writing about Paul Edwards' (2006) notion of infrastructural globalism, or how "'the world' is produced and maintained" through infrastructures that are aimed at spanning the globe. Walking around London after the bodies conference, I came back to thinking about how different infrastructures come to be seen as ephemeral or obdurate, and how they come to be seen as belonging… Continue reading Ephemeral Infrastructures
Circulating Bodies
My thanks go out to Kristin Hussey, Sarah Morton, and everyone involved in the Corpses, Catalogues, and Catalogues conference last week! There were so many wonderful talks, and the full list is available here. Amber Kiri Aranui spoke on the repatriation of Maori ancestral remains. Ginna Camacho of Equitas presented on the role of bioethics in forensic… Continue reading Circulating Bodies
Patent Time
During a recent trip, I stopped off at the apartment in Bern where Einstein lived when he worked as a patent clerk. It's now a small museum, including a desk with this broken clock in it. The clock seemed especially poignant since Einstein's research involved a fundamental rethinking of the nature of time. Einstein famously worked by inventing… Continue reading Patent Time
Cataloguing Corpses
May 18 in London, I'm giving a talk on forensic identification and the economic valuation of life before the advent of DNA. It looks specifically at the role that concerns about life insurance played in decisions to bury bodies at sea, and it's entitled: "Visibility, Value, and the Measure of a Life: Body Recovery and Identification after the… Continue reading Cataloguing Corpses
Young Astronauts
Nautilus magazine was kind enough to include my entry on being in the Young Astronauts in their Spark of Science series, which consits of short posts about how people first became interested in science. Submission is open, and there are some really cool entries, like Hope Jahren on playing with lasers in her father's lab, Caleb Scharf on his rural childhood and being… Continue reading Young Astronauts
Jess Bier 