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
Category: events
Recap: WTMC Annual Meeting
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
Magical Minions
Update: For a related post on orcs, see this related post, Orcing the Other. Magical Minions: Dominance and Diversity in the US Popular Media Privilege and Performativity Privilege is a complex concept that has different meanings in specific contexts. I’m just back from the Judith Butler conference at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and one of… Continue reading Magical Minions
The Feminizing City?
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?
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
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
Jess Bier 