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
Tag: space
The book exists!
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!
Student of Segregation
An Israeli Professor's Trip through the Jim Crow South I've been thinking about the international circulation of racist expertise. James Q. Whitman has published a new book, Hitler's American Model. It's about how the Nazis of the 1930s and 1940s studied the racist legal system of the United States as part of their efforts to take away the rights of… Continue reading Student of Segregation
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
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
Jess Bier 