Monday, August 3, 2009

First week with Latour

Howdy,

Just a reminder that we will be talking about the first 50 or so pages of Reassembling the Social. Good stuff. Hope you can get online tomorrow, Tuesday at 8:30 Central time.

Amber

9 comments:

tara said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tara said...

OK. The podcast of this week's THIS AMERICAN LIFE is MUST listening. It deals with stereotypes, cultural symbols, interpretation and misunderstanding.
Plus it is hysterical, even while being insightful and at times chilling.

Click here to listen

tara said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tara said...

I find myself unable to read this op/ed by economist Paul Krugman in today's NYT without feeling Bruno Latour looking over my shoulder saying, "hmm... see that? and there too, uhuh....hmmm"
That Latour, a curious blend of charming and obnoxious, no?

Click here to read

TDR
p.s. sorry about empty/deleted comments... don't know why original posted multiple times.

tara said...

Jane Jacobs would have loved this guy from Oak Park, I think!
Reminds me of her axiom that people are drawn to people, that people going about their lives is an attraction itself...

Click here to read article

Susan Nevelow Mart said...

So in the thirties in England there was a whole group of people who thought that the way to take the pulse of the nation was to go out and observe people and record their conversations. There is a whole archive of this stuff in England - the group called itself Mass Observation and there are several books published about their pub crawls and a whole book from the archives on what women were really doing in the war - I think they even had government funding - but somehow the work got swallowed up by marketing research - but it is so much a precursor to what I think is going on in LaTour:
see

WARTIME WOMEN: A MASS OBSERVATION ANTHOLOGY. or The Pub and the People : A Worktown Study By Mass Observation or

Britain, Mass Observation, Madge, Charles & Harrisson, Tom

Nef

Susan Nevelow Mart said...

This Latour blog may be of interest: http://www.anthem-group.net/

Tara - how did you make your link live? I don't see any editing tools.

Nef

tara said...

You can use html tags to create links or other effects. A good reference for the what tags to use can be found by clicking here

It looks more difficult than it is, if you are not yet familiar. Use the PREVIEW button to make sure it works before you publish comment.

tara said...

Nef,

Thanks for the info on Mass Observation. I haven't looked it up yet, but it brings to mind some of the work of Studs Terkel, and for that matter, much of the WPA funding for US writers during the '30s to collect oral histories.