Very excited about the inaugural meeting of a reading group I proposed at The Public School on Theory and Practice. We’ll periodically meet and interrogate this oft-encountered dichotomy in a variety of domains and contexts: politics, philosophy, art, ethics. The idea is that by looking at the issue from a number of angles, domains, and styles of thought, we will generate new connections and new articulations, and hopefully erode the boundaries between the two.
I’ll be leading the first session on January 24 with Sarah Kessler trying to lay a foundation and find some orientation for the class for other folks to pick up going forward.
More info and sign-up here.
Digital Arts and Culture
Just got back from presenting my paper The Other Software at DAC09 as part of the Software / Platform Studies Track. This was my first presentation of a peer-reviewed paper at an academic conference and it was somewhat of a trial by fire, but I think it went well and at least there were some positive tweets in response. The paper is a criticism of the materialist approach taken by Friedrich Kittler in his famous essay There is No Software. I believe all the papers from the conference (and there are many wonderful ones) are going to be posted at escholarship.org and I’ll post a link once they’re up.
Leading a reading group along with Sarah Kessler at The Public School on American Pragmatism. We’ll focus primarily on Rorty, but start with discussions of Dewey and James. There will also be a few readings by Stanley Fish and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
The class will have three meetings on July 12, 26, and August 9.
You can find more info here.
Teaching a course (really more leading a reading group) at The Public School on Laclau and Mouffe’s concepts of Hegemony and Antagonism. The reading group will involve a close reading of “Hegemony and Socialist Strategy” and selections from Mouffe and Laclau’s writing on Antagonism. We will also explore related texts by Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, and possibly Derrida.
The class will have three meetings on September 14, 23, and 28.
You can find more info here.
I’ll be participating in the SoftWhere Software Studies Workshop next week at UCSD. This is one of the first events in the US focused on the meaning and goals of the emerging discipline of Software Studies. Most of the workshop is closed, but there is a public PechaKucha style presentation on Wednesday, May 21st, from 12:30-5:00pm. From the description: “Software studies is a research field that examines software and cyberinfrastructure using approaches from humanities, cultural criticism, and social sciences. The public session will feature a rapid series of short presentations by key national and international figures in this emerging field… Attendees can expect a collage of diverse perspectives on what it means to live in software society and how to study it.”
There are a lot of brilliant people involved and it proves to be a fun couple of days. More information at softwarestudies.com.