News from Rob Kitchin of a treasure trove of postdocs and PhD positions at the National University of Ireland – Maynooth as part of his prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council:
I’ve been awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator award for a project entitled ‘The Programmable City’. The project will run over 5 years and be staffed by myself, 4 postdocs and 4 PhD students. The project is essentially an empirical extension of the Code/Space book (MIT Press, 2011), focusing on the intersection of smart urbanism, ubiquitous computing and big data from a software studies/critical geography perspective, comparing Dublin and Boston and other locales.
We have just advertised two 5 year postdocs and the four 4 year doctoral positions… The posts are not restricted in discipline and I’d really like to put together an interesting interdisciplinary team… The remaining two 4 year postdocs will be advertised later in the year.
Prospective candidates can find out more via these links:
Postdoctoral Researchers:
Closing date for applications 22nd March 2013
Further details available here.
Funded PhDs:
Closing date for applications 12th April 2013
Further details available here.
You can find out much more about Rob’s vision – and the visual analytics – of the programmable city via his curated cornucopia at Scoophere.
The continuing explosion of interest in cyberwarfare – most recently tracing the genealogy of the US/Israeli Stuxnet/Olympic Games attack on Iran’s nuclear programme back to 2005, and digitally fingering a specialist unit of the Chinese Army based in Shanghai as a major source of cyberattacks on US commercial organisations and government agencies – makes this project all the more interesting: a sort of “Re-programmable city”, I suppose. I’ve been tracking these developments as part of the revision of my journal essay “The everywhere war” for the book version, which will have a separate chapter devoted to them. Much of this was anticipated by Steve Graham in his discussion of “Switching cities of off” – incorporated into the brilliant Cities under Siege: the new military urbanism (Verso, 2010) – and Code/Space is a rich source for thinking about the wider ramifications. I don’t know whether there is room for any of this in Rob’s grand project, but I hope there is.
I’m just back from Paris, where I spent three days at a marvellous (and marvellously small) workshop on War and medicine organised with flair and brio by Vinh-Kim Nguyen. More on that later, but we began with a ‘walking seminar’.
This was a new venture for me, and Vinh-Kim explained that he had first encountered it in the Netherlands. The basic idea is to take a small group (six to eight people) and walk in the countryside together but in pairs, changing around every 40 minutes, in order to have intense conversations with each other.
In theory, the first twenty minutes of each ‘block’ is devoted to the work of one of the pair, changing over mid-way to explore the work of the other, though in practice I suspect most of us enjoyed mutual conversations throughout the 40 minutes. Then the pairs change. It was far more enjoyable than sitting round a table in a seminar room, but also far more productive: the conversations were wide-ranging but focused (we’d all read one another’s papers, essays and drafts in advance), and the whole experience – we walked from 1000 to 1430 through the national forest at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, west of Paris – was exhilarating. I know that many people think best on their feet, and I can’t remember when I learned so much in such a concentrated period with such pleasure. And it was an incredibly productive springboard for the rest of the workshop.
L-R: Zoe Wool, Vinh-Kim Nguyen, Fanny Chabrol, Ken MacLeish, Alex Edmonds, Catherine Lutz, Omar Dewachi, Ghassan Abu-Sitta
I’m now thinking how to use this to kickoff my graduate seminar next year. No problem in finding a forest, but on Monday we ended up in a fine French restaurant for a lunch that took up most of what was left of the afternoon…
More from Annemarie Mol on walking seminars here, and posts about an Oxford version here. I know that regular seminars can work very well too, but if anyone has any other ideas on how to enliven the proceedings or simply ring the changes let’s share them.
I’ve been reading anthropologist/historian Nicholas Dirks on ‘Scholars, spies and global studies’here. He’s acutely aware of the origins of ‘area studies’ in the Second World War – and Trevor Barnes‘s brilliant work with Matt Farish has done much to deepen our knowledge of geography’s enlistments too: see here and scroll down to 2006 for their already classic paper – and notes that
“The first great center of area studies in the United States was not located in any university, but in Washington,” McGeorge Bundy, onetime dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and then president of the Ford Foundation, observed in 1964. The [Office of Strategic Services], he said, was “a remarkable institution, half cops-and-robbers and half faculty meeting.”
Invoking the spirit of another stellar anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, Dirks makes it clear that he doesn’t want to go back there:
‘The point now is to recognize the essential distinctiveness — of ourselves and others. That distinctiveness can only be appreciated in global frames and with insistent humanist attention… I mean here to insist on a radically new way of identifying the core values and aims of humanist education that puts traditional questions on a global stage, along with the studies of social and policy scientists.’
For a fuller treatment of the issues and ideas sketched in this brief essay, see his University Lecture, ‘Scholars and Spies: Worldly knowledge and the predicament of the university’, delivered at Columbia in February 2012 here [fast forward to 7:23]:
But, as I asked in a previous post on our martial Arts, what if that humanist tradition is already, constitutively compromised through its entanglement with military (and now we obviously need to add paramilitary) violence? Too often, I think, we approach that relationship either in instrumental terms – in the case of my own field, a series of indictments of the ways in which, in Yves Lacoste‘s resonant phrase, la géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre; you can see a similar approach in opposition to the enlistment of anthropologists and others in US counterinsurgency operations and Human Terrain teams – or in philosophical terms (‘epistemological violence’, f, example).
Both are important, to be sure, but for them to work in concert we also need a political genealogy of the conceptual armatures deployed in (and beyond) the humanities and social sciences, mapping the ways in which the construction of our key concepts circulates in and out of other concrete practices. That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in Stuart Elden‘s retro-midwifery at ‘The Birth of Territory‘, though I’m drawn more to its adult (and no less bloody) adventures. Those entailments are not purely discretionary, a matter of preferring this concept over that, and without wanting to return to or even supplement Jürgen Habermas‘s delineation of ‘knowledge-constitutive interests’ I’m left wondering how the production of concepts is implicated in the operations of power, including military power, and how their performative potential (practical and rhetorical) is realized. I’ve never seen the university as an Ivory Tower – and I’m not suggesting it’s a Missile Silo either – but, as I argued in Incendiary knowledges, we need to ‘world’ our ‘worldly knowledges’ and think carefully about the hyphen in power-knowledge.
Bruno Latouronce playfully identified four deficiencies in actor-network theory – the three words actor, network and theory, plus the hyphen – which prompts Ilana Gershon to describe the hyphen as a ‘trickster placeholder’. It’s an artful conceit, but I think we should take the ‘place’ in ‘placeholder’ seriously and think some more about the spaces in which and through which knowledge and military power are entangled. David Livingstone provides some clues in Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago, 2003), but military power remains in the wings of his account, while Gerard Toal‘s discussion of the battlefield as one of geography’s ‘venues’ in the SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, edited by Livingstone with John Agnew (Sage, 2011) is substantively closer to what I have in mind, but it’s more concerned with instrumental modalities than the apparatus through which, for example, the historical battlefield morphed into the contemporary battlespace. That apparatus is at once conceptual and practical, and it is also – crucially – multi-sited, with circulations between (for example) districts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon, and a host of military installations, defence industries and research institutions inside and outside the academy. In other words, the installation of battlespace – a diffuse, non-linear and unbounded space of military and paramilitary operations – at once exemplifies and engenders the contemporary ‘global’ to which Dirks directs our attention.
It was of course Michel Foucault who reminded us of the circulation ‘between geographical and strategic discourses’ – only natural, he said, because ‘geography grew up in the shadow of the military’ – and in that same interview with the editors of Hérodote (including Lacoste)he suggested that:
‘Once knowledge can be analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the processes by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region or territory.’
Those notions are far more than ‘metaphors’, as he called them in the interview, or at any rate metaphors are rarely purely linguistic plays. In the case of many of our spatial concepts, these are not only – as George Lakoffand Mark Johnson might say – ‘metaphors we live by’ – but also metaphors through which others are made to (or let) die. The ‘human’ in human geography has come under increasing pressure in recent years, from both post-structuralism and post-humanism, and my own work on war is indebted to both of them; but my particular concern is the way in which the production and performance of particular spaces is an intrinsic and intimate part of a military violence that is all too human.
If you’re tired of all the war-talk – I mean ‘war on the humanities’ talk – then try Anthony Galluzzo on teaching the humanities at the US Military Academy at West Point (yes): Sarah Lawrence, with guns, over at Jacobin.
“I agreed with a lot of what you said today, Professor Galluzzo,” he said. “But don’t you think there’s a difference between imaginary others and actual people you meet on the ground, in a place like Afghanistan? Can’t fantasies also reinforce stereotypes?” He articulated my own misgivings. I suggested he read Edward Said.
Although Greg didn’t know the book, his questions reminded me that Orientalism – a text and term often invoked by many of my West Point colleagues at the time as what “we” weren’t doing over there – is very much about the ideological misuse of imaginative literature in the service of nineteenth-century imperialism.
More (and older) thoughts from another instructor at a military academy, Lucretia Flammang, here: ‘We would not have a literature of modern war if warriors had not written it.’
And while we’re on the subject: last year US News and World Report named the US Military Academy at West Point and the US Naval Academy at Annapolis as the best public liberal arts colleges in the United States…
I’m as sceptical of the rankings game as you are, but I’m left wondering about the rhetorical effect of reports like this on an American public.
And all this certainly reminds us that the history of the humanities has been intimately entwined with the history of war in ways that transcend any simple (and usually noble) vision of the humanities representing and reflecting on human conflict (see, for example, Harvard’s Drew Fausthere). We know from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakand others some of the ways in which violence has been written in to the very constitution of the humanities, but it’s surely time to return to those questions and think, more concretely, about these martial Arts of ours…
If you think so too, then (to start the conversation) see Homi Bhabha speaking on The Humanities and the Anxiety of Violence earlier this year here.
Timing is tight – isn’t it always? – but if you are interested in applying for one of these PDFs to work with me please get in touch as soon as you can:
The UBC Geography Department welcomes applications for the Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, 2013-14. The Geography Postdoctoral Committee can nominate one candidate this year to enter the university-wide competition.
Once the Geography Department selects a nominee, an adjudication committee at the Faculty of Graduate Studies reviews the selected nominee files, over 40 each year, before making final decisions. The search is for candidates whose work is “beyond excellent and whose research is convincingly innovative and ground-breaking”. Postdoctoral applicants are selected based on “academic achievement, personal qualities, and demonstrated aptitudes”. Consideration is also given to the applicant’s proposed program of study.
The fellowships are awarded for a maximum of two years, subject to review at the end of the first year, and include a stipend of CAD $50,000 per annum and a travel and research allowance. The number of awards available across campus varies between three and five per year.
To apply, you must have the support of a faculty member supervisor within the UBC Geography Department. However, there is no need to submit a letter of support from the supervisor until the Geography Postdoctoral Committee requests it.
For information about eligibility, application forms and detailed instructions, see here.
Deadline: All necessary application materials must be received at the UBC Geography Department by Friday, October 26, 2012.
Advice: To stand any chance of success, publications and major conference presentations are a must; your post-doctoral research program should build on BUT NOT DUPLICATE your PhD research; and your referees need to write at length and in detail – not the all-too-common UK-style ‘obituary notices’ limited to information that is in your c.v.
The new term starts today, and while I’m determined to hang on to summer as long as I can – even as I feel it slipping between my fingers – there is something perfectly wonderful about starting a new year in September. When I was in Cambridge there was something even more wonderful about starting in October, but either way I much prefer it to January when most (I originally wrote “normal”) people have to start their year. At least it’s warm, even in Vancouver, there are still sunny days to linger over, the soft light is still there in the evening, and people are still relaxed enough to have time to talk.
I’ve been teaching full-time since I was 22, and honestly still enjoy it – particularly when I see the enthusiasm (mixed with trepidation) on the bright faces of new undergraduates and graduate students (I enjoy working with graduate students very much, but I prefer teaching undergraduate courses and, to be honest, I’m still unpersuaded of the value of graduate ones).
I’m teaching two third-year undergraduate courses this term, each one twice a week: Cities, space and power, which is a quirky historical geography of urbanization, and Theory and practice in human geography, which is an even quirkier attempt to combine what is usually (and I think mistakenly) taught separately, the history and the philosophy of human geography (what is sometimes called “Geographical Thought”: yuk). If you’re interested you can download the course outlines and readings under the TEACHING tab.
I don’t use textbooks for either. In fact I’ve never taught from one. I don’t see the point: if a textbook covered the same ground why would I need to lecture? I can see the need for reference books, not surprisingly, and in literature-based courses you obviously have to work with the texts. I know too that there are subjects where there is such a premium on learning “the facts” that a textbook is indispensable. I should say that my courses aren’t flights of fancy, but for me the trick is to show students that it’s about so much more than “the facts” – the crucial thing is what you do with all the information, the sense that “I never realised they were connected” or “I hadn’t seen it like that before”. That’s why the two of the most important things to learn at university – I’m serious – are reading and writing: the ability to read sensitively, constructively, critically, and the ability to write rather than cut and paste. And that’s not confined to courses in the Department of English.
No doubt all this is a hangover from my Cambridge days, when the formal teaching load was very light but you were expected to develop your own reflections, ideas and research not just parrot other peoples’. That teaching style seems to work just as well at UBC but, just as relevant, textbooks are inordinately expensive. Students are already shouldering enough debt – I find it quite shocking that so many graduates of my own generation, in the UK at least, who paid no fees and were eligible for grants of various kinds, should so readily impose burdens on young people that they never had to endure themselves. I’ve never been inspired by a textbook, but given the new ones pumped out each year by academic publishers I’m obviously in a minority.
This is all made more difficult than it should be by the absurdly large number of courses undergraduates are required to take in North American universities. Since so many of them are also working their way through college (I still stumble over calling it “school”), it’s often difficult for even the most dedicated to find time to read carefully and thoughtfully. The result is that, much of the time, they necessarily resort to “skim-memorise-repeat” – a practice facilitated by textbooks with their high school parade of boxes and quizzes – so that we end up instilling a culture of coping rather than nurturing a properly critical intellectual culture.
Things are no better when it comes to helping students learn to write. I grade my courses using a combination of written examination (essays not multiple choice) and term papers. One of the wonderful things about the highly privileged Cambridge system was that students wrote essays each week that were discussed in small groups (“supervisions”) with faculty or graduate students, and – since no marks were given – they were free to make mistakes, and to learn from them (and one another). It made learning a properly collaborative not competitive venture. And the supervisions were genuine occasions for experimentation: there was no centralised roster of topics, no approved reading lists, and our inquiries were set free from the constraints of any syllabus. But it was, and presumably remains, an intensive process, and the course-loads here ensure that faculty and students alike are constantly pressed for time.
Shoe Factory (Photo credit: stevegarfield)
I do understand that this is no different from the rest of the workaday world, but universities ought to be places where we also learn to slow down – not only to enjoy that soft, late summer light but to feel ourselves think. That’s increasingly difficult in the corporate university where, for all its slogans and marketing campaigns – UBC once had the truly dire “Think about it!” plastered on baseball caps – efficiency and effectiveness are measured by numbers. That in its turn is part of a comprehensive withdrawal of trust. Our contemporary audit culture places such a premium on accountancy – not the same thing as accountability – that everything must be tabulated and minuted. I’m sure that universities can learn from the commercial world, and vice versa, but we might try to learn the right things from the right companies while insisting that there are also vital respects in which a university isn’t a shoe factory.
Ah me: I started out saying how much I was looking forward to all this…..
News from Rob Kitchin of a treasure trove of postdocs and PhD positions at the National University of Ireland – Maynooth as part of his prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council:
