For scholars in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, it sometimes seems like hardly a day goes by without some kind of exhortation towards ‘interdisciplinarity’ – a trend that has only become more pronounced during the ongoing realignment of public higher education in many countries. ‘The humanities are being driven into defensive positions,’ wrote the vice-provost of University College London …
Tag Archives: Collaboration
Book review: Paul Rabinow’s The Accompaniment
The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary
by Paul Rabinow
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011
248 pp, US$21.00 paperback
From the start, I should note that I have never particularly liked the genre of the book review. They always read like the experience of going to a museum and listening to one of those guided audio tours—complete with headsets and portable …
On collaborating with journalists
Last spring I found myself in rural Alabama, sitting between an investigative journalist and a candid salesman I’ll call Sid, who was hawking used and potentially contaminated former FEMA trailers to those displaced by a series of tornados. These trailers had originally been issued by the federal government after Hurricane Katrina and were found to contain elevated levels of formaldehyde…
On Concept Work
The most recent edition of Cultural Anthropology is dedicated to Writing Culture as an episode in the history of anthropological thought. George Marcus (2012) provides one of two vistas of the relation of Writing Culture to experiments and experiences in anthropology today.
He writes in his abstract, “Fieldwork today requires a kind of collaborative concept work that …