BookWars « Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing

Jeff and I have been talking about ways to include discussions of pedagogy on Anthropoliteia, so I thought I’d give a shout out to a neat little documentary I came across recently (actually it was recommended to me by Gary Handman, the Director of the Media Resources Library here at Berkeley). The movie is called BookWars.

via Anthropoliteia

Critical (Bio)security

The weight of a summer course, cross-country move and the need to expand the “Publications” portion of my CV is upon me, but even still I’m working towards formulating a more or less coherent instigation for an anthropology of liberalism (look for that, probably via On the Assembly of Things in the upcoming week or so).  Until then:

Paul Rabinow of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, discussed the potential risks of insufficient public dialogue in more specific terms.

“Given the access to this material through the internet, there are unquestionably going to be accidents and malicious uses. That’s a given,” he said.

“But then what? What is the reaction to that going to be? Shut down biology? That’s what Dick Cheney would have done. I don’t think the biology community is prepared with answers to that question yet. But they need to be.”

via The Great Beyond: ‘Shiny happy biology’. (subscription required)

New Course: Writing Police Power

On Monday I’ll start teaching my last course here at Berkeley.  It’s a reading and composition course–so its main goal is to teach first and second-year undergraduates the skills necessary for reading, writing and doing research at the college level–but within that overall goal individual instructors get a huge amount of leeway in picking the course theme.

My course will be “Writing Police Power” and I’m pretty excited by it.  You can see a copy of the syllabus here.  the basic premise of the course is that writing about police, across a variety of genres (including urban ethnography), is a way of writing about power.  This is also the thesis of an article I’ve written, currently under review by PoLAR, but the main point for the students here is to get how different representational strategies couch within theme theories of power–a skill they’ll need if they’re going to be critical readers of ethnographic texts for upper division courses.

Since this is a super-condensed summer course I decided to cut out more of the examples from critical theory (Althusser on interpollation, Lacan on the Purloined Letter, etc.) than I’d ideally like, but I do hope it goes well.  Any comments would be awesome, however…