Donna Haraway’s “Critters”

Still from Fabrizio Terranova’s ‘Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival’ (2016)

I’ve finally been reading bits and pieces of Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which, I’ve been doing as part of a larger project to imagine the end of policing.

I had been meaning to do this for a while, but I was recently inspired her performance as discussant at a double panel at the American Anthropological Association Meetings I was a part of, honoring Aihwa Ong.  There were many wonderful moments there (one tidbit: Haraway, who became mega-famous for her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” declared that “Aihwa taught me more about cyborgs than anyone else.”  She was especially inspired by the complex entanglements of women and machinery in Ong’s first book, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline) but it was actually one word that she kept using that stuck with me: critter.

[Extended Deadline] CFP: Bureaucracy as Practical Ethics: attending to moments of ethical problematization through ethnography

Panel to be submitted for the American Ethnological Society & Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Spring Meeting Chicago, Illinois April 11-13, 2013

A significant strain of scholarship on the anthropology of ethics suggests that, since the Enlightenment, ethical thought in the West has been reduced to sheer will to power. A key point of evidence for this claim has been the reliance on bureaucratic forms of administration, which are highlighted as examples of alienating “anti-politics” machines of indifference. This panel hopes to challenge that broad understanding of the role of ethical thought within the contemporary world by using sensitive ethnographic accounts of bureaucratic praxis to explore how ethical challenges are confronted across a variety of contexts. The goal is to use these accounts in order to open up a conversation in which anthropologists might more adequately attend to moments of ethical problematization; moments that offer concrete opportunity for ethical refiguration and, therefore, ethical thought within contemporary political forms.

If you are interested in participating in the panel, please email a proposed paper title and abstract of no more than 250 words to Dr. Kevin Karpiak (kkarpiak@emich.edu) by Tuesday, January 22^nd.

[Update: Since the deadline to submit panel proposals has been moved back, I’ve decided to extend this as well: paper abstracts should now be submitted by Wednesday, February 13th.]

Conference: XIst Colloquium for Police History (University of Cologne, July 14th-17th, 2010) (via Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing)

Next week I’ll be heading off to Germany for a conference on Police History at the University of Cologne. You can read more about it over at Anthropoliteia…

Thought I’d circulate the info for a conference I’m very excited about attending next week, being sponsored by the University of Cologne, Germany.  You can check out the flyer as a pdf here, or you can see the full schedule below. I’d love to say a bit more about it now, but I’m furiously reworking my own talk after re-reading Security, Territory, Population.  I’ll try to report back on the conference later, though, as I’m sure it will be of curr … Read More

via Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing

Conference: XIst Colloquium for Police History (University of Cologne, July 14th-17th, 2010)

Next week I’ll be heading off to Germany for a conference on Police History at the University of Cologne.   You can read more about it over at Anthropoliteia, or through the clipped segment below

Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder: Implications for Diagnosis and Treatment – 2010 Conference

FPR-UCLA Fourth Interdisciplinary Conference

Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder

Implications for Diagnosis and Treatment

January 22-24, 2010

Friday – Sunday

University of California, Los Angeles

Our concept of mental illness in the West is largely shaped by the DSM diagnostic model. The DSM categorization of psychiatric disorders has been useful in driving research, and psychiatric neuroscience has made enormous strides in identifying some of the brain-based factors that contribute to mental disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, as well as suggesting possible drug therapies. However, both neuroscientists and anthropologists have raised questions about the validity and utility of these categories. Neuroscientists are concerned that the categories obfuscate the key brain-behavior linkages underlying pathological processes. Anthropologists on the other hand argue that the categories are largely social constructions and that the current neurobiological zeitgeist minimally attends to social and cultural processes of mental illness. Much still remains unknown, particularly how the social and cultural worlds interact with neurobiological processes to produce mental symptoms that we recognize as depression or psychosis in everyday life and what this interaction implies for diagnosis and treatment.

The aim of this conference is to improve the quality of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment by giving specific attention to biological and cultural contexts and their interactions. Given the abundant criticism directed to both the biological and cultural validity of current DSM diagnostic categories, the focus is particularly important and timely. Revisions to the DSM are now underway that attempt to incorporate divergent cross-cultural aspects of mental illness, as well as underlying neurobiological factors common to different disorders. Both areas will be addressed at the conference in presentations and panel discussions.

via Cultural and Biological Contexts of Psychiatric Disorder: Implications for Diagnosis and Treatment – 2010 Conference.

Transatlantic Perspectives on the Local Pursuit of Intelligence at UIUC

Here’s the program for a conference on policing immigrant communities that I’ll be participating in at UIUC.  The text here’s via Legal Theory Blog, but you can also find it at ESQ Blog.me:

“Transatlantic Perspectives on the Local Pursuit of Intelligence”

April 2-3, 2009

University of Illinois College of Law

Conference Organizers: Jacqueline Ross, University of Illinois College of Law, and Thierry Delpeuch, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique

Jointly sponsored by the University of Illinois College of Law; the University of Illinois College of Law’s Program in Criminal Law and Procedure; The University of Illinois Police Training Institute; the University of Illinois European Union Center; the United States Embassy in France; the Ministry of the Interior of France (Délégation à la prospective et à la stratégie); the Agence Nationale de Recherche; and France’s Centre National de Recherche Scientifique

Center for South Asia Studies: Violence and Creativity Workshop (Update)

An update on the Conference/Workshop I’ll be participating in this Saturday. You can see the full program here.  Or, see the info after the break:

Conference: Violence and Creativity (and the Police Nationale)

Next Saturday (March 7th) I’m going to be giving the first in a trilogy of papers this month on the role of the Police Nationale in French banlieue riots of 2005 and 2008.  The overall goal is to finally have an article ready to go, in the end.

The paper on Saturday is entitled “Electric Burns: governmentality and its discontents in the French banlieue riots”.  The title of the conference is “Violence & Creativity” (see abstracts for both after the break).  It’s sposored by UC Berkeley‘s Center for South Asian Studies and it will be held at International House in Berkeley between 10m and 4pm.  The headliner is Ashis Nandy, who was recent named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world.