Claire Walkey from the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre writes about why we should rethink refugee registration. Registration is the first moment when asylum-seekers become known by the state, so we might assume that states will always want to implement registration procedures to monitor people. But her fieldwork in Kenya shows that this is not always the case as here the government actually stopped the registration procedures. According to her we therefore need to “look for answers in the meaning and politics of registration itself”, as registration can be a form of empowerment for refugees:
Fantastic lecture from Annemarie Mol “Where is my Body? Notes on Eating and Topology”. This lecture was organised by the Research Center of Social and Cultural Studies Mainz (SoCuM) as part of their yearly Georg Forster Lecture series. More excellent speakers have been invited of the years, and I’m curious to look at those lectures as well. A page with all the Georg Forster lectures can be found here. The following is the original abstract from the SoCuM website for the lecture:
Rachel Hewitt writes in 1843 Magazine on different reasons of why “running doesn’t offer women the freedom it should”. In her essays she writes about some of her own experiences why this is the case: from not feeling securing running at night, to clothes not being as well designed for women, and running races not taking into account different bodily needs. Read the full article here.
Reading an article on “Flexible Turtles and Elastic Octopi: Exploring Agile Practice in Knowledge Work”1, where the authors introduce the concept of elastic workers:
We label this form of flexibility as ‘elastic’ to account for the fact that these practices appear to be less a response to dynamic external conditions than a co-construction of external conditions with the internal disposition of the worker. To be elastic, in these terms, is to learn to find stability in dynamic circumstances beyond any one situation, perpetually.
Check out this stunnishing timelapse video directed by Hiroshi Kondo of the flow of motorbikes in the streets of Taiwan.
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Great day today with the Processing Citizenship team and Professor Kalpana Shankar where we discussed connections with her work on social science data archives and data curation practices. Afterwards she also gave a colloquium at our UTwente STePS department on “Data Work as Organizational Work: The Sustainability of Social Science Data Archives”.
Some nice recent articles from Courier International:
I’m always interested to learn about influences on culture and traditions that are otherwise taken for granted, or are considered “natural”. So I’m pleased to find out via Wikipedia about “The Pizza Effect” as one perspecive on such a phenomena:
Listening to a podcast from the BBC program In Our Time about Henri Bergon’s ideas on time. Some ideas I found noteworthy:
The Hyphen Labs collective is making brilliant projects at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Check out there work here