Chasing Dragons

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 62

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The Unwanted' a graphic novel by Joe Sacco at guardian.co.uk

• '40 Things You Need to Know About the Next 40 Years' at smithsonian.mag.com (I, for one, welcome the rule of our new jellyfish overlords...)-->thanks to openculture.com for the link!

• 'The Consultant was a Spy' by Shane Harris at washingtonian.com -->thanks to boingboing.net for the link!

• 'Humanitarian Design vs. Design Imperialism: Debate Summary' by the Editors at designobserver.com (a really good digest of the online debate about humanitarian design and whether it is a form of imperialism)

• And just in case you've ever wondered what the Earth might look like if it stopped rotating, you can find answers at popsci.com

Photo credit: Sunshine Junior

Mickey Mouse Just Said 'Yes' To Drugs and Racism in 1951

Mickey Mouse just says 'yes' to speed and racism in this 1951 comic strip entitled 'Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man', available here.

The glorification of amphetamine use is certainly a change of pace from the strong anti-drug messages portrayed in contemporary children's media. However, I would argue that the racism is shocking not because of its message but rather because of its form. 

As the Guardian reported on 30 June, 2010 in an article entitled 'Lower IQs found in disease-rife countries', it would appear that the notion that 'natives' are stupid and lazy is an enduring stereotype nearly seven decades on. The difference is that rather then being casually asserted, it  now relies on pseudo-science and neo-Lamarkianism to provide rhetorical force and validation. It would appear therefore that the cultural production of racism may be returning to its nineteenth century eugenic roots...

Plus ca change, plus ce la meme chose?

Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of Everyday Life

Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of Everyday Life is a collaborative multi-media piece created by Caren Kaplan, Erik Loyer, and Ezra Clayton Daniels. Through a series of vignettes, it explores the ways that dual use technologies like GPS are used in military and civilian spheres and how these technologies increasingly blur the distinction between these spheres. As she argues:

• the circulation of GPS between military and civilian use is instructive if we want to understand better the ways in which government and business cooperate not only to make war but to create consumers. Most importantly, in this way, people who have no particular interest in military projects or nationalism may find themselves through their use of technology in everyday life participating in the culture of war: through ways of seeing, forms of entertainment, and modes of communication.

The argument is provocative and compelling. And what I particularly like is that Kaplan is able to demonstrate a nuance put forward by David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro more broadly with respect to visual cultures. That is, rather than getting stuck in an 'either-or' understanding of technologies like GPS, it is important to understand how they underpin contemporary military practices while potentially offering a means of critically engaging with them.

Moreover, the format is engaging and accessible to an extent that traditional methods of presenting arguments are not. Thus,  Precision Targets is also a catalyst for people like myself to think about how we go about presenting our research and the sorts of platforms that might convey our messages better than traditional publishing outlets.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 57

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Barcelona Rebels Against Tourist Invasion' by Giles Tremlett at guardian.co.uk

• 'The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord, and the Israeli Defence Force' by Eyal Weizman at mutemagazine

• 'Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Killings: Special Report on Targeted Killings' by Philip Alston at the United Nations Human Rights Council

• 'Ten Things that Terrify Right-Wingers' by Joshua Holland at truthout.org

• 'Is NATO to Blame for Russia's Afghan Heroin Problem' by Simon Shuster at time.com

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: bitzcelt

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 56

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Of Drone Wars and Buffalo Urine' by Conn Hallinan at fpif.org

• 'The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment' by Peter Beinart at the New York Review of Books

• 'The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment: An Exchange' at the New York Review of Books

• 'Don't Replace Child Detention with Enforced Separation' by Simon Parker at guardian.co.uk

• 'Canada Unveils Arsenal for Anti-G20 Protests' by Pav Jordan at reuters.com

• 'State Sponsored Stupidity, and Why Dissent Still Has to be Chaotic' by Hariman at nocaptionneeded.com

Photo credit: Gaensler

Newcastle University Launches World Politics and Popular Culture MA Degree

I am pleased to announce that Politics at Newcastle University will be launching a new MA degree in World Politics and Popular Culture for the 2010-11 academic year. Here is the course description:

• World Politics and Popular Culture is a distinctive interdisciplinary degree programme that examines the changing dynamics of contemporary international relations in the context of the politics of the various forces shaping and shaped by popular culture. The programme focuses on key theories, policies, and events in world politics in relation to both traditional and new media. You will learn not only how to think critically about how world politics is reflected or reproduced in popular culture, but also how the politics of popular culture shape the dynamics of world politics...

The programme entails three core modules in Politics (World Politics and Popular Culture, Theories and Approaches to the Study of Politics, and a Dissertation in World Politics and Popular Culture) with 4 optional modules that can be taken from politics, cultural studies, media studies, and film.

Admission requirements are an undergraduate degree from an accredited university with at least a 2.i result--the rough equivalent in North American systems would be a B average.

Please note that 'other qualifications or relevant professional experience may also satisfy the entrance requirements. Applicants whose first language is not English require IELTS 6.5, TOEFL 575 (paper-based) or 233 (computer-based), or equivalent.'

Information on how to apply can be found here. There is no formal deadline--apart from the start of classes at the end of September--but if you are applying from overseas, securing a student visa can take several weeks depending on your circumstances.

If you'd like to talk to someone to find out more about the World Politics and Popular Culture MA, you can contact  Matt Davies, whose tremendous efforts and vision saw this through from design to implementation.

I'm also happy to field any inquiries that you may have about the programme or pursuing a MA in politics in the UK.

Disclaimer: If there are any differences between information provided here and that contained on official Newcastle University web-pages, the latter should be viewed as the authoritative source.

Collage and photo credit: DerrickT (work displayed under a Creative Commons attribution license)

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 55

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Surveillance Suspected as Spacecraft's Main Role' by William J. Broad at nytimes.com

• 'Killer Entertainments' by Jennifer Terry at vectorsjournal.org

• 'Obama's Missing Moral Narrative' by George Lakoff at truthout.org

• 'Bourgeois Property-based Rights and their Exclusions' at Lenin's Tomb

• 'And so Cameron's First Victims Are...' by Johann Hari at johannhari.com

• 'Jamaica Bleeds for Our "War on Drugs"' by Ben Bowling at guardian.co.uk

For those stateside or in the UK, enjoy the long / bank holiday weekend!

Photo credit: atomicshark

What Makes Political Campaigns Go Viral? Five Lessons from the Founder of MyDavidCameron.com

Clifford Singer, founder of Bubblewrapped, the Other TaxPayers' Alliance, and MyDavidCameron.com has published a concise audit of the factors that made some of these endeavors successful and others--in the words of Borat-- not so much.

With on-line political campaigns that rely on 'word-of-mouth' for promotion, social networking for distribution, and crowd-sourcing for content becoming more common, he provides an interesting set of observations about the positives and negatives of this nascent form of political activism. You can read his comments here.

The unanswered question for me is what kind of effect do these campaigns have on election outcomes? Do they amplify lingering suspicions in the minds of the doubtful? Do they convert the potentially convertible? Or, are they a means of promoting group solidarity in situations where mainstream forms of media are largely under the control of opposing political forces? 

But this also raises the issue of whether immediate electoral results should be the litmus test of success for these kinds of campaigns? Might it be that the power of something like MyDavidCameron.com derives from the ability to contribute to the process of repositioning the terms of political discourse during the Con-Dem reign so that privilege, class, and structural inequality are once again recognized as problems facing the United Kingdom? Time will only tell...

Image credits: David Rosenberg and Ian Cuthbert at MyDavidCameron.com

Good-Bye Mr. Brown: Visual Resignation

  

I find photographs of Gordon Brown incredibly interesting because they often seem to capture a pathos that many public figures work incredibly hard to conceal. Nowhere has Brown's pathos been clearer than during yesterday's resignation speech, a poignant twist in the ongoing election drama.

No doubt this was a hard decision for him to make. Admitting defeat is always difficult when you've fought for something you believe in. But beyond the difficulty of articulating defeat, he would have also been aware that with most of the media establishment against him, members of the press would see this act as a final opportunity for a public humiliation. Yet in the photos above and directly below, you have images of a confident and dignified Brown seizing the moment. At the same time, the poisoned chalice of #10 looms behind him, with the number bearing weight on his left shoulder in the first image and dwarfing him as an obelisk in the second. The signal is somewhat ambivalent: is it that being Prime Minister was a burden upon the back of Gordon Brown or that no person is bigger than the office of the Prime Minister?

It is these visual contradictions that I find so fascinating.  In a previous post some weeks back, I remarked that Gordon Brown when photographed conveys a remarkable level of vulnerability. In my eyes at least, it is his vulnerability and awkwardness that makes him appear more human and common--in the very best sense of the word--than other political leaders.

This inner turmoil surfaces quite clearly in the photo above. And this time, we see a man who is enveloped in darkness, a lonely and solitaire figure trying to figure out why the reward for boldly preventing a global financial meltdown--at a time when no one else was prepared to do so--has been vilification, unpopularity, and abandonment by the very people he helped.

But perhaps the most iconic image from yesterday--and one that has been picked up as the lead photo by several newspapers--is of Gordon Brown retreating from the press scrum. Again, the ambiguity of #10 looms large in this photo: is it his sanctuary or his tomb? More importantly, the image is of Gordon Brown turning his back on a press, a party, and a public that had turned on him. And the message is clear: you won't have Gordon Brown to kick around anymore.

Photo credits: Getty Images and David Levene

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 52

Wow what a week! This weekend in the reading roundup, an amuse bouche from the election musings:

• 'Scholarly Communications and the Long Tail of Knowledge' by Gideon Burton at academicevoultion.com (a part of his series on scholarly communication)

• 'Times Square, Bombs, and Big Crowds' a New York Times 'Room For Debate' presentation

• 'Drones Kill Low-Level Militants, Few Civilians: US' by Adam Entous at reuters.com

• 'Picasso's Politics' by Alex Danchev at guardian.co.uk

Have a good weekend!

Photo credit: Doha Sam