Links to other conversations
EVENTS
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
March 2013
"Tales of Tomorrow," Connie Samaras' solo show at the Armory, opens March 2. Samaras' work over 3 decades has framed the city and nature through historically-nuanced critiques of empire, capital, gender, globalization. See this Difference Engines blogpost for more about her work: http://www.differenceengines.com/?p=204
April 2013
The American Association of Geographers meets in Los Angeles this year, April 9 - 13. Daniel Cohen has organized a panel on the future city; more details here
The Eaton Conference honours Ursula Leguin this year, Riverside, CA, April 12 - 14. Kavita Philip, Ward Smith, Geeta Patel, Anil Menon and others are presenting papers on "global SF."
UC Irvine will host a panel on global SF with physicist and Locus award-winning fiction writer Vandana Singh, and her co-conspirator, software engineer and fiction writer Anil Menon.
November 2013
The Feminist Technology Network (FemTechNet) is applying for an artist & scholars' exchange grant, to enable the travel of creative professionals between LA and the world. PIs (Alexandra Juhasz and Kavita Philip) plan to host people from Bangalore and Bogotá.
EXTENDED TANGENTS
FUTUROLOGY
Institutional Sites The Univ of Hawai'i at Manoa has a famous institute for Futures Studies. Debora Halbert does some good activist/feminist stuff there. An overview of the field IN THIS PDF [1]
The Institute for Alternative Futures makes this into a money-spinning consultancy gig! I can't quite figure out the politics of how this kind of pro-poor work actually functions: [2]
SF and Future Thinking The SF-encyclopaedia has a page on Futures Studies. It's not very well footnoted, but it makes useful links, pointing to the often-conservative politics of future-oriented thinking (from Thomas Malthus to Donella Meadows), and linking it to Science Fiction, as well as to a military-industrial-imperialist set of political concerns [3]
SF and critical theory Here SF stands not only for science fiction but for the broader term "speculative fiction" as well. Few other than literary critics have picked up on Deleuze's famous claim that theory IS sf
HAUNTS
Haunting may be thought of as related to futurology. If one doesn't privilege a time line from origin to infinity, then one might think of haunting as happening in any direction. Ghosts of the future haunt the present and shape our selective readings of the past, just as much as the more conventional story about past ghosts haunting the present. And nostalgia (though it is a longing for the past) is a form of future-thinking (in the sense that it shapes our desire for certain kinds of futures, similar to a selective shaping of our pasts - as, for example, in the mythical notion of the 1950s that the US Republicans evoked as being lost in the 2012 elections and Obama's version of the future). Here's a film that draws together urban labour politics and technological infrastructure (the Bangalore Metro) through the metaphor of ghosts: Behind The Tin Sheets [4] Also see this work from Latin America [[5]]
JNNURM, NREGA, and other development projects in Modern India
Leo saldanha on the politics of co-optation in development projects: [6]
OPEN SOURCE
Open Source Education [7]
Open Source Design
If The Economist is onto it, you know it's mainstream now! And no surprises, they want to figure out how to profit:
"The big question is how to profit from all of this fevered making. Does open-source design risk breaking the link between intellectual property and value, and doing to designers what the internet did to music and journalism? http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/11/open-source-design?fb_ref=activity
SOPA
I'm looking for good close readings of the Stop Online Piracy Act. I'd like to figure out SOPA through an analysis of its legal discourse + critical close reading. Any suggestions?
