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July 7th, 2009
 | 05:49 pm - Summer days
My advisor diagnosed me with an acute case of denial regarding my qualifying exams yesterday morning. It has been a major problem for me for a while now that I have been substituting enthusiasm regarding my dissertation topic for enthusiasm regarding the theories and methods of my field. Hence, frequent desires to leave academia for journalism, where getting the story is enough.
But with a fire lit under my ass by way of a directive to spend the week seriously thinking about what kind of scholar I want to be and what kind of scholars I want as my intellectual community, followed by the email delivery of a bibliography to my advisor at the beginning of next week, I am making progress.
What I think has lain under all of my various interests is a deep concern with American worship of technology--as source of identity, as way to create community, as solvent to all manner of ills. My advisor agreed that a qual paper that could be titled something like "Technology and Care in American Culture" would be a perfectly good, orienting kind of thing for me to do. And the best part is that I think I could actually get very into a topic like this, that it makes me smile to think that I would be an expert in this area...unlike a lot of things which people have suggested to me which make me feel sort of resigned and frustrated. The second qual paper, informed by the lessons of the first, will hopefully adapt earlier work I've done specifically on trauma or mental illness or something, but if not, then so be it. I have not yet been happy with one of those papers as I wrote them.
And so I have spent the past couple days reading through key texts and anthologies (David Nye's The American Technological Sublime; Lisa Rosner ed. The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems; S. Vaidhyanathan and Carolyn de la Pena eds. Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies so far). I expect to keep doing pretty much exactly this for the next month, with a bit of paid research for another prof thrown in for good measure. It's kind of exciting to have a whole month to hone my mind on one body of literature...without even having to write a 20 page paper in 3 days at the end of it (hopefully write the 20 pages little by little as I go). No trip plans, not even little ones, but hopefully time for lovely summer study breaks, preferably involving parks, art, bicycles, music, food, and hopefully friends.
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July 5th, 2009
| 08:28 pm - fireworks and the state
On September 1, 1753, the anniversary of the king's coronation, the city of Paris set off fireworks at the Pont-Royal. The display was not as spectacular as the fireworks celebrating the king's marriage, or as the legendary fireworks in honor of the dauphin's birth, but it was impressive nevertheless. They had mounted golden sunwheels on the masts of the ships. From the bridge itself so-called fire bulls spewed showers of burning stars into the river. And while from every side came the deafening roar of petards exploding and of firecrackers skipping across the cobblestones, rockets rose into the sky and painted white lilies against the black firmament. Thronging the bridge and the quays along both banks of the river, a crowd of many thousands accompanied the spectacle with ah's and oh's and even some "long live" 's--although the king had ascended his throne more than thirty-eight years before and the high point of his popularity was long since behind him. Fireworks can do that.--Perfume by Patrick Suskind, pp. 37-38
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June 26th, 2009
| 07:49 am - on italy, academia, and co-ops
Jetlag and anxiety are an evil combination.
The rest of the conference went pretty well. In spite of horrible jetlag which made it very difficult to continue taking notes past a certain point in each day, I did manage to record all of the talks that will be very useful for my research and took notes afterwards on all the useful informal conversations that I had with people during breaks.
On Tuesday evening ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ancientbrass came down from Switzerland and we spent Wednesday doing touristy things in the lovely Verbania region--including walking through the Villa Taranta botanical gardens and a ferry tour of several of the islands in Lago Maggiore.
Thursday i woke up at 5 am to i could catch the 1 hour shuttle to Malpensa/Milan airport, fly to JFK, then fly to SFO, take BART to Civic center, and then finally the bus to stellarbaby and Steve's apartment, 24 hours of travel. They fed me and gave me sherry and a futon to sleep on while telling me stories.
But for all this niceness, I am still freaking out. Meeting and introducing myself lots of people on this trip--therapists, engineers, researchers, social workers, and nurses at the conference, but also ancient brass, who is a musician and instrument-maker, and people on the airplanes, including a teacher, a model, and an MTV sales rep--brought me back to that old useless feeling.
I hate to admit this, but as fascinating as I find my academic work, I don't feel that it is my passion. Or at least, it doesn't fulfill me in the way that a passion should. I enjoy researching, reading, writing, teaching, but somehow, at least from where I stand, they aren't adding up in a satisfying way at the moment.
I have been asking myself what my dreams are and for several months I have not been able to remember. I always wanted to be a writer, and, I'm on a good path towards that. And yet, it's not enough. This morning, waking up stateside, I remembered that my most frequent dream since high school has been to manage a cooperative or other communal residence AND write. I think that this sort of interaction is what is really missing in my life: being able to make a meaningful contribution to the lives of people around me in an immediate way. I let the co-op dinner club that I organized all the year before slide away after many of my friends moved away, and rather than starting it up again this academic year, I got a boyfriend. But for me, a boyfriend is not an equal trade with a community.
I guess I've always known as a person that no one thing would ever satisfy me completely: my interests are too broad and undisciplined, my emotional needs too unstable and complex. Grad school has perhaps only made these problems more deeply entrenched. I like to imagine that if I'd only committed myself to something practical--being a therapist, a lawyer, a web designer, something respectable, skill-based, useful--I would be over these feelings, but I suspect that's not true. I suspect I'd still wonder about the other choices I could've made.
So I guess the good news is, maybe I don't need to start over, maybe I can continue to do what I'm doing and just supplement it with more of the things that I need, find ways to be useful to more people in ways that I care about.
I will come back to this later. As stupid as it feels to continue having existential crises on and off for a decade, going into my late 20s, as long as I remain productive at school, for now it can't hurt to spend some time every so often checking in with the anxiety, ask why it's still hanging around, and try to figure out what I might be able to do to appease it for a while.
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June 20th, 2009
| 08:27 pm - italia - note
just a quick note to say that i made it to my hostel in spite of a crazy thunderstorm soaking me all the way from the bus stop to the hostel, hidden on a hilltop through a passage of winding cobbled streets.
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so far
wednesday i arrived in milano malpensa airport, where i was picked up by my friend tommaso, and had a lovely stop at a roadside Auto Grill, which has food, coffee, and souvenirs. we had a lovely conversation about the shortcomings of semiotics during our long drive back to parma. tommaso's girlfriend ottavia made us risotto and then i look a nap while they and their friend gabriella smoked and talked in ottavias apartment on the edge of town. i got up for tea, but then crashed again. in the evening we went to a Movida, which is a street fest where they close the street, play music, serve food and drinks. they told me it was an effort to revitalize the older, working class part of town. we ran into many of their friends and i learned to drink spritz, which is sparkling white wine, soda, and an orange liqueur called aperol. we had pizza with ottavia's cousin tomas and his new wife, then walked to the Duomo, a big and very old church
thursday tommaso took me on a walking tour of parma, starting with his old place of work, the casa della musica, a sort of cultural center for music with a nice music library, then across the street to the new casa del suono, house of sound, where they were promoting an exhibit (though perhaps it is permanent?) of culture and technology, with gramophones, very early portable record players, a fascist radio (Radiorurale), a very early coin-operated music player, and other such treasures of communication technology. We grabbed a frozen cappuchino, then wandered, through markets and plazas, into a church called steccato and one across the street. amazing illusory ceilings, all the indulgence of the church in the what 17th century, i think. i was so in love with all the scooters and the bicycles--amsterdam style, like mine! all over town bleechers had been erected for town events, the upcoming concert by patti smith and the ongoing poesia festival. in the evening we went to vigheffio, which is a mental hospital farm in the countryside where young people from parma go to drink and mingle with the patients on lawn furniture. then we joined ottavia at her parent's place in a little town called Medesano where she is baking cookies for her new business.
Friday tommaso and i had a nice breakfast in parma then took the train to bologna. i bought a new outfit from some hippies at the montagnola outdoor market. we visited the sala barsa library, which is a very modern library with very interested architecture and educational projects that was once a stock exchange. i bought a tomato to eat plain from a vendor. we had gelato at the oldest gelateria in bologna, where i tasted white chocolate, strawberry, and a flavor called dolce emma which was honey and fig. we walked through a park where we watched people feeding turtles and catfish, then went back to montagnola where the hippies said their was a party. many, many people were gathered and we watched some parkour of sorts for a while, before catching a sleepy trainride back to parma.
today we went to the mall so i could buy an outlet adapter at MediaWorld (i think it was called that) helped ottavio with her cookies, then grabbed a pizza in tommaso's hometown of noceto (which translates to 'walnut wood'), which is famous for its rugby team. then i caught the train , first to milano, where i was totally convinced that i would miss my train or get on the wrong one or both, due to being given bad information in a kiosk, combined with getting a late start out of parma. but thankfully it all worked out and i had a lovely ride through northern italy, lush and european. and now i am warm in the hostel, having changed my clothes, borrowed needle and thread from the lovely lady paola at the desk in order to fix the gaping hole in my luggage.
my sleep was a total mess last night, my nerves were shot, to the point where i was ready to cry for need of cartharsis this afternoon. but i reminded myself to 'be here' and it helped immensely.
and now for some rest. tomorrow my first big adventure as an anthropologist of technology begins!
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June 6th, 2009
| 11:13 pm - Addicted to Love-Hunting
The following is a confession, though it is not exactly a secret. The fact that I have met men online for purposes romantic will not come as a shock to those who know me, though they may be a little surprised to learn just how extensive my involvement in this strange practice has been. Yes, friends, my search for love has been long, deliberate, disappointing, and largely virtual. I cannot bring myself to guess how many encounters there have been in total, but if you are so inclined you are welcome to keep tally as you read on. I write this story, at age 27, rather cynical about the whole thing, wishing I could replace the vast majority of these encounters with long walks alone, books read, or comics drawn—you know, experiences I could actually share with other people rather than shameful little rendezvous. I hope, at least, that they are amusing to an outsider.
( You might actually be in this story, but if so, then you're anonymous. Unless you are Alex, who is always an obvious character in my stories anyway. )
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June 3rd, 2009
| 12:33 am - i spent the weekend in seattle
I went to visit my last great unconsummated flame. I didn't tell anyone else in the city that I was coming up. I wanted to be able to give myself entirely to what might happen without the burden of obligations. Sometimes, I guess, you have to do these sorts of things because the crazy feeling of throwing yourself into them--the text messages, the emails, the late night phone conversations, the rashly bought plane tickets--are good distraction from the break up which is, of course, much, much more real.
( and here's how that went... )
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May 18th, 2009
| 11:38 pm - single is easier when you aren't alone
Wow. My friends have been amazing support providers. Within days of the break-up, I just had to stop moping, wondering "what now," because my single life was proving to be a lot more full of caring than I remembered it.
Thursday morning, freshly just-me-again-ed, I ran into my hippie friend Kaya on the shuttle, accompanied by a woman who I had known a bit on the periphery of my social circle before she moved back to the east coast at the end of last summer (Lauren). I made it through the shuttle ride without bringing up the break up, but as I dropped them off at the campus thrift store I finally admitted to what was shaking me inside. After hugs, they insisted I come to Kaya's co-op's weekly potluck dinner (which I tend to skip more than I attend). I made it through the day, several meetings and an interview. Had a nice long phone conversation with meemoo. At dinner time I headed to the co-op--called The Roost--where I had vegan food and a pep talk from Lauren. After helping Kaya take care of the backyard chickens, all potluck attendees piled into a couple cars to watch our friend Shani, an undergrad digital arts major, project a video art installation on an abandoned used car lot in City Heights. In spite of getting drive-by harassed as we discussed how unfortunate it is that schools aren't funded like the military, it was an overall refreshing outing that helped remind me that there are some really interesting people here doing really interesting things.
Friday was a work day. In the evening I found myself in an hour-plus video chat with the college housemate Diego who is finishing public policy school at an east coast Ivy. We talked about friendship, life, love. I hadn't videochatted with anyone other than my mother in a long time and it really was impressive to see how intimate it could be, to see someone's expression as you spoke--especially when doing something "deep," like summarizing their dating patterns you've observed over the past 8 years. After that, I picked up Chuk and Diana and went to a birthday party at the apartment of a couple of fairly new friends of ours. At first I was disgusted with some of the guests--cranky fuckers complaining about the undergrads (stupid, ugly, don't know how to have fun) and bitching about California as though La Jolla is in any way a stand-in for all of southern California. But fortunately some friends showed up, a couple wonderful strangers were met, and the punch was rather tasty. Chuk, Diana and I were some of the last guests, enjoying ourselves boozily with our hosts.
Saturday I went to Solano Beach with roommate Matt to attend a BBQ being held by a friend of his from his dept. I knew enough of the Poli Sci crowd not to feel awkward, but met enough new people to feel like I was having an adventure. The host also made me the best cut of espresso I have had in San Diego using one of them Italian stove-top thingies. I played fetch with his dachshund and watched a handful of surfers waiting for waves in the ocean behind the condo complex.
Sunday morning I walked to the tiny cafe hidden in my neighborhood, far from any thoroughfare, and enjoyed a bagel on the canyon-view back porch and read in the kind light of morning before the clouds burned off. I called my grandmother, who assured me that there were many fish in the sea, which I imagine was as much assurance for her as it was for me. In the afternoon, Diana and I biked to North Park to meet vandint for the arts and crafts festival. You know the kind: streets blocked off with stages, beer garden, local artists, food vendors. In San Diego lots of the artists seem to sell things with skulls on them. Between Mexican culture and motorcycle/hotrod culture, I guess it makes sense. I find it fairly awesome. We ran into some school friends, had slushies (lychee slush = delish), bought mexican trinkets. I admired blue-haired rollergirls and funny old hippies riding contraptions and almost-convincing transexuals, so happy to see this city's weird ones out and about. Afterwards Diana and I biked to cafe Filter and did school work on a couch, though I took a break to ask a friend who arrived there drunk for some advice on which writing program job I should take for next year.
So yeah. Things are pretty okay. If anything, I feel bad that I'm not mourning more, which I guess if a pretty good sign that things are going to be fine.
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May 16th, 2009
May 14th, 2009
| 12:22 am - broke
I'm thankful that I got to have seven months of a really good-hearted boyfriend. But it still hurts.
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May 1st, 2009
| 12:00 pm - on my skills as a teacher
After reading my TA evaluations, it seems that a lot of my students think I'm a tough grader (which they denote through a check box that says I am bad at giving consistent grades.) Also, I apparently don't give enough feedback. This makes sense, because I tend to give less feedback when I feel like a student didn't put a lot of effort into writing a paper, but of course, those with lower grades probably want more justification. It's also unfair of me to think equate careless-looking work with actually carelessness.
Other than that, I seem to deeply polarize people. A few said I was best TA they'd had at university, while others said the discussion section was a waste of their time. Some liked the variety of participatory exercises, others said they don't learn unless they're being lectured at. Some said I did a great job clarifying ideas from lecture, others said that section and lecture seemed to have nothing to do with one another. Some really appreciated the extra short assignments I gave as a chance to work on their writing and express opinions, others despised them as needless work. Some said I seem to genuinely care about my students and their writing, others said I was unapproachable and "almost mean."
Reading my evaluations reminded me of when I was in middle school. My mother is a science teacher at the same school. Sometimes students would come up to me in the hall to tell me what a bitch my mother was. Others would tell me about how much they loved her, that she really took interest in them, and that they learned a lot. At first I didn't quite knew what to think of her as a teacher, though I knew we didn't get along well as mother and daughter. But at some point I started asking people who told me that my mother was a bitch, "Do you do your homework? Do you care about the class?" and they usually said no.
Chuk once asked me, "As a TA, do you think it's better that your students like you or that they learn something?" I said, as you might suspect, that it was more important if they learned something. Chuk thinks the opposite. I would guess that my mother also cares more that they learn than if they like her. Neither she nor I is likely to throw around A's just to make people happy. Neither of us likes feeling manipulated or taking bullshit, but if she's like me, then we are both also willing to take a lot of time to help those who ask for it and who take responsibility for themselves. I've given tons of flexibility to students who notify me of problems in advance or soon after--giving extensions, make-up quizzing, excused absences, re-writes--but those who don't wait for a week or two tend to get nothing but an unpleased look. I should expect that the trade-off for expecting a lot of people is that those who don't conform get pissed.
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April 30th, 2009
| 01:43 pm - Just so you know
My current research is about the use of virtual reality in psychiatric therapy, with a focus on those for post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.
You wouldn't believe how ridiculous some of the literature on virtual reality is. Or trauma for that matter. I'm doing my best to gear my research such that I don't have to be directly answerable to either Terence McKenna or Freud.
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April 26th, 2009
| 07:34 pm - Weekend
Friday - Critical Mass, which was a near-perfect activity because 1) My schedule has made me miss most of my favorite non-campus activities for the past couple months (Dr. Sketchy's, bellydance class, and the Hillcrest farmer's market at the top of the list) and 2) I seriously need some exercise. Even if a sizable chunk of the riders are rowdies craptards on two wheels, the overall exhilaration that comes from biking to parts of town I'd never pedal to on my own makes it worth it. Though I was not entirely comfortable biking through the passenger un/loading zones in the airport, even if we didn't seem to upset much and the security guards seemed pretty amused. I also opted not to bike to the end of the Ocean Beach peer, as a few of my cycling compatriots did.
One special moment from the ride was as we were biking through Little Italy and two girls called out from a second-story window, "What's the event?" "Just riding!" I called back. "Awesome!!" they cried in unison. So f-ing cute.
Saturday - As if I hadn't gotten enough lovely urban time in, Ryan took me back to Little Italy Saturday afternoon for the annual Art Walk. We agreed that the art by people with Mexican last names was on average vastly superior to the art by basically everyone else. By this I mean that the Mexican art tended to be more experimental, but also more craftsmanly, while a lot of the other art seemed to be designed mostly to be unoffensive--portraits of fruit, impressionistic paintings of young women, shoreline landscapes. There were a few exceptions, of course, my favorite being the work of Duke Windsor. All the paintings he had on display were of streets and alleys in San Diego. As an urban wanderer, I was struck that this artist has chosen as his subject these banal, beautiful scenes that for me are what a city really feels like. Maybe this time I will get a painting instead of a tattoo to remember my home by.
(I don't think the jpg version really does it justice, but you get the picture, so to speak.)
The rest of the day I read in the park and at night I watched Southland Tales, a commentary on national security set in 2008 in an alternate universe Venice Beach by the director of Donnie Darko. I found the movie both kinda awesome and kinda way too much to deal with in one viewing, even as a plot-junkie with in an inordinately good ability to keep track of characters--of which this film had, perhaps, a few too many. Ryan, who was having trouble hearing, seeing, and understanding what the hell was going on, completely hated the movie. It also probably doesn't help that Richard Kelly planned the film to be parts 4-6 of a 6 part story, the first 3 parts of which are only available as graphic novels.
Sunday - Cleaned. Rearranged the plants on the back porch to try to get the just the right amount of light. Rearranged parts of my room to get my reading spot just the right amount of light. Biked to get groceries. Read a good chunk of Ann Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, which is the rare kind of book that makes me wish I was a journalist instead of an academic.
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April 19th, 2009
| 12:21 pm - twitch twitch
in the shower, had a great thought about how to restart the co-op book project this summer...
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April 17th, 2009
| 08:23 pm - another experiment
Grad school seems sometimes so right and sometimes so wrong. I'm nearing the end of my third year, and even though--in premise--I've been working on the same issue (innovations in PTSD treatment technologies for veterans) for 2 years now, it has only been over the past few months that I've been able to really start understanding theories in my field(s) and gained a feel for methodology well enough to even begin concretely thinking about research design. In some ways it makes me sick to think that I've been so fucking slow at this, even as I enjoy finally being able to see through the fog of the insane thought-collective that is my department.
I wonder, perhaps, if I didn't start hating social theory because I always could feel the weight of knowing that I understood so little. (And, you know, how god-awfully it can be written.)
My next mission is to qualify, which, for better or worse, for my advisor means writing up two big old literature reviews, rather than making anything publishable. I think she would rather her students just take the time to figure out what kind of scholars they are, and to get in a last push of "all that reading I've been wanting to do" before switching over to empirical work. Though, man, sometimes I'd really just like to start writing papers I could someday hope to see published. All in good time, I guess.
...
Today I presented a paper at Binacom, a transborder communication and media conference organized by the prof I do research for. It's not really my area, but I thought it would be neat to check out, practice giving a talk at something lowkey and local. I wrote the paper last year but hadn't done anything with it publicly until this event. It's on the Zapatista's anti-GMO movement and I thought that the insights of a Mexican audience would be interested. I don't know when I'll ever be able to do the ethnographic work in Chiapas that would actually be necessary to turn it into something publishable (especially since I'd need my subjects to sign IRB forms AND an Indian translator), but there were some interesting questions raised after my talk that helped me to better see the stakes of the project. Oh well. Part of it is about learning, after all. I also learned that the first time I present work I definitely need notes more detailed than my slides, because I get just a little too nervous without a safety net.
Other interesting moments were the screening of The Devil's Breath, a film about the families of 3 of the 11 people who died during the San Diego wildfires in 2007. I had no idea prior to seeing that film that at least 7 people are known to have died during the fires while trying to illegally cross the border. Laura Castaneda manages to tell the stories in a way that makes you rethink immigration without feeling preached to. I also heard Greg Nava, who directed Selena and El Norte, speak on being a mexican-american in Hollywood.
The Devil's Breath
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April 4th, 2009
| 07:16 pm - I Heart History of Technology
This instructional agricultural film on growing hemp made by the US gov't during WWII, was just posted on www.boingboing.net because, you know, it's funny to think that the gov't used to want people to grow weed (for economic benefit and industrious uses, of course).
Even as a former pothead, cultural studies/science and technology studies nerd that I am, of course the thing that really fascinates me about the film it glorifies new technology by visually and discursively comparing the strenuous labor of farming with hand tools to the ease and efficiently of farm machinery and assembly line factories. Nerdier than, that, of course, is that the whole thing really makes itch to write a paper on technological progress in visual rhetoric of war-era public film :P
Okay, yes, I am probably in the right department.
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March 29th, 2009
| 08:09 pm - tomorrow
Spring quarter of my third year of graduate school starts tomorrow. For some reason, I think my Springs are my best quarters in grad school. Even as I struggle to make sense of my research and of this strange career path that I've chosen, I am slowly starting to feel like I am getting the hang of this. Last Spring I wrote my two favorite papers of grad school. This Spring I hope to start a qualifying paper. Finally having realized that I am in serious need of guidance from someone with similar academic interests and that my semi-monthly meetings with my advisor--who is in Stanford for the year at a posh institute, living out an academic dream life--is simply not cutting it, I have enlisted the help of the junior faculty who is the only person in the dept who does Science Studies and Social Force--as opposed to Culture or Human Interaction.
At the same time, I'm going to take my first real ethnographic methods class and sit in on a long-awaited course on science in the public arena. While continuing to be a research assistant for a project on health news and grading papers for a course on advertising in society. It's a little too much of good things, but I'm pretty excited for it, if nervous. My summer is going to be long and mostly solitary, as the boyfriend will be driving across Europe and Asia for much of it, so taking I might as well get as much out of school as possible. I dearly want to figure out how to be good at this, even if many grad students I meet make me suspicious about whether or not such a desire is even reasonable.
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March 15th, 2009
March 9th, 2009
| 11:30 am - Facts and Ideology
It was announced this morning that the Obama administration will be lifting the ban on stem cell research. While I'm deeply ambivalent about stem cell research as a technology that further commodifies some human bodies in the pursuit of capital-intensive treatments for the wealthy few who could afford them, what is equally disturbing to me in the repeated assertion that the Obama administration is going to “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.”
Even if I do not agree with the pro-life (read: anti-abortion) ideology that that led the Bush administration to ban stem cell research using new cell lines, I think that it was entirely appropriate in this case for that office to admit that the decision of a nation to allow certain kind of research on certain kinds of bodies--bodies that it may even see as citizens--is a question of the application of values that no scientific fact can direct. Obama's administration needs to recognize that the decision to see embryos as viable objects/subjects of scientific study is an ideological decision; how we defy where life begins, as well as where citizenship begins, and what protections our government should afford us as citizens is not something that can be scientifically defined. Yes, science can tell us when a fertilized embryo is implanted in the womb, when fetal hearts begin beating independently, when brains reach various developmental stages, but none of this information tells us when sex cells become people. This is only information that we can use in making our decisions about personhood. The choices we make and what we choose to do with them are every bit ideological, no matter how well informed by scientific study and accepted facts.
At this stage, stem cell research has produced no practical benefits while it has attracted copious research funding and the creation of several research centers at universities in New Jersey, Wisconsin, UC Irvine, Pittsburgh, and others. What stem cell research offers is hope: hope for cures, hope for funding, hope for Nobel prizes, hope for new patentable biotechnological projects. But what it does not, and cannot offer, are facts that can direct us in our science policy. To ignore the copious and varied interests that are hedging their bets on stem cell research and suggest that stem cell research should be done for the sake of science is to express a profound ignorance is the cultural, economic, and political contexts in which all science takes place. The desire for scientific progress is a reflection of ideology, as are the desire for technological superiority (or at least competitiveness with other nations) and economic benefits that follows from it. To relegation of embryos to mere biological materials is a reflection of an ideology that makes clear distinctions between alive/not alive, human materials/human beings, objects of research/subjects of research, potential babies/potential products.
Again, I'm not arguing that Obama's decision to allow stem cell research is wrong or amoral--only that we must always be wary of the danger of believing that our decisions are not based on ideology. As our science and technology becomes very more capable of changing every material aspect of human living, it is increasingly the burden of our policy makers to evaluate lines of knowledge-making to ensure that they reflect our values as a nation. Who would argue that new technologies for mind control or torture should be protected because of scientific fact? What would that even mean? Being created through science, being the product of scientific fact-finding, does not in itself warrant the legitimacy of any research program, especially a publicly funded one in a (more or less) democratic society.
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March 2nd, 2009
| 08:38 pm - Weekend in La la Land
Thursday night the boyfriend and I drove up to LA. The trip was a nice dovetailing of meeting professional, social, and familial needs.
Friday morning I tagged along as the PI of the research center that I hope to be the focus of my dissertation showed off the technologies currently in the pipeline to a corporate partner and colleague. So far so good. The PI seemed pretty amenable to me doing dissertation work there, though it was unclear if he understood exactly what participant observation is.
After a diner visit and a nap, I joined the boyfriend and his family for the big old benefit concert for arts education that his father had helped organize for the affluent suburban school district they live in. I have a better understanding now of how such schools get the resources they do, as the concert--who's musical genre I can only describe as "yacht rock"--raised some $115k. Members of various high school bands played on stage alongside such notables as Michael MacDonald (of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan), Christopher Cross (remember the song "Sailing"?), Tommy Shaw (of Styx), and something called Venice. Boyfriend's father was very proud.
Saturday we headed down to LA for an epic day of play. We had dim sum breakfast in Chinatown with a friend I know through G. It was the first time we'd seen one other since nabbing our respective significant others, which was especially awesome since we used to relate quite a bit through out mutual loneliness. huzzah.
Next boyfriend and I drove to Melrose for punky shopping. He bought me an awesome shell ring at Necromance, a store full of amazing dead things, images of dead things, and other evidence of life not present. I picked a rad hippie goth skirt and little brown and black patchwork leather purse at a semi-vintage shop called Slow. Melrose struck me for a couple reasons: first, there were, like, no cafes on the street, just lots and lots of variants on fashion and vintage fashion. Trying to find a place where I could just get something to drink without feeling bad for taking up a table was an ordeal. Second, several of the funky shops otherwise filled with things like pinstripes shirts with tribal embroidery on the back featured these bizarre long velvet Victorian-style coat, complete with buttons down the wide lapels. I'm really curious if anyone expects this fad to catch on, but based on watching a Russian guy trying to talk down a Korean shopkeeper from a $540 price tag, I think there's a long way to go before the coats reach the masses.
Then we went to ROLLER DERBY at the Dollhouse, the LA Rollergirls' amazing warehouse stadium for their banked ring. It was so rad. The ring itself was pretty amazing, with a really nice sound system, 4 LCD scoreboards with swanky graphics, and a discoball rollerskate above the rink. Other spaces were great too. There was a little vendor fair with plenty of handmade clothes, cookies, and jewelry, and even a built in shop for customizing blazers with silkscreen and such. Apparently there are many celebrity sightings at this location: I heard Henry Winkler was in the audience, and I definitely saw Captain Mal from Firefly a few times. Best of all, the San Diego Rollergirl Banked-track Team, the Swarm, totally kicked LA's Varsity Brawler's asses. (Something like 100 to 51).
And as if that wasn't enough, afterwards we met up with my good buddy from middle school through high school at a really neat German pub called the Red Lion Tavern in Silverlake. I hadn't seen him since July and since then he's gone from being the gopher at a small video game company to one of its designers. Yay for working your way up in the world!
The pub itself, as I said, was really neat with a pianoman, wood panelling, something like 4 separate bars, an outdoor upstairs seating area shaded by big trees, booths, German fare, and cute indie rock chick-fraulein hybrid waitresses.
Saturday morning we had super delicious late brunch with boyfriend's brother and mother at a delicious little creative American food joint called Cici's, which I think was somewhere in the Valley.
From there it was back south for us, to the lab, the books, the reality of our lives in San Diego.
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February 25th, 2009
| 08:45 am - Science under Obama
Care of my friend Kate:
Politics in the Guise of Pure Science
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: February 23, 2009
Why, since President Obama promised to “restore science to its rightful place” in Washington, do some things feel not quite right?
First there was Steven Chu, the physicist and new energy secretary, warning The Los Angeles Times that climate change could make water so scarce by century’s end that “there’s no more agriculture in California” and no way to keep the state’s cities going, either.
Then there was the hearing in the Senate to confirm another physicist, John Holdren, to be the president’s science adviser. Dr. Holdren was asked about some of his gloomy neo-Malthusian warnings in the past, like his calculation in the 1980s that famines due to climate change could leave a billion people dead by 2020. Did he still believe that?
“I think it is unlikely to happen,” Dr. Holdren told the senators, but he insisted that it was still “a possibility” that “we should work energetically to avoid.”
Well, I suppose it never hurts to go on the record in opposition to a billion imaginary deaths. But I have a more immediate concern: Will Mr. Obama’s scientific counselors give him realistic plans for dealing with global warming and other threats? To borrow a term from Roger Pielke Jr.: Can these scientists be honest brokers?
Dr. Pielke, a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, is the author of “The Honest Broker,” a book arguing that most scientists are fundamentally mistaken about their role in political debates. As a result, he says, they’re jeopardizing their credibility while impeding solutions to problems like global warming.
(click to read more)
In his very popular book The Republican War on Science (2005) Chris Mooney outlined a number of areas of research that were being either funded for political reasons (e.g. the ostensible link between breast cancer and abortion) or thrown out of policy-making as "junk science" based on models rather than "sound science" based on hard empirical evidence, which in cases like the question of human-caused global warming/climate change is difficult to come by. Tierney's article/Pielke's book is a good reminder that the science that justifies a political plan of action we would like doesn't necessarily fit the world any better for it.
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