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When Species Meet — Chapters 3 and 4

By ~LS~ On July 26, 2008 · 1 Comment · In Rhetoric and tagged Tagged With: Haraway, Pets, Rhetoric, Science, Technoculture

I don’t really have much commentary on Chapter 4. I saw it as a case study in science studies and caring for animals situated within breeding pedigree dogs. Maybe I’m missing something. As for Chapter 3, I struggled with this chapter more than with other chapters. So first I’m gonna spin out what I got from the chapter (without the nuances, which would add years to this process).

Chapter 3

The chapter is about how we deal ethically with other non-human species, specifically lab animals. “Instrumental action with animals is not the enemy” – sometimes we have to have lab animals. This puts her on very dangerous territory with PETA and animal rights activists, as she says. The crux of this chapter IMO is how to construct a rationale for her position that fits within what is ethical or conscionable to her. Given what she has written thus far about [...]

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David Harvey, Marx, Haraway

By ~LS~ On July 25, 2008 · Add Comment · In Rhetoric and tagged Tagged With: Capitalism, Haraway, Rhetoric, Technoculture

Yesterday I found the greatest link to DavidHarvey.org. David Harvey is a professor of Geography at CUNY. He’s a marxist, and a prolific writer (ten books), including one I read called _The Condition of Postmodernity_, and he’s wicked smart. Every year for the past…who knows how many years, he teaches a course that is a close reading of VOl. I of _Capital_. Last year, someone recorded his lectures on 13 videos and now you can see them on his website. I spent two hours today listening to the introduction to the class, which covered a close reading of the first six pages of the book. I took five typed pages of notes. Mostly what Harvey discussed was how to read Marx, using the first section of Chapter 1 as a model. He emphasized repeatedly the dynamism involved in reading Marx’s notion of the commodity as a dialectic of [...]

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Haraway – When Species Meet

By ~LS~ On July 14, 2008 · 1 Comment · In Rhetoric and tagged Tagged With: Haraway, Rhetoric, Technoculture

Here are some ofmy thoughts on Chapters 1 and 2:

1. Her writing – accessibility: I guess the first thing I want to reflect on is the quality of her writing. I was all prepared for a mind-busting read and I was surprised to find it quite accessible, almost beach reading. I don’t know why she chose to make it so “entry-level.” One thing people have bitched about for years is her lack of accessibility, which is a big issue for me, since I always wonder (like many people) what’s the point of doing feminist work if no one can read it. For instance, I really think you need to be an insider to decades of feminist theory to fully ‘get’ her Cyborg Manifesto, to see its value through its “chrome.” (Although she doesn’t use the term “chrome”, she does talk critically about the “blessed-out techno-sublime reading or something like [...]

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When Species Meet

By ~LS~ On July 11, 2008 · 1 Comment · In Rhetoric and tagged Tagged With: Haraway, Technoculture

I’m reading Donna Haraway’s _When Species Meet_ with Loretta. We had a great discussion of the first chapter over breakfast this morning. The book is a solid choice for us to read because she’s a science-y person and a dog person and I’m a Haraway person, so it’s a nice “collision” of our interests. I’m enjoying the book. The first chapter (and it appears to be true for the rest of the book) is almost light reading compared to Haraway’s other work. It’s still her typical methodology of hauling in everything and the kitchen sink into a cat’s cradle analysis of some interesting point of departure, in this case dog food, or a picture of a tree stump that resembles a dog, etc. And it’s still her lovely writing, with beautiful sentences:

Whom and what do I touch when I touch my dog? … My premise is that touch ramifies [...]

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Random Musings – Gen Y Goes to College

By ~LS~ On June 26, 2008 · Add Comment · In Generations, Pedagogy, Random Musings, The Web and tagged Tagged With: BRCC, Generations, Goals, Information Literacy, Teaching Speech, Technoculture, Technology

There’s a great article in Slate by Michael Agger a couple of weeks ago about how we read on the web. Apparently we don’t really read as much as skim. This is based on interesting research cited in the article. My website doesn’t really fit the guidelines that ‘experts’ advocate in order to retain audiences. There’s also a great article in this month’s the Atlantic Monthly, Is Google Making Us Stupid, which takes a media ecology approach to the web, citing the Phaedrus, McLuhan, and Mumford, among others. The article was a long column, which I had to scroll over, and it didn’t have any bullet points, so I only skimmed it! No, kidding. I read it. He makes the standard argument that all critics of new media do, we are losing our ability to think linearly, critically, and substantively. He concludes by saying, “as we come to [...]

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Second Life

By ~LS~ On April 4, 2007 · 1 Comment · In Technology, The Web and tagged Tagged With: Consumption, Pop Culture, Technoculture

About a year and a half ago, someone told me about Second Life, the mmorpg. I got a character there and I even bought a new video card to play there. I was very psyched about joining. I spent a couple of weeks learning how to get around and building my character. But after that, there was nothing to do except go shopping or build things, and if you’re not into code, building things is kinda boring and frustrating. So I stopped going even though I have several VR friends who go there. It seemed to me that people don’t really RP there the way they do on mushes, so I just wasn’t interested. It reminded me a lot of Furrymuck. But now Second Life is really huge and I keep seeing stories about it popping up in the press. For instance, someone named “Stroker” just sold his “Amsterdam” [...]

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When Species Meet — Chapters 3 and 4

David Harvey, Marx, Haraway

Haraway – When Species Meet

When Species Meet

Random Musings – Gen Y Goes to College

Second Life

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When Species Meet — Chapters 3 and 4

David Harvey, Marx, Haraway

Haraway – When Species Meet

When Species Meet

Random Musings – Gen Y Goes to College

Second Life

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Catch me if you can!