Abahlali Assembly, Foreman Road Settlement by Richard Pithouse Cities have emerged as a key site of popular struggle in post-apartheid South Africa. But with the ANC responding to independent organisation in an increasingly violent and repressive manner the future of these struggles is deeply uncertain. On the 26th of June, James Nxumalo, the African National…
Read MoreLena Pillars. Photograph by Maarten Takens by Greg Downey The Bull of Winter weakens In 2003, after decades of working with the Viliui Sakha, indigenous horse and cattle breeders in the Vilyuy River region of northeastern Siberia, anthropologist Susan Crate began to hear the local people complain about climate change: My own “ethnographic moment” occurred…
Read MoreAtrium of Nazarbayev University. Photograph by Liz Jones by Jim Sleeper U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings by American critics and human-rights monitors…
Read MorePeace Corps Volunteers work with a water-well drilling team in Chad to provide clean water to the community, 1968 by Audra J. Wolfe Last November I sat in a hotel ballroom surrounded by fellow historians of science as a baffling (to me, anyway) exchange unfolded over the legitimacy of the term “Cold War Social Science.”…
Read MoreThe dream: A publicly-funded Berfrois, free from ads. The method, man: YOU!
Read MorePhotograph by Allen Ginsberg by Ceal Nassady “Wup! wup! man this is IT—this year’s funding drive for Berfrois. If you get your kicks reading Berfrois every day ad free then gee…THIS is your chance…to keep it that way man, yass, yass. Now you all read BERFROIS and you all GET IT- -dig those done articles…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch For the dead at Rana Plaza “So you’ve shifted much of the actual labor from more highly-trained employees to less-skilled and therefore less-expensive workers?” “They do a much better job than we could do ourselves, with our sophisticated technologies. And because of their effectiveness, the scientists and management professionals on our team…
Read MoreFrom FINAL FANTASY VII, Square, 1997 by Simon Ferrari and Ian Bogost Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games, by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 320pp. In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect…
Read MoreWould texts by Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant on computer screens have provided the same relief from the trauma of war?
Read Moreby Legacy Russell 1. In the early-evening hours of November 4th, 2008, when everyone was waiting to find out whether or not Barack Obama would take the election and become the 44th President of the United States, I was at home drinking an ill-timed whiskey. A friend of mine called me up and asked if…
Read MoreFrom The Cubies’ A B C, illustrated by Mary Mills Lyall and Earl Harvey Lyall, 1913. Via by Guy Aitchison Writing in response to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first systematic attempt by the US government to police the internet, John Perry Barlow – former lyricist for the Grateful Dead – made a celebrated Declaration…
Read MoreThe Pueblo Bishops and Blood Stone Villains hold down the 50 blocks between Central Avenue and Alameda Street in Los Angeles. The relationship between Pueblos and Villains is often contentious…
Read MoreHypatia, Alfred Seifert, 1901 by Linda Zionkowski While straitened budgets and shrinking resources present difficulties for all of us within the university system, some of the most vulnerable people affected are graduate students. Occupying a liminal space as apprentices within the profession, students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs often find themselves facing a situation…
Read Moreby Patrick Bray The Map and the Territory, by Michel Houellebecq, Vintage, 288 pp. When we read literature from the 19th century, we usually try to be vigilant in order not to project our contemporary ideas and obsessions onto the past for fear they might obscure the radical difference of another era. But what happens…
Read Moreby Stuart Moulthrop Since this is a paper about the computational context of literary writing, and to some extent poetry, I have invested heavily in metaphor, at least as far as the title is concerned. Taking key terms in no particular order: by end I mean not so much terminus as singularity or convergence of…
Read MoreThe Knife by Elias Tezapsidis Family Eccentricities In “The Magical Act of a Desperate Person,” Adam Phillips paints a compelling picture of a provocative argument: he asserts that we all spend our lives in recovery from the sadomasochistic experiences we were exposed to as children. Specifically, our personalities can be greatly understood via an analysis…
Read Moreby Justin E. H. Smith The apocryphal story of Phyllis and Aristotle is captivating for a number of reasons. For one thing, it recalls for us a period in the history of culture in which philosophy, and philosophers, were implicated not just in elite disputation, but also in popular lore and moral instruction. The tale…
Read MoreFrom Midnight in Paris, Sony Pictures Classics, 2011 by Jenny Diski There is a picture in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where I live, called The Annunciation. I keep a postcard of it in my writing room, and visit the actual painting from time to time. A winged and haloed angel Gabriel, holding white lilies…
Read MorePoster by Cea. by Artemy Troitsky, Peter Pomerantsev and Oliver Carroll Russia’s 1968? Oliver Carroll: From Voina to Bykov, Pussy Riot to Moscow hipsterism, culture seems to be playing a very political game in Russia. How can we explain this? Is this something that Russia has seen before? Are we witnessing this Russia’s ‘1968’ moment?…
Read MoreMonsters University, Walt Disney Pictures, forthcoming 2013 by Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out […] it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by…
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