A talk by Dominque Boullier

Talk: Friday, May 18, 3:00-4:30 pm, in Donald Bren Hall room 5011 [Map]
Reading Group: Wednesday May 16, 3:00-5:00pm, SBSG 3323 [Map]

Dominique Boullier is a Professor at Sciences Po Paris, Centre d’Etudes Européennes. Together with Bruno Latour, he is also the Scientific Coordinator of the médialab at Sciences Po.

He will discuss the habitele project: the development of a new conceptual framework that can account for the technological revolution in mobile communications. Habitele is used to label the various distant connections with various social worlds that we are able to handle by carrying devices.

Reading Group Details

There will be a reading group meeting on Wednesday, May 16th, from 3-5pm in SBSG 3323 in advance of Professer Boullier’s talk. The readings we will be discussing are (in rough order of priority):

1. Dominique Boullier, Habitele project summary
2. Dominique Boullier, “Preserving diversity in social network architectures“
3. Bruno Latour, “Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist“
4. Dominique Boullier, et al., “Security: Always too Much and Never Enough: Anthropology of a non-starter market“

Please see http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/imtfi_habitele for more details, or contact Beth Reddy.

Sponsored By: The Critical Theory Consortium

Indexing the importance of UC Irvine’s tradition of and continuing innovation in critical theory, broadly defined, the Critical Theory Consortium brings together associated research institutes, centers and programs to further the advancement of social, humanistic and scientific inquiry on campus and beyond.

Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion • UC Humanities Research Center • Critical Theory Institute • LUCI: Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction • UC Irvine Science and Technology Studies Initiative • Digital / Cultural / Mobile • Values in Design Lab • Critical Theory Emphasis

Casper Bruun Jensen, ITU Copenhagen
Stefan Helmreich, MIT
Bill Maurer, UCI
Mei Zhan, UCI

Friday, December 2, 11am – 1pm
Anteater Instruction and Research Building 1030 [map]

More Information: http://www.imtfi.uci.edu/sideways

Claude Lévi-Strauss spoke of the readiness for classifications and binaries as a fundamental human attribute. This workshop ventures into a historical rather than structural account of Lévi-Strauss’s observations through a discussion of the bifurcations that have made anthropology what it is. Anthropology has long navigated the tension between being a nomothetic and an ideographic science, between being explanatory and descriptive, between analyzing and evoking. Its ethnographic engagements consistently bring it up against the limits and terms of comparison. While it has never put much stock in prediction, as anthropology’s subjects themselves anticipate, adopt or adapt to ethnographic modes of inquiry the field finds more often than not that some of its core precepts and attitudes are already embedded in and articulated by its subjects. So, perhaps less Levi-Straussian, and more Bergsonian in nature, anthropology — at least in some quarters (*our* quarters) — now participates in the becoming-worldly of our world, unpredictably, often accidentally. In this, it bears more than a passing affinity with some kinds of science and technology studies.

This conversation reconsiders anthropological bifurcations and explores their alternatives. It examines the nature of anthropological knowledge production through recent discussions about the recursivity of theory, standing athwart theory, lateral reason, comparative relativism, oneness and worlding — which are always in the middle of that which we meet halfway. Each participant will respond to a written work of the other specifically addressing questions of theory, method, object and analysis. The common cause is thinking and doing anthropological knowledge *sideways* — not above or under the phenomena under investigation or the conditions of possibility of such knowledge. The conversation will also explore the possible relationship between an anthropology less content with theoretical verities and a science and technology studies uneasy with the simple opening of black boxes.

This event will be streamed online. Stay tuned for a URL.

RSVP to ereddy at uci dot edu

Sponsored by:
Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion
Digital | Cultural | Mobile
Department of Anthropology

We are excited to announce our first speakers, Supriya Singh and Yaso Nadarajah from RMIT University, Melbourne. They will be coming to visit on Wednesday, October 12. Please join us for their talk, titled, School Fees, Beer and ‘Meri’: Gender, Cash and the Mobile in the Morobe province of Papua New Guinea.

Wednesday, October 12; 12pm-1pm
Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway (SBSG) 1517 [map]

-=ABSTRACT=-

We combine the perspectives of the anthropology and sociology of money with user-centred design to explore how the use of cash in rural and remote Papua New Guinea will shape the use of mobile money. Drawing on 13 open-ended interviews and participant observation over two visits to Morobe province in 2010 and 2011, we found cash in its subsistence economy is used for school fees, mobile phones, household goods, transport, beer, cards, women and gifting to wantok, that is, people connected by descent or place. Cash is individually controlled and women’s savings are often hidden in pandanus walls or locked cupboards. Women control cash from gardens and the re-selling of betel nuts and cigarettes. Men take the larger share of cash from coffee and control the ‘big money’ from mining. Mobile money, if appropriately designed, can reinforce the privacy and security of cash and savings, facilitate gifting to wantok, and lead to greater financial inclusion of women.

-=BIO=-

SUPRIYA SINGH is Professor, Sociology of Communications at RMIT University, Melbourne. She is Deputy Head, Research, Graduate School of Business and Law, and a Senior Project Leader of the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre at the College of Business, RMIT University. She also heads the Community Sustainability Program of RMIT’s Global Cities Research Institute.

Supriya’s research interests include the user centered design of communication technologies; sociology of money and banking; remittances and the transnational family. Her books include Marriage Money: The Social Shaping of Money in Marriage and Banking (1997); The Bankers (1991); On the Sulu Sea (1984) and The First 25 Years – Bank Negara Malaysia (1984). She is working on a book entitled Globalization and Money to be published by Rowman & Littlefield.