Posts from — February 2004

New JASIST. The March issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is now online. Here are the OA-related articles.

• Marcia Lei Zeng and Lois Mai Chan, Trends and issues in establishing interoperability among knowledge organization systems
• Padmini Srinivasan, Text mining: Generating hypotheses from MEDLINE
• Massimo Melucci, Making digital libraries effective: Automatic generation of links for similarity search across hyper-textbooks
• Peter Vinkler, Characterization of the impact of sets of scientific papers: The Garfield (impact) factor
• C. Christiaan van der Eijk and four co-authors, Constructing an associative concept space for literature-based discovery
• Corinne Jšrgensen, Unlocking the museum: A manifesto

[Open Access News]

——

the fourth and sixth papers are especially interesting I think. the fifth, i have issues with because I think that I've done it differently, but it might be because i don't use terms like hebbian type, instead i use more humanities oriented terms. In any case, i also still think that conceptual maps arise as much from usage as from analysis of the text, but that's just me. I'm happy someone else has time to do this kind of work though at least it is progress in the field.

Playing dumb at Bowdoin, too. In response to yesterday's post about the responses of Duke faculty and administrators to the news that a strikingly disproportionate… [Critical Mass]

Another victory! US withdraws subpoena of antiwar meeting

Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters.

From the National Lawyers Guild press release

The U.S. Attorney announced this afternoon that it withdrew the subpoena seeking records relating to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) chapter at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Subpoenas directed at four activists were also withdrawn. The NLG subpoena sought records relating its leadership and to a forum held at Drake on November 15, 2003, the day before a protest at which 12 were arrested. A gag order placed on employees of Drake University has also been lifted.

NLG President Michael Avery said, “The government was forced to back down in this case and it shows that people can and should stand up to the government when it is abusing its powers. The Lawyers Guild is grateful to our many friends and allies who supported us in the face of this attack by the government. This experience demonstrates that the American people cherish their right of free expression and the right of political groups to dissent from government policies.”

The NLG does huge amounts of behind the scenes work negotiating with police and authorities prior to big demos. Plus, they are always present at demos, monitoring the police, negotiating when needed, etc. They're the people wearing the iridescent green caps. Be happy they are there!

[Politics in the Zeros]

Bush to Back Marriage Amendment. WaPo: Bush Plans To Back Marriage Amendment President Bush plans to endorse a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man… [Outside the Beltway]

——

from dictionary.com
bigotry: . The state of mind of a bigot; obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one's own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them.

—-
pluralism: condition in which numerous distinct ethnic, religious, or cultural groups are present and tolerated within a society.

the president is acting as one of these, which is it…. which one….

Wesley Clark to Abandon Presidential Bid. According to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, the Associated Press reports that Wesley Clark will announce his withdrawal from the Presidential… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

—–

this is probabably a good thing. if he doesn't have to maintain his campaign aparatus, and he can still stump and talk about the president, he can actually help the democrats.

French Parliament & Religious Symbols in School. BBC | French Parliament Votes The French Parliament voted today to pass the law banning religious symbolism in its public schools. This includes the banning of Muslim hijab. I would like to be able to take a strong stand on… [Flailing in the Surf]

——-

while i have problems with religion in schools institutionally, i am not as concerned about people who exist in the institutions as students demonstrating their beliefs, just so long as the school treats everyone equally and without bias. what i really don't like is the institutionalization of religion in schools, where classrooms, teachers, etc. prosecute their religion upon another. I don't have a problem with even teachers wearing religious dress as long as they don't try to convert anyone and answer questions like 'why do you wear a n x?' with answers like 'because i am an z' and following on with 'what is a z', it is a person that believes in v, etc. etc. just the facts, and then students will be faced throughout their life with the plurality of facts that construct a cultural mileiu, the same milieu that they will have to live in most of their lives, and learning that is very important. or at least i think so.

Stop laughing at me!. So, what do you do when people respond with laughter at your projection for
2.6 million new jobs in 2004?
Counter with an even greater prediction of 3.8
million new jobs!
This goes so beyond The Big Lie technique that we probably need a new term
for [Interesting Times]

——

well, common sense tells me that it a. wan't done and b. can't be done….

Preserving Internet Freedom: Guiding
Principles For The Industry by Michael Powell, FCC Chairman.

Powell challenges the industry to maintain Internet freedoms for users,
specifically:

1. Freedom to access legal content;
2. Freedom to run any application
   that won't harm the network;
3. Freedom to attach any device that does not
   abet crime; and
4. Freedom to obtain meaningful information about service
   plans.

Powell to Cable: Protect Internet Freedom, by Ted Hearn, Multichannel
News.

(The original link is

Powell to Cable: Protect Internet Freedom.) [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

—

1. freedom to have people watch you access content
2. freedom to have all your applications registered in one big database
3. freedom to have all of your devices surveilled
4. freedom to buy some things

   oh man, i'm in heaven, i'm so free.

Patriotically.com. Announcing patriotically.com, where we at blogosphere.us turn our attention (and our database) to the upcoming election.The site basically has three… [Blog de Halavais]

—–

as non-indicators go, this is at least interesting.

kerry
kerry
edwards
kerry

DESIRING DISSENT: BODIES AND/ OF/ IN RESISTANCE

A conference organised by the Essex Management Centre, University of
Essex, UK, 5-6 May 2004

Call for abstracts

	"What are the new types of struggle, which are
	transversal and immediate rather than centralized
	and mediatized? What are the Îintellectualâsâ new
	functions, which are specific or Îparticularâ rather
	than universal? What are the new modes of subjectivation,
	which tend to have no identity? This is the present
	triple root of the question: What can I do, What do
	I know, What am I?...What is our light and what is our
	language, that is to say, our Îtruthâ today? What powers
	must we confront, and what is our capacity for resistance,
	today when we can no longer be content to say that the
	old struggles are no longer worth anything? And do we not
	perhaps above all bear witness to and even participate in
	the Îproduction of a new subjectivityâ? Do not the changes
	in capitalism find an unexpected Îencounterâ in the slow
	emergence of a new Self as a centre of resistance?
	Each time there is social change, is there not a movement
	of subjective reconversion, with its ambiguities but also
	its potential?" (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault)

One of the key aspects of academic thought is the analysis and
questioning of the ideological orders of social reality that have come
to dominate specific times and spaces. The aim of such an endeavour is
to produce concepts which are able not simply to describe such orders
but dissent from, interrupt and resist the techniques and desires that
produce and sustain them. Indeed a focal point of academic debate over
the past decades has been to conceptualise the MULTIPLE forms of
resistance that are mobilised against different BODIES OF ORGANISED
POWER. While the realisation that resistance is a multiplicity that
takes all sorts of shapes and forms is, without a doubt, an important
one, it seems that what has been somewhat celebrated in recent times is
a conception of resistance that can take place simply everywhere. That
is, what can sometimes be observed is that any difference or otherness
is fetishised for its PARTICULAR form of resistance without assessing
its EFFECTIVENESS within larger formations of social struggle.

Against this we suggest that resistances to bodies of power operate in
SPECIFIC socio-historical situations. That is, what is crucial is the
concrete analysis of the specificities of power relations and the
possibilities of resistance that can be deployed against them. What thus
becomes significant are questions of STRATEGY and TACTICS: resistance is
not simply something that is everywhere but something that can be
strategically organised and tactically deployed for specific political
ends and purposes. This is of particular concern for large-scale protest
movements, whose effectiveness is often a question of how MASSES OF
BODIES are organised and institutionalised into a MASS BODY across
boundaries of space and time. The anti-globalization/ anti-capitalist
movement/s provide a particularly apposite example of this set of
issues, given that the participants represent a disparate collection of
political ideologies and are spread across the world.

In unpicking questions such as these, the Îspecific intellectualâ can be
argued not only to conceptualise such dissent but also to help to
explore possibilities of its effective organisation and strategic and
tactical deployment. The academic thus becomes an ACTIVIST BODY whose
theoretical practice (or practical theory) is to resist
taken-for-granted realities and dominant forms of social organisation.
ÎBodyâ here may mean not only the intellectual Îselfâ who resorts to
scholarly arguments but also the actual carnal being that lives in an
embodied world where wants, desires and fantasies are regulated through
sensory experiences, imagination, and language. For a LIVING body, these
are not only sources of control but also bases of resistance to its
domination and appropriation by another body, ideology or organisation.

Thus, resistance is by no means deployed from within a STABLE BODY
characterised by humanist categories. Instead, the Îspecific
intellectualâ arguably resists in part in order to explore his or her
own subjectivity ö to engage in a Îcritical ontology of selfâ and an
examination of phenomenological Îbrute beingâ. That is, resistances by
individual academic bodies are not only directed against something
external but indeed against Îthe bodyâ as such. The body of the
Îspecific intellectualâ DESIRES DISSENT against itself. The activist
academic engages in a deviant act of SELF-SUBVERSION in order to produce
a body that is different to todayâs taken-for-granted subjectivities.

But are we even asking the right questions? How is difference possible
in a world that is always already characterised by relations of power
that seem to be able to INCORPORATE all forms of resistance? Is the
CAPITALIST BODY not one that continuously desires dissent in order to
explore new planes of surplus production? Is the capitalist economy not
a body of organisation that thrives on DISorganisation: resistance
against its own very organisation in order to expand its territory? Does
this axiomatic logic of capital not render all forms of resistance
FUTILE? Is, in other words, the desire for dissent not coming from
within the body of capital and therefore always already co-opted by it?
Is the activist body not always already infiltrated by the desires of
hegemonic machineries of social organisation? How then is social change
POSSIBLE?

Obviously these questions have been at the forefront of theoretical
thought for some time and there are certainly no easy answers. But we
feel that it is one of the tasks of the intellectual to ask such
questions again and again, to continuously analyse the specific
formations and organisations of power and resistance in order to
critique them and explore possibilities of changing them. Within this
conference we therefore aim to explore precisely the CONCEPTUAL JUNCTURE
between bodies, desire, resistance and organisation. We would like to
invite scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to come to
the University of Essex and present papers that respond to some of the
conceptual and political problems outlined above.

Authors might want to address some of the following broad themes (this
is by no means an exhaustive list):
- Can resistance be organised? How is resistance organised? Is it
possible to talk of Îbodies of resistanceâ?
- The role of the intellectual in the conceptualisation/ organisation of
resistance.
- Academia and activism/ teaching and research as resistance.
- The productive body and resistance at the workplace.
- Direct action: resistance and/ or desire?
- Strategies and tactics of resistance in times of ÎEmpireâ.
- Resistance and organisation/ institutionalisation/ co-optation.
- The psychoanalysis of desire and dissent.
- Historical and contemporary forms of resistance.
- Democracy and radical resistance: an oxymoronic pair?
- Desiring and resisting war.
- The resistant subject/ the resistant body.
- Resistance as art/ the art of resistance.
- Being and body as modes of resistance.
- Re/presentation of resistance in the media

Interested contributors to this conference are asked to submit an
abstract of around 500 words to Olga Belova (obelov@essex.ac.uk) by
FRIDAY, 26 MARCH 2004. Once selected, they will need to book their place
by paying a £20 registration fee. Please note that attendance will be
LIMITED to a maximum of 25 delegates.

The conference will run over 2 days, starting at lunchtime on 5 May and
finishing after lunch on 6 May. There will be 2 lunches, one dinner and
refreshments provided during the event. There is a choice of guesthouses
in the surrounding area for delegates to stay in, as well as a hotel
situated on the University campus.

Bursaries will be available for THREE PhD students to contribute towards
their accommodation and travel costs, and they will be charged no
registration fee. Interested PhD students can apply for a bursary by
submitting a separate two-page document, which addresses the following
points: What are the theoretical and methodological themes of the PhD
project?; How would a participation in this conference be of benefit to
the PhD research project?; What are the travel and accommodation costs
your conference participation would involve?

We will seek to collect papers presented at this conference into a
dedicated journal and/ or a book publication. A full paper will
therefore be required at a later date if presenters would like to be
considered for this publication.

Conference Organisers:
Olga Belova (obelov@essex.ac.uk)
Steffen Bšhm
Jo Brewis