Matthew J.X. Malady summarizes readers' comments on his Slate "word aversion" piece — "Which Words Do Slate Readers Hate?", 4/2/2013: Hundreds of commenters chimed in to report aversions keyed to words extending from apple to zesty. Among the others mentioned: foyer, salad, hose, lapel, plethora, funicular, groin, nostril, and munch. Several commenters noted an aversion to belly. Additional repeating themes included 1) using known word aversion weaknesses to torment and tease siblings, spouses, and other family members, and 2) an uncomfortable commenting posture that amounted to, as PaisleyScribe put it, “shuddering as I type” the offending word. He ends his list of striking comments with two co-MVP ("most vividly plaintive"?) awards: In the meantime, I will bid you adieu by ceding the floor to the “Why Do We Hate Certain Words?” commenting co-MVPs. First up is ochnas2, who wins the prize for best description of what it’s like to experience an aversion to the word gorgeous. “I have hated this word as long as I [can] remember. It is a visceral reaction. I wouldn’t say it makes me nauseous, but hearing it gives me the same creepy feeling you would get when you first notice a spider crawling on you that has obviously been there a while.” And, finally, there’s fsutrill, a “writer/editor/proofreader and bilingual” who maintains a list of aversive words that includes pus, spittle, and putrid. But beyond all others, fsutrill cannot stand the word cigarette, a word that seems so deeply repulsive that fsutrill has never once spoken it aloud. “I’m 43,” fsutrill notes. “Crazy, huh?” Cynthia McLemore has pointed out to me that many of these reports of "word aversion" are reminiscent of Freud's ideas about the emergence of repressed ideas in dreams via condensation (German Verdichtung) and displacement (German Verschiebung). From his New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1933): Let us go back once more to the latent dream-thoughts. Their most powerful element is the repressed instinctual impulse which has created in them an expression for itself on the basis of the presence of chance stimuli and by transference onto the day’s residues - though an expression that is toned down and disguised. […] The latent dream-thoughts are thus transformed into a collection of sensory images and visual scenes. It is as they travel on this course that what seems to us so novel and so strange occurs to them. All the linguistic instruments by which we express the subtler relations of thought - the conjunctions and prepositions, the changes in declension and conjugation - are dropped, because there are no means of representing them; just as in a primitive language without any grammar, only the raw material of thought is expressed and abstract termsare taken back to the concrete ones that are at their basis. What is left over after this may well appear disconnected. The copious employment of symbols, which have become alien to conscious thinking, for representing certain objects and processes is in harmony alike with the archaic regression in the mental apparatus and with the demands of the censorship. But other changes made in the elements of the dream-thoughts go far beyond this. Such of those elements as allow any point of contact to be found between them are condensed  into new unities. In the process of transforming the thoughts into pictures, preference is unmistakably given to such as permit of this putting-together, this condensation; it is as though a force were at work which was subjecting the material to compression and concentration. As a result of condensation, one element in the manifest dream may correspond to numerous elements in the latent dream-thoughts; but, conversely too, one element in the dream-thoughts may be represented by several images in the dream. Still more remarkable is the other process - displacement or shifting of accent - which in conscious thinking we come across only as faulty reasoning or as means for a joke. The different ideas in the dream-thoughts are, indeed, not all of equal value; they are cathected with quotas of affect of varying magnitude and are correspondingly judged to be important and deserving of interest to a greater or less degree. In the dream-work these ideas are separated from the affects attaching to them. The affects are dealt with independently; they may be displaced on to something else, they may be retained, they may undergo alterations, or they may not appear in the dream at all. The importance of the ideas that have been stripped of their affect returns in the dream as sensory strength in the dream-pictures; but we observe that this accent has passed over from important elements to indifferent ones. Thus something that played only a minor part in the dream-thoughts seems to be pushed into the foreground in the dream as the main thing, while, on the contrary, what was the essence of the dream-thoughts finds only passing and indistinct representation in the dream. No other part of the dream-work is so much responsible for making the dream strange and incomprehensible to the dreamer. Displacement is the principal means used in the dream-distortion to which the dream-thoughts must submit under the influence of the censorship. The Wikipedia article on displacement notes that In 1957, Jacques Lacan - building on the way in Freud's work, condensation (from German Verdichtung) and displacement are closely linked concepts, and inspired by an article by linguist Roman Jakobson - argued that the unconscious has the structure of a language, and that condensation and displacement are close equivalents to the poetic functions of metaphor and metonymy. As he cautiously put it, 'in the case of Verschiebung, "displacement", the German term is closer to the idea of that veering off of signification that we see in metonymy, and which from its first appearance in Freud is represented as the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship'. My own instinct would be to look for Pavlovian rather than Freudian mechanisms — but as I noted in an earlier post, there has apparently never been any systematic (much less scientific) investigation of the phenomenon of word aversion. I was therefore amused by the way that Matthew's article was framed on the Today show: "So there's been some scientific research that there are certain words that make people have a physical negative reaction to them …"

Farid Esack The Academic Study of Islam and/in/for the Wounded Empire A Lecture by Dr. Farid Esack Fri, 5 Apr, 2013 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM Union Theological Seminary 3041 Broadway at 121st Street New York, NY 10027 The September 11, 2001 attacks in the USA significantly impacted Islamicists (scholars in the Study of Islam). These events contributed immensely to the growth of irenic scholarship, in which Islamicists increasingly dove into the trenches in order to help save Muslims and the image of Islam from the attacks of different quarters—primarily Western governments and armies and the mass media. This defensive engagement of the Islamicist, described as ‘bunker scholarship’, raises significant questions about fidelity to the post-Enlightenment foundations of critical scholarship. What is more, such scholarship often plays a significantly accommodationist role in co-creating compliant Muslim subjects in a larger hegemonic project. About Dr. Farid Esack Professor Farid Esack is a South African Muslim theologian who cut his teeth in the South African struggle for liberation. He studied in Pakistan, the UK and Germany and is the author of Qur’an, Liberation and Pluralism, On Being a Muslim, An Introduction to the Qur’an, and Islam, HIV & AIDS –Between Scorn, Pity & Justice. He has published on Islam, Gender, Liberation Theology, Interfaith Relations, and Qur’anic Hermeneutics. Professor Esack served as a Commissioner for Gender Equality in South Africa and has taught at the University of Western Cape, University of Hamburg, the College of William & Mary, Union Theological Seminary, and Xavier University in Cincinnati. More recently he served as the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islam at Harvard University. Farid Esack is now Professor in the Study of Islam and Head of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Registration is required. RSVP online.

Hiroshi Kumamoto (a specialist in Middle Iranian, especially Khotanese) sent in the following photograph of the sign on a water boiler in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University: Since I wrote about the Chinese penchant for hot water in two recent Language Log posts ("Opens the waterhouse; open water rooms" and "Water between"), naturally I was game to take on this specimen of a water heating apparatus from Japan. The directions posted on the heater read as follows: Futtō shita oyu o tsukaitai baai nomi sāmosutatto daiyaru o "B" ni awasete kudasai. 沸騰したお湯を使いたい場合のみサーモスタットダイヤルを"B"に合わせて下さい。 ONLY IN CASE OF USING THE BOILED WATER, PLEASE TURN THE THERMOSTAT DIAL TO "B". I suppose one might interpret that to mean that, in all other cases (such as when you don't want to boil water), don't turn the dial to "B". This is a fairly common problem in J-E / E-J translation: clause order is reversed, and a perfectly serviceable — if stilted or awkward — translation could be achieved simply by switching the clauses around. "Please turn the thermostat dial to 'B' only in case of using the boiled water" is pretty close to acceptable English. The translator has omitted the nicety of "wanting to", without which this version is never going to be better than "meh", but order change is definitely an improvement. The English translation is surely not the most felicitous rendering that might be made of the Japanese. Here are some other possibilities: "Only when you want to use boiling water, set the thermostat dial to 'B'." "Turn the thermostat dial to 'B' only in the event that you would like to use hot water." "Turn the thermostat dial to 'B' for hot water only." "Turn the thermostat to 'B' when you want to boil water." Notes: 1. futtō shiteiru 沸騰している ("boiling") and futtō shita 沸騰した ("boiled") share the same meaning in the pre-nominal position / relative clause in Japanese. This is probably why it was translated here as "boiled water" instead of "boiling water". In English, "boiling water" and "boiled water" do not mean the same thing. yu 湯 ("hot water") futtō shiteiru yu 沸騰している湯 ("hot water which is boiling") futtō shita yu 沸騰した湯 ("hot water which has reached the boiling point") The verbs which behave this way in Japanese are those whose resultant state lasts at least for a while after the action is completed, e.g.: kiru 着る ("wear") haku 穿く ("wear") motsu 持つ ("hold") 2. The 騰 in futtō 沸騰 is a very complicated, difficult kanji with a total of 20 strokes. It is somewhat surprising that the government did not come up with a simplified version when they designated 1,850 tōyōkanji 当用漢字 ("kanji for general use"). 3. One wonders whether this is the only way to indicate the device in Japanese: sāmosutatto daiyaru サーモスタットダイヤル ("thermostat dial") As to what prompted Hiroshi to send me the photograph of the directions affixed to the water boiler in his departmental office, he mentioned to me that he had to live with that sign for 24 years. Now that he is retiring, I can imagine that it is with a combination of amusement and bemusement that he felt the need to unburden himself of having to look at that sign for nearly a quarter of a century by sharing it with someone outside who would appreciate its subtle nyuansu ニュアンス ("nuances"). I would not want to close this post without mentioning that, upon his retirement after teaching in the Department of Linguistics at Tokyo University for nearly a quarter of a century, Hiroshi Kumamoto (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1982) was recently gifted with a magnificent Festschrift by his colleagues. This substantial Festschrift has papers on Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, Pwo Karen, Kurux, Latin, Georgian, Arabic, Tocharian, Hittite, Japanese, English, Mongolian, Talaud, Sanskrit, Sogdian, and other interesting subjects. [Thanks to Cecilia Segawa Seigle, Hiroko Sherry, and Nathan Hopson]

Apparently awakened early this morning by a stray cosmic ray, a mainframe somewhere in the depths of the University of Pennsylvania Health System sent me this email: Subject: Required Training Expiration Notification DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL – SYSTEM GENERATED These items on your Knowledge Link Learning Plan may need your attention as soon due or overdue: POCT: Bedside Glucose Testing - UPHS (HS.10010.ITEM.POCT112A) due on 7/31/1990 All the headers and links seems to be legitimate, but this is the first that I've heard of this training, which was apparently due nearly 23 years ago.  Nor, as far as I know, have I ever needed or wanted to perform (or submit to) bedside glucose testing. I wonder whether this is the same computer that once sent out thousands of (paper) applications for radiation safety badges, with my office phone number listed as the fax number to used in submitting them. The resulting flood of voicemail messages gave me a good reason to give up on voicemail, so it all worked out. But I'm not ready to give up on email yet.

I truly believe that Tom Higham can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Well. Maybe not. But he has served notice to the palaeoanthropological community that there's a new sheriff in Temporal Town.Photo credit: Nel Acebal, Elcomercio.esToday Phys.org alerted me to the existence of new, more accurate and precise dates for the El Sidrón (Asturias, Spain) Neanderthals. And, once again, as it was at Kents Cavern and elsewhere, T.F.G. (call me Tom) Higham's (Oxford) is the fount of this new information on old stuff. Using an ultrafiltration pre-treatment protocol on Neanderthal bone, the team is now reporting that they've obtained a date of 48,400 ± 3200 bp (OxA-21 776).Tom HighamWOOD, R. E., HIGHAM, T. F. G., DE TORRES, T., TISNÉRAT-LABORDE, N., VALLADAS, H., ORTIZ, J. E., LALUEZA-FOX, C., SÁNCHEZ-MORAL, S., CAÑAVERAS, J. C., ROSAS, A., SANTAMARÍA, D. and DE LA RASILLA, M. (2013), A NEW DATE FOR THE NEANDERTHALS FROM EL SIDRÓN CAVE (ASTURIAS, NORTHERN SPAIN). Archaeometry, 55: 148–158. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4754.2012.00671.xThis should put the kibosh, once and for all, on the fantastic notion, propounded last year [and spectacularly amplified in the media---New York Times are you listening?], that the ancient artwork at El Sidrón Cave might have been attributable to Neanderthals.  Recall that those claims were being raised because the dates obtained ranged from 10,000 to about 46,300 BP (Torres et al. 2010).I refrained from saying much last year, mostly 'cause I figgered you might be getting bored listening to my naked [incessant, really] scepticism about any claims of Neanderthal sophistication. But now I can say that nobody, perhaps not even the excavators themselves, thought such an amusing suggestion might have been the reality.In addition to quashing the notion that Neanderthals in Spain were artistically precocious, this new date pretty much closes the door on the idea of an Iberian refugium for late-surviving Neanderthals.I know. I know. I'm as naïve about radiocarbon physics as I am about anybody else's radiometric dating prestidigitation. So, how is it that I can so readily accept some results and not some others. Some might call this unscientific. My expectations are based on a certain familiarity with the corpus of knowledge surrounding the Neanderthals. And it's not scientific, for a very logical [philosophically speaking] reason. What's known in philosophy of science as the contexts of "discovery" and "justification"[i.e. how we arrive at our hypotheses and how we support or refute them] are almost always independent of one another. Thus, even if I literally dreamed up an idea, it's nevertheless subject to instantiation and later justification [A.K.A. hypothesis testing]. Getting back to the physics, in this case the mostly likely outcome was achieved [as far as my dreams are concerned], and by someone [and his technique] about which no one that I know [or know of] would [or could] dispute. In today's example, there's nothing like the uncertainty of provenance or of technique that I see, for example, in the luminescence dates from southern Africa. For that reason, if for no other, I have no aversion to hanging my hat on Higham's test tubes, and getting on with my business.You know how much I hate saying "I told you so." There! I didn't say it.SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

I recently came across an interview in Wired magazine from mid-2012 with MIT Media Lab ‘guru’ Joi Ito on Resiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Tools for the Coming Chaos. He concluded the interview with his ‘9 or so’ principles to ‘survive in this chaotic, unpredictable system where planning is almost impossible’ (which sounds a lot like some of the current day complex or ‘wicked’ development scenarios that are discussed):Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.You want to focus on the system instead of objects.You want to have good compasses not maps.You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.It’s disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.It’s the crowd instead of experts.It’s a focus on learning instead of education.I looked at these principles (the emphasis is mine) for quite a while with a growing sense of bewilderment: Why does the organizational, discursive, programmatic, practical landscape of international development almost look like the exact opposite of his principles in 2013 and has so for many years, potentially even decades? And what does that say about the future of development?First of all, the principles are a reminder that any cutting-edge, this-is-how-the-future-will-look like predictions always need to be taken with a few pinches of salt, because aid is not the only industry that doesn’t really work according to them. But more importantly, it is also a reminder for those inside the development industry to be more realistic about the locus and speed of ‘change’, especially when digital innovation and organizational cultures of large entities are involved. The idea that the UN Security Council will be abandoned, bilateral agencies will stop providing aid and China and India will take over the development landscape, because traditional actors didn’t see the ‘chaos’ coming sounds not realistic - despite predictions of fundamental changes. It’s hard to imagine that it’s now almost 25 years ago that the communist bloc pretty much imploded and ‘the end of history’ was announced. But many, maybe even most, of the predictions about freedom, democracy, peace and prosperity haven’t been fulfilled yet. Was there ‘chaos’ in the past ten years? Timothy Ogden asks very related questions in his latest piece for the Stanford Social Innovation Review: Ten Years On: Are Donors Different? Were They Ever? [The authors] found common beliefs: there wasn’t much difference between nonprofits, any giving was good, and performance measures were a waste of time and money. Most importantly, they found that the donors picked nonprofits based on personal relationships, not performance. Same as it ever was. That’s the other side of the double-myth of the “donors care about impact” meme: that claims to care about impact are new or a distinguishing feature of the present. A decade after the original article, you still can’t read about philanthropy without encountering the claim that today’s donors are different. You can also find the same claim in stories about philanthropy from 1994—years earlier. The truth is that donors have always claimed to care about impact. If you care to look, you can easily find examples of donors making this claim in every era of American philanthropy.So what is the ‘answer’ to new prophecies and familiar stories of stagnation, change and disrupture? First, keep calm, carry on and don’t listen too much to ‘Internet gurus’. And second, good, somewhat traditional research that empirically engages with some of the hypotheses (as the research that Ogden is highlighting does), still matters.Ito’s principles and the realities of social media and development policy-makingThis is also part of my Internet and social media-based research interest when it comes to assessing the impact of new technologies on traditional development discourses. In a forthcoming article in Third World Quarterly (ungated pre-print soon!) Daniel Esser and I analyzed social media and the rituals of international summits and global development policy-making (in the context of the MDGs). Very short summary: Blogs and Twitter and global virtual civil society have little to no impact when experts whose views are compliant with the mainstream discourses around the MDGs present their maps for a ‘post-MDG’ future, focusing on safe results and desirable objects and numbers. Almost needless to say that most of these experts have high levels of formal education and are  centrally stockpiling knowledge in the environment of a global summit in New York and the affiliated structures of UN agencies, Think Tanks or university institutes etc. In the end, despite my lack of enthusiasm for belligerent comparisons, I found Stowe Boyd’s addition in his comment on the Ito principles quite useful for the development and research domain: One thing missing is the principle related to resilience: ‘go slow to go fast’. This means you need to step out of the flow of today’s operational frenzy to take new actions. In martial arts, this means you must relax your muscles and nerves to respond or attack quickly.

On April 2, the Associated Press made the bold and surprising announcement that the AP stylebook will no longer sanction the term “illegal immigrant.” According to the AP’s new standards, “‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally, and not a person.” This announcement garnered swift responses — [...]

By Zoltana Domotor, from If I was a Hoarder: On December 1, 2012 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association approved the final diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, due to be published in May 2013. Among the diagnoses new to the fifth edition of the manual … Continue reading »

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George Orwell, in his hugely overrated essay "Politics and the English language", famously insists you should "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print." He thinks modern writing "consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else" (only he doesn't mean "long") — joining togther "ready-made phrases" instead of thinking out what to say. His hope is that one can occasionally, "if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase … into the dustbin, where it belongs." That is, one can eliminate some popular phrase from the language by mocking it out of existence. In effect, he wants us to collaborate in getting rid of the most widely-used phrases in the language. In a Lingua Franca post published today I called his program elimination of the fittest (tongue in cheek, of course: the proposal is actually just to depopularize the most popular). For a while, after I began thinking about this, I wondered what would be the ultimate fate of a language in which this policy was consistently and iteratively implemented. I even spoke to a distinguished theoretical computer scientist about how one might represent the problem mathematically. But eventually I realized it was really quite simple; at least in a simplified ideal case, I knew what would happen, and I could do the proof myself. For this purpose, we can take a language to be just a huge collection of sequences of words. It is customary in mathematical linguistics to assume that the collection is denumerably infinite, but that the words come from a finite dictionary, and I will make those assumptions here. I will also assume that phrases all have different freqencies (it isn't crucial: if two phrases with identical frequency came top of the frequency chart, they could both be simultaneously banned). Without loss of generality we can ask what would happen if it were always two-word sequences that were at issue. (The effects would be similar, mutatis mutandis, for phrases of any other length, though banning two-word sequences is more radical and powerful in its effects.) Computational linguists refer to sequences of length 2 as bigrams. Every sentence is of course made up entirely of bigrams. For example, that last sentence is made up of the bigrams (1) every sentence, (2) sentence is, (3) is of, (4) of course, (5) course made, (6) made up, (7) up entirely, (8) entirely of, and (9) of bigrams. Each of them will have some frequency of occurrence, which you can check with the Google Ngram Viewer (with its utterly inscrutable mode of frequency reporting, criticized by Mark Liberman here): the bigram is of is shown with a frequency of around 0.007% to 0.008%, while of course has a higher frequency, generally in the range of 0.010% to 0.014%. Now, it is crucially relevant that only a finite number of bigrams exist for any finite dictionary. To be precise, if the dictionary contains N words, there are a maximum of N2 bigrams. This includes bigrams that don't normally occur, like of of. (Google seems to lie about such things: it says "of of" occurs in the page at [www.upenn.edu] but it does not.) More generally, given N words there are exactly Nk possible k-grams for each k greater than 1. Every sentence is made up of a selection of these N2 bigrams, and what it does to the language as a whole when you ban a specific bigram wx is that all the sentences containing that bigram become impermissible. What remains is just the sentences that do not contain wx. Others may contain w or x, but not juxtaposed as wx. When another bigram is banned, say uw, other sentences become impermissible. So fewer and fewer sentences are permissible as this banning of the most frequent is implemented. Bit by bit the language is whittled away, and the end point, in the limit, is that only one-word sentences are permissible. To prove this, suppose (for contradiction) that all N2 bigrams over some dictionary D of N words have been banned, but some multi-word sentence S is nonetheless permitted. S must have a first word, call it y, and a second word, call it z. But y and z must both be in D, so yz is a bigram of words in D. Since all bigrams have been forbidden, S impermissible in virtue of its first two words: a contradiction. Hence there can be no such S. There may be weaker sets up assumptions under which Orwell's depopularization in the limit does not yield this conclusion; for example, it could be stipulated that after a few decades of exile some once high-frequency phrases come back at low frequency. But under the simple procedure that you look to see which word sequence of some designated length k is currently the most frequently occurring and you ban it, and then iterate, the result is always that the language empties out of all sentences of length equal to or greater than k. Orwell, a great protector of the English language? The man was its worst enemy! English would actually be endangered if we'd gone the way he wanted: it would eventually have emptied out of all sentences other than one-word utterances like "Go!" or "Duck!" or "Slab!". In case you were wondering, though, things didn't go the way he wanted. Take the case of two phrases he specifically claims had been killed by 1946: Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. No they weren't. You can use Google Ngram Search to check for yourself that explore every avenue first starts appearing in books around the end of the First World War, and its (fairly low) frequency rose very slightly during the period from 1944 to 1948; and while the considerably more frequent leave no stone unturned did take a slight dip in frequency around the time Orwell's essay was being written, it continued on happily through the rest of his life and onward to the present day. These and other such facts show us that Orwell's idea of eliminating of the most popular phrases in the language, in addition to being an absolutely potty idea for style improvement, has been an abject failure.

Arabic Papyrus #1564: Receipt for agricultural tax (1/3 of a dinar: from Ushmunayn in Middle Egypt. Compete scroll with seal in fine quality light brown papyrus. 9.3 x 8.3 cm written in black ink. Recto: 6 lines. In good condition. Verso: Two lines occupying the middle of the scroll. In good condition. 249 AH/863-4 CE The Arabic Papyrus, Parchment & Paper Collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah is the largest of its kind in the United States. It contains 770 Arabic documents on papyrus and more than 1300 Arabic documents on paper, as well as several pieces on parchment. Professor Aziz Suriyal Atiya, founder of the Middle East Center and the Middle East Library, compiled the collection. Dr. Atiya and his wife, Lola, purchased the collection over a period of several years from dealers in Egypt, Beirut, and London. The bulk of the collection originated in Egypt, in addition to a small group of fragments from the University of Chicago. A large number of pieces date to the period between 700 and 850 CE. The collection includes a significant number of documents from the pre-Ottoman period and thus offers unique source material on the political, economic, religious and intellectual life of Egypt during the first two centuries of Islamic rule and the period up to Ottoman domination.

A FIVE-PART ESSAY, “LAYING SIEGE TO THE VILLAGES” HAS BEEN PUBLISHED ONLINE AT OPEN DEMOCRACY. HERE’S PART FIVE, WHICH DISCUSSES INFORMAL URBANIZATION AND THE CREATION OF NEIGHBORHOODS FOR AND BY THE WORKING POOR. 5. Baishizhou: Neighborhoods for the Working Poor As of

AAA Chicago 2013  Call for Papers: The social lives of biomedical technologies in global health development  Global health development policy and practice has made a noticeable return in recent years to technical and entrepreneurial solutions to world health challenges.  This panel will consider the social lives of new and re-purposed biomedical technologies including devices, medicines, and protocols in low resource settings generally or as specific features of health development projects.  How do these devices and drugs fit the new mandate for simple, high impact, and low cost solutions? How do local clinicians, policy makers, development workers, and users experience them and adapt them to their own contexts? We welcome papers that focus on a particular moment in the life of a biomedical device or drug or that seek to cover longer career histories and trajectories; familiar issues of access, distribution, and consumption are all important areas for the anthropological study of biotechnical solutions for global health challenges as are issues design and manufacturing.  Both ethnographic and theoretical papers are welcome. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to: theoretical approaches to understanding the design, manufacture, and use of biomedical technologies in low resource settings creative uses of biomedical technologies by users (including clinicians and lay persons) non-biomedical technologies used in health projects (ie cell phones) the domestication of medicines and devices usually reserved for clinical settings scientific and social debates around evidence and particular uses of biomedical technologies, protocols Please send a 150 word abstract to Maggie MacDonald Maggie@yorku.ca as soon as possible.

For scholars in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, it sometimes seems like hardly a day goes by without some kind of exhortation towards ‘interdisciplinarity’ – a trend that has only become more pronounced during the ongoing realignment of public higher education in many countries. ‘The humanities are being driven into defensive positions,’ wrote the vice-provost of University College London recently, ‘despite isolated counter-actions, they experience marginalisation as martyrdom and tend to look inwards rather than outwards to new possibilities, such as recovering their status and influence through interdisciplinary working’ (Worton, 2013). Or as John Brewer, the ex-President of the British Sociological Association, was quoted just this week in a reflection on the values of social science: ‘we need to move beyond rather insular profession-oriented courses and introduce courses that have breadth rather than depth…that bring together teachers from a variety of different disciplines’ (Reisz, 2013). For those of us who work in/on/through topics in the life sciences, of course, these declarations have a special lure: given how practiced we have become at finding the gaps and interstices in the practices of the life sciences, many of us seem well positioned to collaborate with medical and biological colleagues. This opportunity is manifested in ethnographic accounts of interdisciplinary interventions (Rabinow and Bennett, 2009), in historical and genealogical accounts of the split between the bio-logical and socio-logical disciplines, (Renwick, 2012; Rose, 2013), and, of course, in a still-ongoing theoretical retrenchment between concepts, cultures, bodies and biologies (Wilson, 2004; Haraway, 2007). Somewhat less common, however, are some of the very basic and pragmatic outlines of what a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ moment of interdisciplinary labour between the social and life sciences would actually look like. A sense of this gap was at least part of the impetus behind a recent workshop, and subsequent report, from the European Science Foundation (ESF) – ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Understanding Collaboration between the Social Sciences and the Life Sciences’ (I was the commissioned ‘rapporteur’ of the workshop, and subsequent author of the report, although note that authorship, in this context, was more a work of collating and summarizing contributions to the workshop than anything else. Note also that what follows here are my own summaries and reflections, and not those of either the ESF or the participants at the workshop). What set the workshop apart was an attempt to identify, in a fairly matter-of-fact and case-driven process, the basic elements of a ‘good’ collaboration between a social scientist and a life scientist – and then to set out what distinguished it from ‘bad’ or frankly ‘ugly’ collaboration. The workshop, steered by a small multidisciplinary committee, then distilled its discussion into groups of recommendations for individual researchers, academic institutions, funders, and policy-makers. Cases ranged from an account of how the nascent Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) was working to correlate social-scientific variables with large-scale genetic data-sets; to a report on the well-known ‘Whitehall II’ study, where social scientists have collaborated with clinicians to somehow shift the attention of an epidemiology away from the body of the individual, incorporating notions like class in the emergence of disease; to an auto-ethnographic reflection on the sometimes surprising and awkward mixing of theological, anthropological and neurobiological considerations in a study of the neuro-cognitive correlation of religious experience. Not all of the outcomes and recommendations can be repeated here – but I want to draw particular attention to three over-arching three themes of the discussion. First is that, if working between and beyond disciplinary boundaries is probably more-or-less a good thing, ‘interdisciplinarity’ is still not a good in itself. This sounds like a truism – but can be hard to recall amid ceaseless exhortations towards, for example, an amorphous ‘knowledge exchange.’ More to the point, a taxonomy of bad and ugly collaboration might well be achievable – and although the workshop did not attempt to exhaust this possibility, there were some consistent themes. Prominent, here, was a focus on collaboration rooted in excessive trust or gullibility – and an unwillingness, or an inability, to account for contest and controversy in another discipline. Certainly we all have our favourite (or least favourite) examples of scholars from the interpretive sciences who suddenly discover a monolithic ‘genetics’ or ‘neuroscience,’ and proceed to recover insights from these fields as they if were subject to no degree of internal contest or dispute. But this is tricky too: if excessive enchantment is undesirable in a collaborator, still some degree of trust is required; the hard part is knowing when to trust and when to be critical – which can sometimes be a surprisingly tacit or affective form of knowledge (‘know who the assholes are,’ as one contributor pithily put it). Second is that an institutional rhetoric of interdisciplinarity is not always matched by sources of funding, or by the provision of genuinely collaborative spaces and resources.  Several of the cases presented at the workshop were dependent on fortuitous access to small amounts of seed funding, or to pots of money that were otherwise unmarked. But these remain relatively rare. Others mentioned the on-going difficulty of accessing data held under the aegis of scholars from another discipline, or a discipline-specific funding body. And almost all stressed the persistent compartmentalisation of national research-funding councils, and of reviewers of proposals, along still fairly rigid disciplinary lines. There are signs that this is shifting (the growth in small-scale funding for ‘sandpits’ and ‘ideas factories’ was mentioned for instance) – but the workshop still stressed the need for many more small-scale, low-stakes and epistemologically-tolerant sources of funding for tentative collaboration between social and life scientists. Third: doing truly interdisciplinary research remains deeply risky for a lot of people – and can leave junior scholars struggling for both resources and recognition. There is clearly a lag between the rhetoric of working across disciplinary boundaries and, in many of the social sciences at least, the nonetheless profoundly disciplined spaces of scholarly prestige – including high-ranking journals, prestigious funding bodies, and job openings. For too many would-be collaborative researchers, there is a nagging awareness that they still have to build a career amid a community of scholars for whom ‘is this sociology?’ (or economics, or anthropology, or whatever it is) remains an interesting and useful question. No doubt this too is changing – but it remains a salient fact that scholars stepping outside – truly outside – the epistemic boundaries of their own discipline are taking a not-insignificant risk with their careers. To conclude, let me add three further observations of my own, that I think should also play into future thinking on interdisciplinarity and which might build on the conclusions of this report. First, while I still think that collaborative labour between the social and life sciences is vital to the future of both sets of disciplines, we still need to be sensitive to the ways in which an unproblematized ‘interdisciplinarity’ may be pursued and promoted within an increasingly market-driven and instrumentalized academy. This workshop certainly wasn’t guilty of that – but amid a broader drive for disciplinary entanglement, we need to be wary of eroding the space for intellectual practices that are already marginalized, and to recall that lots of good scholarship within the social study of the life sciences may have little to say to biological or clinical outcomes, or to health policy, or health services research, or whatever it is. Second: there is still scope for a more fine-grained analysis of degrees of interdisciplinarity – and of the different problems faced by researchers at different levels. I mean this, first, in the sense that not all gaps are equal: we should acknowledge that there may not actually be a significant epistemic distance between, for example, political science and genetics, or between analytic philosophy and neuroscience – whereas there may be a much bigger gap between (some strands of) medical anthropology and clinical medicine. Calling collaborators in all of these cases ‘interdisciplinary’ thus obscures some important differences (cf. Maasen, 2000; Schmidt, 2007). But I also mean this in the sense that we need to be mindful that a model of interdisciplinarity that imagines a kind of trade between experts may mandate a very specific prior expertise – and thus a form of mutual exchange that actually maintains a quite conservative attitude to pre-existing epistemic boundaries. There is thus more space, here, to think about the ruptures between an inter-disciplinarity, a trans-disciplinarity, or even a post-disciplinarity (see Thompson Klein, 2010). Finally: we are going to need to be much, much more attentive to the epistemological politics that structure so many interdisciplinary interactions – and, without retreating to a conservative and defensive posture, it is going to become increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that the great drive towards, for example, a ‘neurophilosophy’ or a ‘neuroaesthetics,’ is also rooted in the epistemological, political and financial marginalization of philosophical and literary inquiry. I stress – this is not to get bogged down in a tedious turf war over resources: but it is to remember that collaborative work across the social and life sciences can be vital, and ground-breaking, and mutually re-constitutive of both socio-logical and bio-logic epistemologies – even while it gets filtered through a shifting, ambiguous, and sometimes unhappy politics of knowledge. Learning to pick our way through this challenge, I think, may well mark how ‘good,’ bad,’ or indeed ‘ugly,’ our future collaborations actually turn out to be.   Des Fitzgerald is a postdoctoral researcher at the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, where he works on the use of evidence and experiment in the new brain sciences. He received his PhD in sociology from the London School of Economics in 2013.   Bibliography: Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Maasen, Sabine. “Inducing Interdisciplinarity: Irresistable Infliction? The Example of a Research Group at the Center for Interdisciplinay Research (ZiF), Bielefeld, Germany.” In Practising Interdisciplinarity, edited by Peter Weingart and Nico Stehr, 173–193. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Rabinow, Paul, and Gaymon Bennett. “Human Practices: Interfacing Three Modes of Collaboration.” In The Prospect of Protocells: Social and Ethical Implications of Recreating Life, edited by Mark A. Bedau and Emily C Parke, 263–290. Cambride, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Reisz, Matthew. “Values Are at the Heart of Social Science: John Brewer.” Times Higher Education. Accessed April 4, 2013. [www.timeshighereducation.co.uk] Renwick, Chris. British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Rose, Nikolas. “The Human Sciences in a Biological Age.” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 3–34. Schmidt, Jan C. “Towards a Philosophy of Interdisciplinarity.” Poiesis Praxis 5, no. 1 (2008): 53–69. doi:10.1007/s10202-007-0037-8. Thompson Klein, Julie. “A Taxonomy of Interdisciplinarity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman, Julie Thompson Klein, and Carl Mitcham, 15–30. Oxford: OUP, 2010. Wilson, Elizabeth A. Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Worton, Michael. “Big Picture from All Angles.” Times Higher Education, February 21, 2013. [www.timeshighereducation.co.uk]

As careful readers of this blog may have already surmised, I rely heavily on structure for writing. I organize my note-taking with a rubric, each entry carefully tagged and labelled in Evernote, I brainstorm with the mindmapping software VUE, and painstakingly outline in Opal. When it comes time to write, I like to have both … Continue reading →

Hello all,The post-holiday week link review features some unspectacular, but very readable development related policy-issues from inequality to the conflict in the Central African Republic, new donors' between 'useful idiots' and development norm changers, microfinance, arms trade, why oil revenues are unlikely to be on Nepal's agenda any time soon and some academic reflections on participatory photo interviews in evaluations. 'Ethnoming' is probably my word of the week as Ethnography Matters starts a month of great posts on ethnography, big data and positivist challenges. Over in Academia, a publisher is learning about the Streisand-effect and there's also an interesting post on how and why Gender Studies are still confronted with 'dangerous laughter'.A quick note on a new category on the blog, Student advice, which is featuring some older, but still relevant, content around doing a PhD, entering 'the field' of development as a student or recent graduate as well as some additional musings on (development-related) academic issues.Enjoy!New on AidnographyResiliency, Risk, and a Good Compass: Are Joi Ito’s ‘Tools for the Coming Chaos’ relevant for development?Joi Ito concluded his Wired interview with his ‘9 or so’ principles to ‘survive in this chaotic, unpredictable system where planning is almost impossible’ (which sounds a lot like some of the current day complex or ‘wicked’ development scenarios that are discussed).I looked at these principles (the emphasis is mine) for quite a while with a growing sense of bewilderment: Why does the organizational, discursive, programmatic, practical landscape of international development almost look like the exact opposite of his principles in 2013 and has so for many years, potentially even decades? And what does that say about the future of development?DevelopmentKeeping an eye on the have-moresSecond, concentration of income is important because it is closely associated with elite-capture, a distortion of the political process and regulatory weakness. This is one of the core arguments of J. Stiglitz’s new book The Price of Inequality where he shows that the uber-rich have used their power to influence the political debate and macroeconomic policy (tax cuts and monetary policy, mostly) in their favour.Oxfam's Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva on why a focus on reducing absolute poverty is not enough for a comprehensive post-2015 debate. Development goals? What development goals? Blank faces in El SalvadorShe described how rural communities in eastern El Salvador expressed frustration and anger when she explained what the MDGs are, that they expire in 2015, and that the UN is now looking at what should come next. "Why are you coming to tell us this now?" they responded. "This is not a consultation, this is just information … Why didn't the government tell us? Why didn't it come through the media?"(...)Benavides says the process has gone too fast and reached too few. She argues that, while international professionals may have flown between meetings and high-level events, most people know nothing of the post-2015 development conversation. "It isn't happening, this bringing in the excluded," says Benavides. So the post-MDG 'global debate' is engaging mostly the usual suspects and ignoring people on the periphery. Do not file under 'breaking news'...Getting into the Weeds of the Central African Republic’s TroublesOur resident regional expert Carol Gallo takes us deep inside the troubles afflicting politics in the Central African Republic. Wonky political analysis to follow!Mark Goldberg @ UN Dispatch is absolutely right that Carol Gallo really manages to put the current crisis in the CAR into a broader political perspective. Making History: How the Arms Trade Treaty Was Won Ultimately, like most international agreements, the ATT will only be as strong as the states that back it. And it is worth underlining that major players such as China and Russia abstained in the final vote, suggesting that agreement is not as universal as presumed. And notwithstanding increased efforts of the Obama administration to advance arms control at home, there are real concerns that the Senate may not gather the two thirds majority required to approve the ATT. That said, once the treaty comes into effect (90 days after it is ratified by the 50th signatory) it gives added impetus to entities such as the Security Council, the European Union, and the International Criminal Court to punish violators, including arms dealers. And this, surely, is cause for celebration. Robert Muggah reflects on the long and winding road that led to the first Arms Trade Treaty.Will BRICS change the course of history?The article makes the reader wonder whether the West has succeeded in transforming today's emerging powers into 'useful idiots', who are so proud that they are part of the G20 that they no longer defend developing countries' interests. Seen from this perspective, the rise of the BRICS may have been a positive development for the West, now that the poor have lost powerful defendants in Brasília and Delhi, who are increasingly defending big-power interests. At the same time, emerging powers should not complain: It is natural that the West will do everything do hold on to its power – after all, even China is not fully committed towards permanently including Brazil and India in the UN Security Council.Great commentary by Oliver Stuenkel on how BRICS may have already been co-opted by Western values, attitudes and norms rather than emerging as global game changers - let alone advocates for developing countries or 'poor people'.The Brave New World of Uncertain AidDeveloping countries are entering an ‘age of choice’ says a new paper authored by Greenhill and ODI. That choice means that competition is increasing between donors and giving an increasing amount of control to countries over their development paths. The paper goes on to argue, “These new forms of financial assistance will have a game-changing effect on aid.”(...)These new donors are finding ways to work closely with governments to meet their development goals. Cambodia, for example, was able to partner with China to build provincial roads when it was unable to pass the strict economic rate of return threshold set by donors like the World Bank. Though it does raise questions about the accumulation of debt and the prioritization of less important projects, says the report pointing to the example of three stadiums being built in Zambia by Chinese companies.Tom Murphy summarizes a recent ODI paper and adds some additional nuances to the debate around the emergence of new donors, e.g. from BRICS countries. Research in Microfinance – A Practitioner’s Perspective – Talk at CERMi, Brussels and a Rejoinder by Prof Shamika Ravi of the ISB, HyderabadThis takes me to the gorilla in the room. The double bottom line of microfinance. It has been shown in various ways, that there are serious trade-offs between the two objectives: commercial bottom line and social bottom line (Morduch and Armendariz, 2005). If microfinance practitioners accept this simple fact of life, everything would begin to look much better. When growth becomes the over-riding objective of a social enterprise, social objectives are compromised. We have seen this repeatedly in data from different countries. We call this phenomenon mission drift.This is real gem of a blog post which summarizes very succinctly many of the key debates around microfinance (in India). Cairn may give up on Nepal“Despite having established a big plan and presented our credentials, it’s been impossible to move forward,” Thomson said, “the reason we were there in Nepal in the first place still remains. Whether we will be able to make progress is a different matter.” The comments reflect frustration among insiders at Cairn about the obstacles the company has faced in a country where it had high hopes of making a big oil and gas find. Nepal contains the kind of under-explored territory on which Cairn believes it has an edge over giants like Shell.Maybe this is a particularly twisted example of applying the 'weapons of the weak' to frustrate an international oil company through what may seem like bureaucratic ineptitude. But quite frankly, I can only agree with commentator 'Jang' that oil revenues are most likely a resource that the Nepali state would have difficulties to deal with: Good news. A country that can't even harness renewable clean and cheap Hydro energy has no business drilling around for fossil fuels that will make its corrupt rulers even more corrupt and make a warm climate even warmer. The Nepali people and the world will never benefit from oil and gas in the Terai.One of us daughters and sons The Gurkha’s Daughter is a collection of short stories that depicts the life of average Nepalis and those of Nepali-origin spread from Kathmandu to Kalimpong and Gangtok to New York. Summaries of the stories may not compel you to buy the book—a young cleft-lipped housemaid considering running away in her quest for the Bollywood dream, the daughter of a wealthy family stealing, a disintegrating father-daughter relationship - which all, in some form or another, address common topics of caste, culture, identity, and our society. So what then makes Parajuly standout? The most obvious: he is talented and uses novel modes of presentation. He doesn’t waste time inking the beauties of the Himalayan landscape, but rather focuses on the characters, the true heroes of his stories. In more positive news from Nepal, there's another fiction book on the market that hopefully gains some global momentum!Tips for International Job-HuntersThis is a guest post by Melissa Mullan. Melissa has been reading, giggling at and and crying over CVs across Africa and beyond for the past several years. Recently I was digging through a pile of nearly 300 applications trying to hire five people. Some of them were funny, but many were downright depressing to read. Writing a good application can be difficult, especially in the context of international organisations, as someone from a very different culture than yours who has a different idea of how a CV should look might read your CV. Writing a good CV is something that you learn, so as a public service to anyone trying to get a job (and to myself so I do not have to read anymore bad applications) here are some tips to make your CV more professional for international readers.There really were a few cringe-worthy 'people are still doing this?!' moments when I went through the list... Participatory Photo Interviews in Evaluation Practice: Possibilities and Limitations of Working with Elaborate Qualitative Methods Using the Example of a Project Evaluation in the Field of DisabilityIn non-university evaluation research, the use of elaborate qualitative methods often proves difficult, as both content-related and structural resources are usually limited. Furthermore, this research context, as a rule, brings with it difficulties in the realization of a flexible and experimental research approach, even if the object of the evaluation would suggest such a method. This article aims at presenting the research strategy and methodology of an evaluation study which examined an offer of assistance based on self-determination for people with mental disabilities and strived for participatory involvement of those concerned. For this purpose, an extended form of the photo-interview method was used, supplemented by participant observation and semi-structured interviews with actors in the relevant social context. In order to enable the comprehensive analysis of the substantial data gained while taking the existing limitations of the evaluation context into account, a specific method of analyzing the photo album created during the photo interview was developed. This method of analysis strives to achieve a balance between an extensive interpretation of the data and a timesaving, results-oriented procedure. The practiced methodological approach has enabled diverse and expressive insights into the field of study, yet the method still remains relatively complex and time-consuming for order-financed evaluation research.Although this is an academic article (from the great open-access journal Forum Qualitative Research), I think/hope that it's actually quite relevant for participatory development practice.AnthropologyApril 2013: Ethnomining and the combination of qualitative & quantitative dataThat being said, the mixed-method approach, whether involving large data sets or not, is not so straight-forward. There are potential problems worth exploring. The most important issues lies in the fact that qualitative and quantitative methods do not necessarily mix easily at the epistemological level: how do positivist assumptions embedded in quant research mix with more interpretive standpoints? Another problem also consists in the triangulation process between data: should they only be to the service of one another? Or is it possible to collect and analyze both types of data in a more integrative way? Then what does all this mean in a practical sense? Finally, as discussed by danah boyd and Kate Crawford, the large data sets we can use have their own challenges around what is considered to be “truth.” They point out that ”what is quantified does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective truth“. Building on these discussion, this month’s “Combining qualitative and quantitative data” theme will give an overview of current opportunities and issues. The post series will not focus only on ethnomining, but it will show various case studies and perspectives on the implications of mixed-methods approaches. Here are some posts that we have coming up in this edition:So looking forward to these posts...what can I say: Ethnography Matters is the best ethnographic blog I know! AcademiaSSP Board Decides to Reinstate Removed PostsYesterday, the Board of Directors of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) unanimously decided to restore the posts by Scholarly Kitchen chef Rick Anderson that had been removed after the Kitchen and SSP received correspondence from a publisher that didn’t like the content. The posts (“When Sellers and Buyers Disagree” and “One Down, One to Go: Edwin Mellen Press Blinks One Eye“) have been restored without the comment quoted in the letter.Can you hear that noise in the background? That's probably Barbra Streisand calling, wondering why the publisher stole her effect! I admit freely that I wasn't aware of the initial posts, but thanks to the ensuing debate I have learned about a publisher I will unlikely engage with as academic.Dangerous laughter: the mocking of Gender Studies in academia Through ethnographic observation of academic work and interaction in Portugal and the UK, and interviews with 35 scholars working within and outside WGS, I found that claims that WGS is not proper knowledge are frequently made informally and in humorous tone, creating what one of my interviewees called a ‘culture of teasing’ around WGS. A senior WGS scholar explained to me that ‘colleagues will sometimes make teasing remarks and laugh at me and my colleagues. Feminism is seen as something which is ridiculous, something that is laughable, that does not have academic quality.’ Scholars in other institutions reported very similar experiences. One junior scholar in another institution told me: ‘My colleagues make jokes about our Gender Studies degree all the time. Whenever I invite a Gender Studies scholar to speak at a seminar, one of them says “there comes another one of your feminist friends. I wonder if she shaved?”. He’ll describe this as just a joke, nothing to take seriously, just innocent teasing, but this shows that they attribute less importance and value to Gender Studies than to other fields, which are never the butt of these kinds of jokes.’ Maria do Mar Pereira on why Women's and Gender Studies are still subject to 'innocent teasing' when it comes to their academic legitimacy. Q&A with Arun Agrawal, Editor of World Development Part IProbably the right metric for assessing quality control is our rejection rate rather than the number of articles we publish. If we received 300 manuscripts and published 75 of them (roughly what might go into 6 to 8 issues), that may not be a great indictor of quality (other things being equal). But we accept only about 11 percent of the submitted manuscripts, and that proportion might well go down this year. The advice of members of our editorial team and the editorial board are two means to ensure quality. But the biggest quality control mechanism – perhaps one on which all journals rely despite imperfections – is the advice of reviewers. If there is an increase in negative assessment of papers we send out for review, I will not hesitate to publish less.This is probably only of interest for academic wonks ;)...but nonetheless a good insight into some of the editorial dynamics at one of the leadeing Development Studies academic journals.

Today’s guest blog post by Adam Grotsky shares a fellowship opportunity in India. Please direct your inquiries to USIEF. Greetings from New Delhi! I am writing to alert you about the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship opportunities available for U.S. citizens in India for the Academic Year 2014-15. India, as you may know, has the largest U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program [...]

Attacks on punks and goths are now hate crimes in Manchester from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow Europe in figures: Eurostat yearbook 2012 from Docuticker Source: Eurostat Europe in figures – Eurostat yearbook 2012 presents a comprehensive selection of statistical data on Europe. With around 480 statistical tables, figures and maps, the yearbook is a definitive collection of statistical information on the European Union. Most data cover the period 2000-2010 for the European Union and its Member   How many wise men does it take to fix Italian politics? from Open Europe blog by Open Europe blog team Serbia, Kosovo in critical juncture amid EU push from Hurriyet Daily News The EU-led talks between Serbia and Kosovo reach its ‘decisive stage’ as EU and US call on two sides.   Details of Cypriot bailout agreement filtering through by Open Europe blog team The package is coming together. The IMF has officially announced that it will take part in the Cypriot bailout, providing €1bn of the total €10bn in loans – that gives a UK share of around €50m (see our thoughts here on UK IMF shares). That leaves €9bn to be provided by the eurozone, likely through the ESM. Below we breakdown the country shares (click to enlarge): The EU’s Rubik’s cube: Who will lead after 2014? by Centre for European Reform Next year, EU leaders will decide who will succeed Herman Van Rompuy, José Manuel Barroso and Catherine Ashton as, respectively, the next president of the European Council, president of the European Commission and high representative for foreign affairs. These (no doubt) excruciating deliberations will begin in earnest after the European Parliament (EP) elections in May 2014.   Are EU falling for a massive trick? from Blogactiv by Hugh Barton-Smith According to the partial results of the latest ECB survey, the median wealth of Spanish households stands at €178,300 while that of their German counterparts languishes at €51,400. This is largely due to contrasting approaches to bricks and mortar: nearly 50% of Germans rent their accommodation and only 25% own it outright, whereas less than 20% of Spaniards are tenants and nearly half have no mortgage or loan against their property.   Where will Cypriot growth come from? by Open Europe blog team This is now emerging as the key question for Cyprus following the severe mishandling of its bailout. The financial services sector, along with real estate and related businesses, which accounted for around 30% of Gross Value Added in the economy is now essentially gone as a source of growth. Europe’s Political Stress Tests from Project Syndicate by Jan-Werner Mueller In recent years, the EU – or, more accurately, the powerful countries of northern Europe – has been subjecting its weaker members to social and political “stress tests,” with varying results. Now, Europe’s leaders must move beyond austerity, and recognize that some countries need to renegotiate basic social contracts. Cyprus bailout: What are individual EU member states on the hook for? by Open Europe blog team Now remember, contributions via the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) are loan guarantees, not upfront cash. But here’s the break-down of how much each EU country is on the hook for in the Cyprus bailout: Draghi slams handling of Cyprus bailout (News) from EurActiv.com   The Meaning of Cyprus from Project Syndicate by Daniel Gros The crisis in Cyprus represents an extreme and special case in many respects. But the way that the problem arose, and the solution that was finally adopted, is likely to have very important consequences for the way that Europe addresses its banking problems.   Football, fascism and the British from open Democracy News Analysis – by Sunder Katwala Sunderland manager Di Canio has apparently finally distanced himself from fascism. What can we learn from the furore, about power and sport, politics and the personal, and the UK’s relationship to fascist ideology? Related posts: Eurosphere roundup: The Cyprus bailout Eurosphere roundup: Big freeze over Europe, Greek bailout, ACTA Eurosphere roundup: Google faces European privacy probe… Headscarf debate in France… Cyprus… "Eurostat yearbook 2008 — Europe in figures Eurosphere roundup: Cyprus crisis, Italian election deadlock continues, neo-Nazi trial in Germany clouds transparency….

Bobs’da oylama başladı! Rüşvet vermek, sürü psikolojisi, kartpostal, örgü örmek, sağır-dilsiz alfabesi… Birbirleriyle ne ilgisi mi var? Bunlar, Bobs’un bu yılki toplam 364 finalistinden sadece birkaçı. Bobs’un 15 üyeli uluslararası jürisi sizlerden gelen 4 bin 200’ü aşkın aday önerisini mercek altına aldığı üç haftalık hummalı bir çalışmanın ardından 14 dil ve 34 yarışma kategorisindeki finalistleri belirledi. Top sizde! Şimdi sıra sizde. Finalistlere bir göz atıp favorilerinizi seçin. Tüm kategorilerdeki kullanıcı ödülü sahiplerini sizin oylarınız belirleyecek. Unutmayın, yarışma kuralları uyarınca her kategoride 24 saatte sadece bir kez oy kullanabilirsiniz. Oylama süreci 7 Mayıs’ta sona erecek ve ödül sahipleri Berlin’de düzenlenenre:publica konferansında duyurulacak. Uluslararası jüriyi ise Berlin’de yine hummalı bir çalışma bekliyor olacak. 4-5 Mayıs tarihlerinde Berlin’de bol kahve eşliğinde yapılacak jüri oturumunda altı ana kategorideki finalistler birer birer mercek altına alınıp jüri ödülü sahipleri çok turlu bir oylama sonucunda belirlenecek. Jüri ödülleri, Bonn kentinde Deutsche Welle Global Medya Forumu’nda düzenlenecek törenle sahiplerini bulacak. Şimdi bu yılki finalistlere bir göz atmaya ne dersiniz? Oyunuzu kullanın, sesinizi duyurun! Related posts: Simge Tezel: Buruk Dünya Şampiyonası başladı Seçim Takip projemiz nihayet Türkiye medyasında görünmeye başladı @secimtakip Yürüyüş başladı, twitter mesajları, görüntüleri… #kardesimsinhrant @hrantdink .@Radyo_vesaire tekrarları başladı: Taksim’de toplanma başladı… #kardesimsinhrant

    As fellow anthropologist Jamie Coates remarked today, you need to be writer – not just an ethnographer – to write good ethnography. And gracious me, does Sahlins write beautifully sometimes.   ‘There is a link,’ [Mauss] wrote, ‘a … Continue reading →