This is a sort-of rough edit of my live-blogging notes for Lucy Suchman’s talk today at the IT University of Copenhagen. The talk was entitled “Human-machine reconfigurations – expanding frames and accountable cuts”
Lucy Suchman is an antropologist by training, and has worked at the legendary Xerox PARC research facility for many years. Suchman is [...]
Posts under ‘Academia’
Lucy Suchman on framing technology
Bit by bit – a review of “Two Bits”
I finally found the time to read Christopher Kelty’s book Two Bits – The cultural Significance of Free Software. Kelty is one of the few other anthropologists studying Free Software in general, and his work has been a huge inspiration in my thesis work on Ubuntu, so naturally, my expectations were high.
As Kelty argues, we’ve [...]
The difference between right and left
Today, I found an interesting presentation delving into a matter, which I touched upon before: the basic differences between the political right and left.
The presentation, given by one Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Based on his research into moral psychology, he claims to have found evidence of 5 moral [...]
Let the user finish the design
At EPIC, I took part in a very interesting workshop discussion led by Jeanette Blomberg and Elin Rønby, two of the leading figures within the field of ethnography-supported design.
The theme of the workshop was making visible the object of design in the design process, and centred on this diagram describing the generalized design process:
This [...]
The Community of Practice on Communities of Practice
Some time ago, I was invited by John D Smith to present my thesis work on Ubuntu as a Community of Practice at the CP Square autumn dissertation fest. CP Square is an online community of researchers and consultants working with Communities of Practice – a term coined by Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, and [...]
All design is redesign
A recent Bruno Latour keynote[PDF] has been making the rounds on the Anthrodesign mailing list.
Called “A Cautious Prometheus?”, it is a very concise and thoughtful dissection of the changes the word and concept ‘design’ has been undergoing for the past 30-40 years, which also signals the change from “the hubris of modernity” with its [...]
Fields of care and online collaboration
There’s a good discussion over at the Savage Minds anthropology group blog in relation to the recent publication of an article discussing the pros and cons of Open Access Anthropology.
The article has been written by no less than seven anthropologists using email and Google Docs to create an online collaborative space. Following the publication of [...]
Teaching it
A long time ago, I wrote a post about anthropologist Michael Wesch’s concept of anti-teaching. Since then, he has been refining it even further while teaching huge “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” classes at Kansas State University. And now he’s written a very worthwhile article [.pdf] explaining the concrete teaching concepts that he has developed.
Wesch [...]
How to write a thesis
Writing a thesis is a difficult undertaking. Before I started writing mine, I hadn’t written any assignment longer than 30 pages (my Bachelor’s essay), and it was quite a step up from that to having to structure a huge complex of data that I’d gathered on my own, analyze it and bring it together in [...]
… graduates!
And thus arose the day where I end my association with the University of Copenhagen after almost 7 years to the day.
I defended my thesis this morning with some success, with fun props and pictures to explain my theoretical perspective. And I passed comfortably, though not without being told that there was a distinct lack [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
