Tag-Archive for » environment «

What we don’t talk about when we talk about design

Objectifying from Lilly Irani on Vimeo.

I made a version of this video for a Delhi public photography exhibit called Blow Up. It is based on ideas that Kavita and I have been talking about for a while. I will avoid captioning too much, but I’ll say that I’m reminded of Donna Haraway’s reminder in When Species Meet that we are all in “differential relations of dying.” This is my first foray into video production so I’d love discussion — constructive feedback, tips, and thoughts on film as a medium for critical academic output.

Piracy: Cutthroat capitalism or response to an enviro-exploitation disaster?

Dragging my net on WorldChanging and Wired for a recent research project, I stumbled across Wired’s flash game “Cutthroat Capitalism”. The game lets you “simulate” a Somali pirate interacting with the world as if through a Tamagotchi, as “economic man” usually is, balancing hostage health and trust with threat to their safety to negotiators. The game claims that pirates “are not just buccaneers — they’re businessmen,” as if Somali pirates metaphorically presage what dangers await us all when capitalism goes awry.

Well, the might be right but not how they think. Rather than capitalism gone awry, some argue that the Somali pirates are a response to globalized capitalism and the absence of governance in the face of European toxic waste dumping off the Somali coast (see
The Huffington Post’s article by a Somalian writing about these issues).

In short, the pirates may be a capitalistic response to “legitimate” forms of capitalism, rather than Other to them.

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Gender on Ice

Gender on Ice (great title) is an upcoming conference at Barnard College, New York (Nov. 20-21) focusing on “the intersection of science, policy, race, and gender in the way the Arctic and Antarctic are studied, represented, inhabited, and imagined.” Participants come from an unusually wide array of disciplines — photography, women’s studies, astronomy, filmmaking, philosophy, art history, geography, environmental studies, science writing — so it looks to be an interesting conversation at the very least.

The conference kicks off with a screening of True North, a film about Matthew Henson, the first African-American to explore the Arctic with Robert Peary in 1909. For more information, check the Gender on Ice website.