Scholarships Announcement 2008 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference
We [EPIC, not ethnography.com] are pleased to announce 3-5 scholarships for the EPIC conference in Copenhagen, 15-18 October 2008. Any student (undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D.) can apply! Scholarship recipients will receive free registration, in exchange for working 12-16 hours before or during the conference.
Deadline for applications: 25 July 2008
Application process: Please submit a curriculum vitae and a cover letter to scholarships@epic2008.com. In your cover letter, indicate whether you will be presenting a paper or organizing a workshop. Also, explain how you will benefit from attending the conference. Thirdly, we want to make sure that the scholarship recipients carry out their conference tasks in a responsible and effective manner, so you should describe any relevant experience of this type.
Scholarship recipients will be chosen by 4 August. Priority will be given to
Those who are presenting a paper or organizing a workshop
Those whom the conference would benefit the most
Those who seem most likely to be responsible and effective in their work for the conference
Questions? Contact Christina Wasson, Scholarships Committee Chair, at cwasson@unt.edu.
I didn’t say it was a happy one, but it is a perspective. Of course there were the expected strident calls of moral outrage over anthropologists in the military. Then it got worse when a voice vote was taken and passed that “no reports should be provided to sponsors [of research] that are not also available to the general public and, where practicable, to the population studied.” (from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Blog http://chronicle.com/news/article/3532/anthropologists-vote-to-clamp-down-on-secret-scholarship ). To be clear, this does explicitly include the kinds of proprietary research I do for my clients.
Well, there we go… apparently when that resolution passes next year (I have no doubt it will) my industry brethren and I will once again be non-anthropologist anthropologists and the rest of the field will return to the comfy tower without fear of getting its collective hands dirty. I am not renewing my membership that expired last Thursday. It’s not some form of protest, but more of why bother? I went into the AAA meetings feeling like people were having arguments that are nearly 50 years old, and already rolling my eyes. But now I’ve stopped rolling them.
I’ve realized that being annoyed at the American Anthropological Association and the more vocal members of the organization is like being annoyed at an old doddering relative. You know the one I mean, not quite crazy enough to lock up in the attic, but still likely to blurt out embarrassing anachronistic statements during holiday meals like “We may have lost the war, but I’ll be damned if I recognize missou-ra!” Also like the AAA, the effect on my life and career other than the occasionally embarrassing statement, is exactly zero.
The only function of the association is to hold a meeting once a year, distribute info about open positions in academia and issue statements about ideology. Other than that, I don’t see much. You can’t make someone stop being an anthropologist. No one can reach into my brain and remove the knowledge. Never in my career has anyone asked if I am a member of the AAA, I don’t even know if it’s a requirement of an academic department to be a member.
I don’t claim to do classical ethnography, that’s why many of us in my end of the field prefer the term Design Ethnography or Design Anthropology because it is a sub-field that is different from the long-term studies others do and used for different ends. Its not better or worse, it’s different.
So, I’m still an anthropologist but one that places academic and professional freedom above being in an Association that is trying to keep us all in a box.
Status is the posturing we do in order to be a member of a desirable group. Status in turn has implications for how valued resources such as money, prestige, power, and honor are distributed. In an ideal world, labor economists tell us that the more productive labor is, the more money, prestige, power, and honor will be acquired via the blind mechanisms of a marketplace that knows only productivity. But this ideology belies what many of us intuitively know. Status is not only dependent on productivity, but is obtained through who you associate with. These associations may be through family connections, club memberships, school networks, fraternity membership, or what college you attend. None of these connections are blindly entered into, irrespective of their utility in the marketplace.
Universities are at the intersection of this status paradox, between a market which sees only productivity, and a social world tuned into status distinctions based on relationships. As labor economists (and university administrators) assure us, what is learned at the university makes labor more productive in the marketplace. But, this is not the whole story. Because, universities are not only about the acquisition of skills valued in the marketplace. Attendance at a particular university is as a status marker determining how money, prestige, power, and honor are distributed irrespective of what skills an individual acquires. Were this not the case, no university administrator, parent, high school student, college counselor, or anyone else would pay any attention to the college status rankings published by US News and World Report. And for this reason, it is interesting to think of what implications this annual ritual has on how we inside America’s colleges and universities view each other. For example, people teaching and learning at dominant universities like UC Berkeley view their privileges and advantages as being the just reward in a blind competition in which their true honor is recognized. Those of us who teach at lower-ranked universities (in my case Chico State) disagree. We think our own honor is unjustly hidden.
Why Chico State Is Better than UC Berkeley: A Brief Rant
I will be blunt. When it comes to undergraduate education I think Chico State does a better job than UC Berkeley. Berkeley’s classroom teachers or what they call “discussion leaders” are often inexperienced graduate students, and not the big name (and well-paid) research professors who may be famous, but often are poor undergraduate teachers. Berkeley also asks less class attendance of students. For example, Berkeley’s Introductory Sociology course in Spring 2007 had 286 students who were lectured to for two hours per week, and a smaller graduate student-led discussion section which was one hour per week. Students received four hours credit for these three hours of instruction In contrast, Chico’s Introductory Sociology classes were three hours per week of lecture with 40 students, and Chico students received only three hours credit for this. As for Berkeley’s undergraduate students, they themselves are among the smartest and hardest working high school students in California. And, at the end of four years at (continued on Page 2)
We had a fellow come into the office to conduct a workshop in ergonomics. It sparked more interesting thoughts than you might think. For example, if slouching is so bad for you, why does it feel so good? Further, does it add more fodder to the growing pile of data that anything one might enjoy: bacon, sausage, beer and buffalo wings are all some form of cosmic bait and switch?
He also mentioned that a way to avoid injuries related to being a knowledge worker type is to stop working every 20 minutes, get up walk around, do some stretches, etc. So I guess if you hire a lot of people with Attention Deficit Disorder you’ll save a boatload of money on works comp insurance.
This is a video that has been making the rounds for a bit, and it is still fun. I put myself through school as a tech support person and the only flaw in this depiction is the tech support fellow does not appear to be pulling his own hair out by the roots.
I will admit it, I have zero tolerance for poor phone support (Are you listening Sprint?). Call center turnover is generally high and for good reason, no one ever calls up to say “Hey, I just want to let you know everything’s going A-OK over here. It’s all good and working fine.” People call because they are working on something NOW and it needs to be fixed NOW. Most call center people aren’t very skilled because they have a script they follow for your problem, and if your problem does not follow that script, they are as lost as you are. Support comes in levels and generally its not until you get elevated a couple of levels that you will get to someone that actually as technical expertise and is genuinely interested in your problem.
Sprint may have the worst customer support in the history of the known world. I suspect the complaints department at Alcatraz was more responsive. Its fairly apparent the Sprint approach is two-fold:
one – get them off the phone as quickly as possible and however that happens is fair game
two – no matter what happens the problem is because the customer is in a rare dead zone / indoors / moon is in the wrong phase. But in no case is the phone, network, Sprint, its subsidiaries, employees or any resemblance to real tech support living or dead part of the problem.
Here is a favorite case from when I bought the Treo 600. I got very spotty reception and a friend and I would be standing next to each other and his was find and I could not get a signal. In multiple calls to phone support I was told:
Sprint: “Oh, you were standing next to each other? You can’t get a signal because you canceled each other out.”
Or my personal favorite:
Sprint: “You see those little bars to the side on the top?”
Mark: “yes, I do. All the bars are showing..”
Sprint: “OH, that’s your problem. See those little bars tell you how busy the network is. If you see all of them, the network is really busy and that’s why you can’t make you call.”
Mark: “………..”
In an effort to keep this blog PG-13, I can’t detail my response.
