Study diary

I continued tweaking my essay for Theory and History during the week. In fact, the first draft needed some major changes. As always, S was invaluable in pointing them out. I finally submitted on Friday, a full week before deadline – as planned, but still!

This is the first academic paper I write since being an undergraduate student, but it would actually be fair to call it my first academic paper ever. This is on a whole different level than when I studied at Stockholm University, which was also very long ago. So therefore, I feel extremely proud and accomplished, and the whole process was so satisfactory: To read lots of papers on a certain topic, to summarise existing research and to build on it – adding my own analysis, backed up by what has already been established. The feeling is one of being part of something bigger, of contributing my little piece to the vast body or why not building of knowledge that people are continuously constructing and repairing.

I remember when I was in Rotterdam with S in April last year and we visited the campus of the Erasmus university. Their slogan was something like “Leave your mark”, and S asked me: “Are you ready to leave your mark in academia?” That’s the first time he suggested I should apply for a Master’s programme, apparently having thought about it for a long time but not knowing how to drop the hint in the right way. Well, about a year later my feeling is one of having “left my mark”. A small mark, a contribution to something bigger, and most definitely only the beginning. It’s such a fantastic feeling. So we biked to Tempelhofer Feld and enjoyed the Friday afternoon in the sun, drinking beer and eating strawberries. (Of course I have made many journalistic contributions before, but on a more independent level, and sometimes “dependency” makes all the difference. This time my contribution counts, is the feeling.)

This week’s classes:

• Monday: Space & Place, unit 3.
• Tuesday: Media Activism, unit 3.
• Thursday: Immersive Technologies. With an interesting guest lecturer.
• Friday: Research Proposal. First session.

Because I was so focused on my essay this week I had not read all the mandatory readings for Space & Place and Media Activism. It was the first time that happened in this programme, and it was exactly as bad as I had assumed: I couldn’t engage in the discussions and didn’t get as much out of the class as I usually do. I haven’t caught up yet, since I rather started the readings for next week’s unit 4 of those courses right away – plus one from unit 6 of Media Activism since I will present then.

Today I voted in the European Parliament elections.

Tomorrow I will drop off my Macbook Pro to Apple, so that it can be repaired while we’re at Freiburger Filmforum.

Study

Space and Place

Unit 4: Applied Methods: I – Maps from Switzerland / Indonesia. Weakness and Limitations of Mapping.

• Bartley, Brendan (2012): Chapter 1: Introducing Theory. In Continuum Studies in Medieval History: Thinking Geographically, pp. 3-21.

Media Activism

Unit 4: Practice, Agency & Change

• Postill, J. (2010). Introduction: Theorising media and practice. In B. Bräuchler & J. Postill (Eds.), Theorising media and practice, pp. 1-32.

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

• Barassi, V. (2015). The ethnography of digital activism. In V. Barassi, Activism on the web: Everyday struggles against digital capitalism, pp. 17-48. New York: Routledge.

Other

Articles

• The Economist:
  • A 200km loop around Paris
  • Charlemagne: How to win the Eurovision Song Contest
  • Schumpeter: Sleepless in Silicon Valley
  • Free exchange: Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2
  • “Furious Hours” is an ingenious double mystery (Harper Lee)
  • America is turning against facial-recognition software
  • Obituary: Jean Vanier died on May 7th ❤️
• The Guardian/Arwa Mahdawi: Why Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela’s kiss is a terrifying glimpse of the future
• Aftonbladet/Peter Kadhammar: Medan vänstern pratrunkar går världen åt helvete
• Cnet: Apple redesigns keyboard in new MacBook Pro update and promises quick repairs on sticky keys (just my problem!)

Video

• Zebra Zone: Why I Switched To Resolve 16 after 10 Years on Premiere Pro!
• The School of Life: 20 Signs You’re Emotionally Mature
• Deep Work by Cal Newport (animated book summary) – How to work deeply (via R in our study group)

A pretty full week with lots of classes:

• Monday: Space & Place. I had only read one of the two mandatory texts, Ingold, but read Low after class.
• Tuesday: Media Activism. Similar situation – I skimmed the second text but managed to write the mandatory review nevertheless. As an alternative to write reviews of the readings every week we can present more extensively in one unit. I chose that option and signed up to present in Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research on 11 June 2019.
• Wednesday: Qualitative Methods. This time on participatory action research (PAR).
• Thursday: Immersive Technologies. A tech workshop on 360 photos (see featured image), which we enjoyed in VR headsets (mostly cardboard/plastic holders for our phones).

In Qualitative Methods the lecturer asked us to submit our presentation by video since the in-house classes in April, where we were supposed to have presented, were cancelled. So after zooming with my team members I recorded my part very spontaneously on Friday night. A perfect opportunity to try the green screen that I bought for other purposes:

I finished the “shitty first draft” of my essay for Theory & History tonight. My first drafts always tend to be quite close to the finished version (that’s why they take such time), so I expect it just to need a little finishing touch before I hand it in. I also zoomed with my classmate R to give her advise on her essay.

So much coming up, I think I must summarise it:

Upcoming deadlines and presentations, Summer semester 2019

• 31 May: Essay deadline, Theory and History (S1)
• 10 June: Video presentation deadline, Qualitative Methods
• 11 June: Presentation, Media Activism
• 17 June: Presentation, Space and Place
• 9 August: Essay deadline, Media Activism
• 20 September: Essay deadline, Space and Place

Otherwise the big news is that my programme will change institution from FU to HMKW. It won’t affect me though, but it means I belong to the last generation that studies the programme at Freie Universität. I’m glad I made it before the programme moved, I really like FU!

What’s more? I took S out for a nice birthday lunch, watched the Eurovision final with A (as S boycotted it) and voted for Iceland, and booked an Airbnb apartment for Freiburger Filmforum in two weeks (we had planned to camp, but it seems it will be cold).

Yesterday I had a meeting with a “genius” at the Apple store on Kudamm since the keyboard of my 2016 Macbook Pro starts getting worse. The “up” button has been unreliable for a long time, but recently the space bar started being unreliable too, which was really annoying, and tonight the backspace seems to start freaking out as well. The question is whether Apple considers “being unreliable” as enough a reason to exchange the whole top part. I also complained about miscolourings on the screen and a popping sound. I’m scheduled to hand it in just before we go to Freiburg.

In TV, we started watching the Swedish Netflix series Quicksand (“Störst av allt”) and sort of got hooked immediately. So great to see Felix Sandman, my favourite in the Fooo, move on to acting and doing it so well!

Another full week coming up. This is apparently the most busy semester of the programme. I love it. But will have to focus on giving the finishing touches to the essay – I really look forward to handing it in and leaving it behind, as its subject clashes with the current courses, which I’m getting more and more excited about.

Study

Space and Place

Unit 2: The Body, Landscape & Process

• Ingold, Tim (1993): The Temporality of the Landscape. In World Archaeology, Vol 25, No 2: Conceptions of Time and Ancient Society. (Oct. 1993), pp. 152-174.
• Low, Setha M. (2009): Towards an Anthropological Theory of Space and Place. In Semiotica 175 – 1⁄4, pp. 21-37.

Unit 3: Scapes, Sites & The Berlin Brigade

• Appadurai, Arjun. (1990): Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In Theory Culture Society, Vol. 7, pp. 295-310.

Media Activism

Unit 2: Historical Developments

• Kidd, D., & Rodriguez, C. (2009): Introduction. In C. Rodriguez, D. Kidd, & L. Stein (Eds.), Making our media: Global initiatives toward a democratic public sphere, Volume 1: Creating new communication spaces, pp. 1-22.
• Melucci, A. (1996): The construction of collective action. In Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age, pp. 13-41 – skimmed!

Unit 6: Media Activism & Ethnographic Research

• Video: The Guardian: Anonymous Comes to Town: The hackers who took on high school sexual assault in Ohio (via lecturer)

Qualitative Methods

• Stoecker, R. (2013): Chapter 3: The Community Development Context of Research. In Research Methods for Community Change. A Project-Based Approach (2 ed.), pp. 47-72.
  • (Chapter 2: The Goose Approach to Research (p. 25-46), I read in Week 15, 2019.)

Immersive Technologies

• 360 video: Black Women Rising | My People, Our Stories: Brazil

Other

Articles

• The Economist:
  • Poland’s ruling party confronts the “LGBT dictatorship”
  • Lexington: No sex please, we’re millennials
  • Female MCs are changing Brazilian funk music
  • When Eurovision goes to Israel
• The Guardian:
  • Sweden reopens rape case against Julian Assange
  • Assange now faces two extradition requests. What happens next?
• The Smoking Gun:
  • Charges Dropped Against Florida Man Busted For “I Eat Ass” Car Sticker
  • Teen Breaks Up With Her Girlfriend, Then Immediately Posts Ex’s Nudes On Instagram
• Vice: How Baby Scumbag’s Quest for Social Media Fame Ended in Disaster (2017)
• The Verge: Google has been tracking nearly everything you buy online — see for yourself with this tool

Video

• “Islam in Liberalism” featuring Professor Joseph Massad on 10/4/2018
• Chelsea Manning’s Statement on Release from Jail and Second Grand Jury Subpeona
• Various Re:publica talks, for example:
  • Eben Moglen: Why Freedom of Thought Requires Attention
  • Frank Rieger: Cyberwar, hybride Kriegführung, Desinformation

Re:publica began on Monday. Our plane from Stockholm was going to land at 11.40 at Tegel, so I optimistically thought that there would be a chance to catch Mikael Colville-Andersen’s keynote at 12.30. Well, we landed on time, got our parking position exactly at 11.40. But Tegel being Tegel, it took them 20 minutes to send out the buses and another ten before we stepped out of the terminal. Add replacement buses and carsharing failures to the mix and you get … stress. Quite a lot of it. How I missed my bike that takes me anywhere in Berlin within half an hour. Notes to self (things I already knew):

• Berlin is a slow city – accept it.
• Don’t get attached to Plan A for small things like this.
• Learn to handle stress better.

Eventually it didn’t matter and I watched the keynote online instead.

Reflecting afterwards, I realise that my experience is very similar to the discrepance between the perfect, imagined timetable for Japanese commuter trains – 基本ダイヤ (kihon daiya) – and how the trains actually run – 実施ダイヤ (jisshi daiya). Michael Fisch describes in An Anthropology of the Machine how the gap between the ideal state and the actual outcome is continuously finessed by the commuters. Handling stress better would in my case mean to better finesse the margin of indeterminacy in life.

As for the rest of the conference, I probably I chose my talks badly, because I was disappointed by the low quality and lack of substance of several of them. Obvious exception: Cory Doctorow and a couple of others, especially Eva Wolfangel. I think the organisers want to create the feeling of a multitude of talks, whereas the real attractions actually always take place on stage 1 and 2. The rest are fillers, put bluntly. But seriously, if you choose to speak at a conference, at least show some showmanship! Entertain us!

I also joined in an intimate Ask Me Anything with Cory:

(Top/featured image by P. Shiah.)

I did two classes from the conference, Poetic Framing on Monday and Media Activism on Tuesday. The former is not graded, and with all the exciting content coming up in Immersive Technologies, I think I will choose that one as my other course to be graded it (alongside Space & Place). We only choose two graded courses. I could also write an essay in Transcultural Film Workshop and choose to be graded in that one, but it would almost be a bit too easy. I don’t want to feel as if I’m doing a job – I want to be truly interested in the subjects I write about.

I spent the weekend writing the first half of the “shitty first draft” of my essay for Theory and History. It’s wonderful to finally start writing after spending the last two months or so devouring relevant papers!

Study

Media Activism

• Boyer, Dominic (2012): From Media Anthropology to the Anthropology of Mediation. In Fardon, R. et al: The SAGE Handbook of Social Anthropology (?), pp. 383-392.

Immersive Technologies

• Grau, Oliver (1999): Into the Belly of the Image: Historical Aspects of Virtual Reality. In Leonardo, Volume 32, No. 5, pp. 365-371.

We watched two videos in preparation for class, and I think they were each other’s opposites:

• Nonny de la Peña’s TED talk The Future of News? Virtual Reality was a great example of how VR is the logical next step in the evolution of how we take in news and other stories. My spontaneous comparison would be TV’s impact on the Vietnam war. It had an impact because it took the viewer there, to the middle of the action, in a way that print journalism had not managed to. Likewise, VR takes us further than TV. But it’s basically the same – just an enhancement, an amplification of the sensory experience.
• Alex Kipman’s TED talk The dawn of the age of holograms, on the other hand, was a mishmash of empty phrases that mixed up key concepts such as reality and technical terms like holograms, AR, VR. He tried to convince us that his product lets us break free from our screens and connect to people for real, like we used to. Revolution rather than evolution, that is. When in fact the main difference is that the screens are closer to our eyes in VR/AR. And the dismissal of smartphone technology, rudimentary as it is, completely forgets that the smartphone too lets us connect to real people. At the end of the day the interface doesn’t matter. Human interaction (or the gameplay) does, and we’re willing to see through the rough edges if the main purpose is fulfilled. Save us the this-product-will-change-your-life crap!

Theory and History essay

• Colligan, Colette (2003): “A Race of Born Pederasts”: Sir Richard Burton, Homosexuality, and the Arabs. In Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 1-20.

Other

Articles

• The Economist:
  • Graphic detail: Satellite data shed new light on North Korea’s opaque economy
  • Why Pakistan lets Arab bigwigs set falcons on rare birds
  • Jamaica’s cannabis gamble
  • Tech’s raid on the banks
  • The tricky task of policing YouTube
  • The brewing conflict between America and Iran
• Soranews24: 40 things our loveless reporter felt using Tinder in Japan
• The Book of Life: On Self-Assertion (via Youtube)

The third and last week of in-house classes started with intense editing of our failed project in the Transcultural Film Workshop. We made a seven minute movie where we reflected on the process. We named the movie FAIL – and it was a success, being much discussed after the viewing Wednesday night. I really enjoyed working so intensely in a group again, something I haven’t done for many years. I was reminded of the most intense days of magazine making in Stockholm. I always prefer to work alone, so it was good to be forced to do some teamwork.

On Thursday we had the first class in the course Poetic Framing in the morning and a guest lecture, Queering the Gaze, in the afternoon.

Thursday night was the grand finale of this semester’s in-house: Barbecue and the screening of our final projects in Digital Anthropology. Great closure! I got many positive comments from my classmates about my film on Japanese shota. The comment that made me most happy came from M, who said that it was very scientific.

Finished Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. What I take with me is the sound of the shutter, rather than the photographer’s eye, as the key to the Photograph, and the idea that the Photograph equals death. I commented on page 14:

It is the death of the captured situation, the captured time, which will never ever exist again, but which has been captured in the Photograph.

This lends sadness to the practice but also a mutual understanding between object and photographer: We die together. We share a moment of micro-death.

I picked up a book from an Amazon haul almost ten years ago: Gay Shame. I had miscalculated my interest back then and also had the wrong approach to academic anthologies (I was still reading cover to cover), so I put it away unread. Now it was a better fit. I began with Kulick’s and Klein’s article on Brazilian travesti sex workers. Loosely connected to my essay for Theory & History. But mainly I read it out of personal interest. And I really like Kulick’s style of writing.

S attended a film festival in Cannes where his film was screened. Unfortunately I couldn’t come, since my own film was screened in Berlin!

Study

Theory & History essay

• Cervulle, Maxime and Nick Rees-Roberts (2008): Queering the Orientalist porn package: Arab men in French gay pornography. In New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Volume 6, Number 3, pp. 197–208.

Extra

• Kulick, Don and Charles Klein (2009): Scandalous Acts: The Politics of Shame Among Brazilian Travesti Prostitutes. In Gay Shame, pp. 312-338.

Other

Book

• Barthes, Roland (1980): Camera Lucida. 119 p.

Articles

• The Economist:
  • Why Julian Assange should be extradited
  • Julian Assange’s fate may lie with Sajid Javid
  • Notre Dame
  • Japan’s Self-Defence Forces are beginning to focus on China
  • Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, is determined to raise sales taxes
  • Chaguan: Hope remains for Western solidarity. Look at embassies in Beijing
  • Chinese money is behind some of the Arab world’s biggest projects
  • Raya al-Hassan takes on Lebanon’s warlords—and the patriarchy
  • The right-wing Finns Party does well in Finland’s election
  • Charlemagne: The problem with EU foreign policy
  • In “Machines Like Me”, Ian McEwan asks an age-old question
  • Business this week
  • Is insectageddon imminent?
• Jason S. Farr, Travis Chi Wing Lau: Twitter Helps Us Build a More Inclusive Academy
• David Bryant Copeland: Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design

Podcast

• The Intelligence:
  • India’s enormous election, and more from our daily podcast (21 min)
  • The fire in Notre Dame cathedral, and more from our daily podcast (19 min)
  • Indonesia’s election, and more from our daily podcast (22 min)
  • The [redacted] Mueller report, and more from our daily podcast (21 min)
• Babbage: How AI powers Amazon (24 min)
• Actual Fluency Podcast: AFP 151 – Andrew Feinberg: Learning Japanese and Japanese Culture (83 min)

Film

• Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992, 100 min)
• Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017, 104 min)