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Archive for methodology
by gtdonovan on June 27, 2010 at 8:53 pm · Filed under critique, ecology, methodology, nature, participation, quotes, Robbins
From Political Ecology, p12-13:
As critique, political ecology seeks to expose flaws in dominant approaches to the environment favored by corporate, state, and international authorities, working to demonstrate the undesirable impacts of policies and market conditions , especially from the point of view of local people, marginal groups, and vulnerable populations. It works to “denaturalize” certain social and environmental conditions, showing them to be the contingent outcomes of power, and not inevitable.
… In this sense, political ecology is something that people do, a research effort to expose the forces at work in ecological struggle and document livelihood alternatives in the face of change.
by gtdonovan on March 12, 2010 at 1:30 pm · Filed under ecology, Escobar, identity, informationalism, methodology, nature, quotes, technonature
From After Nature, p13:
A definition of political ecology for technonature would emphasize the biocultural configurations that are emerging and those that are possible according to particular constellations of actors, technologies, and practices. The political ecology of technonature would study the actual and potential biocultural arrangements linked to technoscience, particularly along the axes of organicity-artiflciality and reality-virtuality. It would examine discourses and practices of life and the extent to which they are conducive to new natures, social relations, and cultural practices. It is important that the ethnographies of technonature not focus on elite contexts only or on their impact on nonelite communities; they should also explore the locally constituted cultural and material resources that marginalized communities are able to mobilize for their adaptation or hybridization in the production of their identities and political strategies
by gtdonovan on March 5, 2010 at 2:23 pm · Filed under Castells, ecology, environmentalism, informationalism, methodology, nature, quotes
From The Power of Identity (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II), pp 112-113:
By environmentalism I refer to all forms of collective behavior that, in their discourse and in their practice, aim at correcting destructive forms of relationship between human action and its natural environment, in opposition to the prevailing structural and institutional logic. By ecology, in my sociological approach, I understand a set of beliefs, theories, and projects that consider humankind as a component of a broader ecosystem and wish to maintain the system’s balance in a dynamic, evolutionary perspective.
In my view, environmentalism is ecology in practice, and ecology is environmentalism in theory . . .
From The Power of Identity (The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II), p 133:
The ecological approach to life, to the economy, and to the institutions of society emphasizes the holistic character of all forms of matter, and of all information processing. Thus, the more we know, the more we sense the possibilities of our technology, and the more we realize the gigantic, dangerous gap between our enhanced productive capacities, and our primitive, unconscious, and ultimately destructive social organization.
by gtdonovan on March 1, 2010 at 2:10 pm · Filed under ecogovernmentality, ecology, Latour, methodology, nature, quotes
From the Politics of Nature, p246:
The term does not differentiate between scientific ecology and political ecology; it is built on the model of (but in opposition to) “political economy.” It is thus used to designate, by opposition to the “bad” philosophy of ecology, the understanding of ecological crises that no longer uses nature to account for the tasks to be accomplished, it’s used as an umbrella term to account for what succeeds modernism according to the alternative “modernize or ecologize.”
From the Politics of Nature, p4:
Political ecology is said to have to do with “nature in its links with society.” But this nature becomes knowable through the intermediary of the sciences; it has been formed through networks of instruments; it is defined through the interventions of professions, disciplines, and protocols; it is distributed via data bases; it is provided with arguments through the intermediary of learned societies.
by gtdonovan on October 3, 2009 at 7:13 pm · Filed under censorship, DMCA, Google, governance, informationalism, methodology, Pirate Bay, semantic web
A reminder that Google doesn’t really search “the web,” just a relatively narrow slice of it. From Threat Level:
The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.
The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.
I increasingly hear the students I work with (and a good deal of the faculty) use Google as a synonym for the web, much as how Kleenex is has become another word for tissue. It’s similar with Googling and surfing (e.g. one might say “I was Googling David Bowie last night” when they were actually surfing Bowie fansites with little or no use of Google). Of course, no such equivalence exists — Google is a gated community. There is a boundary drawn between the regions of the web that Google (and other major search engines) will index, and the regions they won’t. What they don’t index, we likely don’t see.
That there is proprietary decision-making behind what information is — and is not — indexed, and that we — as a society — are increasingly loosing our ability to even recognize this indexing is a cause for great concern. Expecting Google to make their gate keeping an open and transparent process is ludicrous. Google is for profit, and dreaming up a contorted “free-market” rational for how it could be in Google’s best business interest to be transparent is a dead end. Google makes billions by controlling access to information, and they aren’t going to give that up. Why should they?
But what if there were non-profit, or even for profit, search engines that focused on identifying and indexing all the information Google (et al) isn’t? At a minimum, having such options might at least make people conscious of the fact that the web is bigger than Google suggests.
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