Having been involved in the early baby poops of Project: Carousel! – it is a delight to see the new buzz of energy here.  I am also glad to have handed the reins over to …

Last day at work – last seminar – last postlude at the Carousel!  Wishing you all now good luck on the essay crunch and I will see you all on the other side.  Do let …

Mentioned this old old essay from 2003 in the theory reading group on Virilio so I thought it would nice to re-air it here.  This essay was actually an interactive multimedia presentation where clicking on …

Knowledge works in mysterious ways. So just to give you Carouselians an idea of what is going on, here is a recent conference proposal I will probably submit for the IAMCR conference in Braga, Portugal this summer (together with a friend of mine). The abstract below:

The routine is pretty much set. Even before a festival peeks from the horizon the plans are put in place. Large groups of boys in the age group twelve-twenty start moving around in herds ringing doorbells at neighbourhood homes, creating a gherao like atmosphere at the doorsteps. They argue and bargain with gentle intimidation for ‘chanda’ or cash contribution from households. They carry standard receipt books and give out signed copies making the activity seem ‘official’. Niggardly or ill-tempered shooing away can however get a household in trouble. These kids may find innovative ways to punish the members in the coming months unless they decide to create a scene right away.

A mental note to myself – go see Avatar! Meanwhile, however, please find below a great compilation / analysis of Chinese viewpoints to the film from our fellow MA from SOAS, Andy Yee. Andy is is currently graduate student in Pacific Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and I am trying to get him to contribute more to Carousel! in the upcoming months. Looking forward to another post-essay-coitum term of interesting writings / projects on the site. Crossposted from Global Voices Online.

There is a time for abstract science and then another one for things…the works of my youth…I henceforth find old, precisely because they are very learned or strictly under surveillance. Luckily, the more one writes, the younger one becomes. Finally, no more surveillance; finally, I can play truant – no more school at all (Serres)

Following our reports about the plight of SOAS (ex-)student Hossein Derakshan HERE, the plot around his imprisonment now thickens even more. Now Newsweek is accusing him being a spy behind the current Iran trials aimed at arresting many of the opposition figures.

For seven years, I used to read Editor: Myself, while sipping on my morning coffee. Hossein, had chosen this name for his blog to reflect his protest to the censorship he had known in Iran. Once landed in Canada, he had started his blog in Persian and English, opening the way for an impressive wave of socio-political movements in Iranian recent history. Iran is one of the rare countries where blogging is the most influential way of communicating among its youth. Through blogs, otherwise imprisoned minds are set free and ideas flow with no constraints.

One of the first times I noticed Hossein was during our weekly seminars put on by the Media and Film studies department. I don’t remember the details of the presentation, but I do remember a smarmy smooth talking woman presenting ways in which to frame the Israel/Palestinian conflict on news programs … Again, my memory is fuzzy on the details, but I remember that when the floor was opened for questions, and Hossein posed his, it made the woman so angry that she demanded he leave the room and refused to continue the Q & A.

We have now finally gotten peer-review comments back from a book that I have been co-editing the past year. The book “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will now be published sometime 2010 after a few relatively standard changes / edits / modifications. My chapter passed without any edits required so quite happy to avoid the extra work.

For those especially theoretically inclined, a recommended event in recent trends in Continental philosophy.

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY

Subject and Appearance
On Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject and Logics of Worlds
Friday 20 November …

THURSDAY CLUB OPEN CALL ** THURSDAY CLUB OPEN CALL ** THURSDAY CLUB
OPEN CALL FOR PROJECTS & PROPOSALS

The Thursday Club is an open forum discussion group for anyone interested in the theories and practices of cross-disciplinarity, interactivity, technologies and philosophies of the state-of-the-art in today’s (and tomorrow’s) cultural landscape(s). The Club is supported by the Goldsmiths Digital Studios (GDS) and the Goldsmiths Graduate School.

In an ongoing effort to reinvent itself, Project: Carousel is launching a new monthly feature to acquaint its readers with interesting and important people/organizations working in the field of global media and cultural studies. These people/organizations have, through their work, made some kind of a difference to the lives of people around the world – a difference that has made a difference.

(UPDATE!  The continuing discussion in NYT has made me edit my post a bit.  Please note that I have specially erased references to the comment that I referred to as I know now a bit …

At the Africa Gathering conference for the past couple of days. Interesting and inspirational talks as is usually the modus operandi of this community of technologists, entrepreneurs and more general world savers. I have always thought of these events a bit like church sermons – so I approach them as such. Less critical discussion but a lot of agreeing and being on the same side of solving problems. So what is often more interesting than the “meaning” of these events is to look at the machinic assemblages that are formed between the organizations spaces, people, technologies, desires, networks so on an so on.

During the past month I have been working on a pilot project in Ethiopia that combines two unusual bedfellows: mobiles phones and climate change. The idea has been to develop a system that would channel carbon sequestration funds to hundreds of thousands of rural farmers in Ethiopia in support of their reforestation efforts. A simple concept: more carbon tied to biomass through growing trees; more money produced. All of this would be then mediated by the mobile phone from data gathering to calculating biomass patterns to remuneration. This talk will present some of the problems and challenges the use of mobile phones raises in a country such as Ethiopia. It will look explain the current stage of the pilot project, describe some of the technical and political challenges we have encountered as well as extrapolate some broader theoretical implications of trying to leapfrog the digital divide through the use of mobile technology.

Wishing here all new students a warm welcome to SOAS! The project you see here – Project: Carousel! – is a student-led online community working under the auspices of the Center for Media and Film Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Our aim is to eventually become a key resource in media and film globally; a site that will help encourage and provoke discussion and connections between students, academics and media practitioners across the world.

At the workshops in Porto currently.  A lot of the activity/discussion here takes place on Twitter: follow/search the hashtag #isdt09 if interested. Interesting first day: the talk currently demystifying the Obama campaign as being the marketing …

The recent situation in Iran has caused quite a lot of debate amongst intellectuals, academics and philosophers in the West about how they should respond to it and what the role of the public intellectual should be when faced with such “events.” The revolution in Iran has a long history of fascination amongst Western intellectual and commentators; Foucault’s infamous writings some 30 years ago come to mind. Below is a selection of some of the writings – including Zizek’s piece that had been making the rounds. How do they compare?