Bruno Latour's Keynote at Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity

I just attended Bruno Latour's keynote address at “Reclaiming the World: the Future of Objectivity”.

It was a packed house at the U of T's Bahen Centre, and they will be putting a video recording of the event on-line shortly.

They said there was no problem if I made an audio recording, so I've attached my handheld audio recording to this blog post in case anyone can't wait for the official video copy. It's a Latour bootleg! If they ask me to take it down for any reason, I will... But they gave me the green light in person, so here it is (see the attached 1 hour itunes/QuickTime M4a clip; it's about 22 MBs -- I hope the sampling frequency is audible and the file size isn't too large for folks):

* Bruno Latour Keynote

If you're up to date with Latour's work, there wasn't much new in his talk on political epistemologies. He mostly developed ideas from his two recent works Reassembling the Social and Making Things Public for a North American audience. He also provided numerous examples of new data visualization tools and projects such as:

1) http://www.demoscience.org/
2) http://mapofscience.com/

Perhaps the most interesting part of the talk for Latour fans were the reactions to it. For example, Ian Hacking critiqued Latour's work as being an "insane phenomenology" with too many examples and not enough of a through line. Others from the more traditional and perhaps not so cutting edge U of T crowd similarly critiqued Latour’s work for not going into enough depth to develop a sense of how new data visualization projects are in fact “new” or leading to a redesign of society that is different from classical epistemologies. Also, many did not understand how networked technologies provided any resistance to dominant epistemologies.

My thoughts on the topic would be that if people are not seeing in Latour's work that new data visualization tools are "new", then they should stop using them and see what happens to their research. I believe other network theorists, like Yochai Benkler for example, would definitely support Latour’s analysis. Google, the military, and other big industries are banking on these “new” visualization tools, so there must be some reason behind it. To spell it out explicitly, beyond Latour's justifications which you can hear in the audio recording or find in his works, I would say that “new” data visualizations are "new" because of:

1) Massive Public Data Interaction: Open data access allow individuals to interact with massive networks that were not publicly available and at scales that have never before been studied, at such an instant speed of investigation (e.g. Just watch CNN's coverage of the Presidential race).

2) Automated Political-Technological Agents: The amount of technological penetration in Western society also increasingly has technology making decisions for us in our research as politically invested agents with their own in-built epistemologies that reflect particular dominant political groups. These epistemologies must be questioned and understood, especially when they do not fit into traditional epistemologies or ways of knowing.

3) On-line Discourse Domination: Decision making processes are moving on-line, and if different cultures want to be invested in science and technological decisions of "objectivity", then they have to become a part of this game, which is increasingly exclusionary.

That's my quick take on the topic. I'll write more as debate arises or time allows me to offer up more insights.

Overall, I was happy to finally hear the work of someone I have been studying for the past five years in person, and his slideshow was definitely very impressive. One of the main things that will stick with me from the talk is how the Maps of Science group and other scientometric tracking projects are demonstrating that globally there are about 12 major research clusters in the new knowledge economy of any discipline. That’s a fairly powerful data visualization of the realignment of social agents.

Okay, that's my final word, for now...

Growing Protests in Canada

Most predictions are that protests will increase in the coming years in Canada and North America as the demographic shift of power from the retiring baby boomers to the millennial generation causes structural tensions in all sectors of society. For example, many university faculty members are increasingly concerned about the administrative change to favour contractual labour and sessional positions as retirements increase, versus the more permanent positions of tenured jobs. Along with that dominant issue are the other pressures of increased class sizes, and more expectations for publication and committee work being linked with those contracts. On the student side of the issue are increases to tuition fees, decreasing quality of education and higher student debt.

We are most likely starting to see the beginning of these structural tensions spilling into formalized protests from examples such as the following:

1) University of Toronto non-violent student sit-in over new 20% tuition fee hikes that captured the police violently removing students from outside the President’s office on campus (today):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ketNtnZQIwQ

2) York University Sweat Shop Policy sit in that was peaceful and successful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow9xDYGl_gI

3) York University protest over the Iraq war in 2005 that similarly captured police violently removing students from Vari Hall on video tape, and led to two students being sent to hospital: http://uppingtheanti.org/node/1119

Perhaps surprisingly, no large student groups at Ryerson have organized around the Chris Avenir case in a similar way, but this might best be explained by the fact that Ryerson student groups are still developing at the relatively young university.

Beyond student groups, one of the main issues in North America that we may see more protests developing around concerns the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) that the Infoscape Lab has found to be growing in the Blogosphere and on YouTube:

1) A media mash up by a Vlogger concerning the SPP that has become highly watched on YouTube can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDoaYILUMAs

2) Compare that story to CNN’s coverage of the same SPP story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU3e8luD2Iw

3) The Montebello Summit Protest and the use of Miami Police Tactics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow

4) NAFTA-gate with Obama and Clinton:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLJJ88HTiX8

POG330 - Section One - Tutorial Seminar Questions

Please feel free to respond to your weekly tutorial questions at this site. Simply select the hyperlink for the "Comments" option at the end of this entry to post your response. Follow the instructions there, and you will receive a confirmation that your comment has been sent to the administrator (me, in other words).

If the answer is correct and well written, I will gladly post it for full marks. Remember to use APA or MLA style, and support your answer with statements from the original text where possible. Also, remember to bring a print copy to use in the tutorial seminar each week.