Freie Universität Berlin

It sometimes feels like most of what is written in academia are proposals for funding – most of which propose research which never actually gets funded. Kind of weird, isn’t it? Empirically, proposals may not actually be the largest amount of text, but they clearly are important. More often than not, proposals decide if something gets done. This is true also for many other areas, like working in NGO’s or even within large firms. A lot is about pitching an idea to someone with the funding. Now, unfortunately, I cannot offer real funding, only an opportunity to practice. In our session on July 15th, we will be hearing a number of pitches – and three will be selected to “be funded”. This will be as fair or unfair as any such selection process – what if 5 or 8 proposals are amazing? Well, it is a good thing its only imaginary money that way. You all get to practice and feedback on your pitch. And here is, how this is going to work.

The proposal

Everyone, who wishes to receive a grade in this class, must e-mail me a PDF (!) of their research proposal by Friday 8th of July. All proposals will be uploaded to the protected section of the blog by Saturday morning. These are the basic requirements for the proposal:

• The proposal must address an issue related to the class, but may suggest empirical research related to the theories we discussed. You are not restricted to using issues addressed in the third phase.
• The proposal should outline research that could be done in a Master’s thesis or short project lasting no longer than 12 months.
• The proposal should be approx. 1500 words in its reworked version – as usual this limit applies not so strictly for now, but for the final version.
• The proposal should be structured to include the following:
  • State of the Art
    This usually describes all relevant literature of the field in question and points out the remaining deficiencies – preparing for your research questions as alleviating these. Obviously, I do NOT expect you to read everything on even the smallest possible issue. But I would ask you to do a preliminary literature review and show, where there is a gap in the literature you have read, i.e. which question remains open and why it should be answered.
    This is where you convince the reader that your research is important.
  • Research question and method
    State clearly which question you will answer and how this answer will be achieved. State any hypotheses you will have, methods that will be used and the outcomes you expect. If there is any obvious challenges, say how you wish to address them. Say, how the research will be summarised and published (Can you think of novel ways?).
    This is where you convince the reader, that the research can be done.
  • The plan
    Usually, proposals lay out a timetable for the research, as well as the finances required. Let’s suppose there is simply a fixed amount to be had and therefore no financial calculation is needed. Devote a brief section of your proposal to just a timetable. What will be done when? How long are the steps going to take? Anything happening in parallel?
    This is where you convince the reader that you know what you are talking about and have the organisational skills to get it done. 

Don’t be discouraged if writing a proposal is difficult at first. Remember that this is an exercise and the paper we read on the 15th is only the first version of even that exercise. It takes practice – and few people get funding on the first try. In fact, funding rates are so lousy, that even seasoned professors have proposals rejected (most just don’t tell). But feedback rates in our class are amazing, so this will not be for nothing, I promise!

Everyone – especially those who are going for certification of participation – have from Saturday, 9th of July, to Friday morning, 15th of July, to read all proposals. Get a first impression and maybe even do a preliminary rating according to the following criteria:

• originality and relevance
• research question and literature
• demonstrated ability to complete the research (methodology and appropriate planning)

The session

Consider July 15th your big day! You get to pitch your idea to an expert committee! You will have three minutes to say:

1. What makes your research important and original
2. How you are going to go about completing it
3. Why they should give the – imaginary – money to you

You may use presentation software, but you don’t have to. Keep in mind, that three minutes are no more than 1-2 slides in a normal presentation (some styles allow for more, but remember our time limit).

There will be three panels – I will publish next week, how they are comprised, as I will try and group them thematically. The committee will award “funding” to one proposal in each of these panels. In order to do that, committee members will be allowed to ask questions for at the most 10 minutes. After that there will be a brief 5 minute recess in which the committee makes the decision and than the result is briefly communicated and the reasons for awarding to this proposal are given by the committee. Yes, it is quick and dirty, but experience says that many longer research proposals don’t get much more consideration, either, for there is so many of them.

As usual if you have any questions, contact me! I look forward to this session.

Expect a text on posthumanism on Wednesday….

Actor-Network-Theory starts from the assumption that all the ways in which we have hithereto understood actors – as natural, social or constructed – are inadequate in an age in which technology plays such an important role (Latour 1996). Instead, Latour and others have suggested to think of humans and things as networks – or associations – which form an integrated whole. The argument is not, that they are the same. But the argument goes so far, I believe, to argue that there is no reasonable way to differentiate between the ways things and technologies shape the world an the way in which we humans do. In fact, they are so intermingled, that we can never attribute an action purely to one or the other. My personal favourite is the example of the door:

By robertsharp (originally posted to Flickr as Downing Street) CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

“Walls are a nice invention, but if there were no holes in them, there would be no way to get in or out; they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that, if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyone can get in and out (bears, visitors, dust, rats, noise). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door, which, although common enough has always struck me as a miracle of technology. The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge-pin: instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledge hammer gently push the door (I am supposing here that the lock has not been invented; this would over-complicate the already highly complex story of this door). Furthermore, and here is the real trick, once you have passed through the door, you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed; you simply push the door gently back (I ignore for now the added complication of the “pull” and “push” signs).” (Johnson 1988: 298)

The door, in other words, ‘acts’ in the sense that it is replacing and thereby transforming the action of biological and social actors. This effect may well be used to create certain behaviours – for example when hotel keys are given out with large heavy metal objects hanging from them to make people remember not to take them home…

So far, so simple. In a way, this kind of thinking is just one variation of the ways in which human-technology interaction has been described in Science and Technology Studies, the strand of sociology focusing on just such interactions. It comprises a broad spectrum of ideas, from more deterministic perspectives to the favouring of social construction. However, ANT has its own distinct perspective. We must rethink any social actors ability to act and consider the ways in which we encounter technology that – in fact – acts upon us. To a reader pof Foucault, of course, this is no entirely alien idea. The panopticon may well be viewed as a a technological representation of the surveillance society. However, with Foucault that is as far as this goes. Latour (with Callon and others) goes further and asks us to consider society not as constituted by social actors but think instead of associations.

In a way this asks us to abandon the idea of a natural self. The individual is inseparable not just from the next individual or its social relations (as in constructivism), but also inseparable from the material objects that surround us. It is not so much that we are cyborgs but that we must acknowledge that our being cannot be understood unless we think of ourselves as part of associations of things and humans/animals. Our mobile phones are mediating and shaping our social interactions – and we would be different if they did not exists.

Of course, thinking of my phone as doing something rather than a tool is challenging and slightly disturbing. It has its charms, though. And the anthropomorhisms we use with regard to many technological objects are an indicator that the whole idea is not as counter-intuitive as one might suspect: Computers can have bad days, traffic lights have it in for you and the printer usually tries to screw you over just when that paper is due – like they knew. Surely, this does not mean that the theory is useful with regard to scientific analysis of social and political phenomena.

Latour’s analyses, interestingly, do not focus on current network technologies – he works with much simpler and seemingly antiquated examples. However, in one paper he addresses the issue of globalization and clarifies some things with regard to the ways in which ANT relates to the problems we look at in political science. He raises one question, that I find most interesting:

“Is space this inside which reside objects and subjects? Or is space one of the many connections made by objects and subjects?” (Latour 2009: 142)

What if we are all constituted by the connections we make – and if we consider these might be very different in nature – space, time, function, emotion etc? How would that work? And how is it different from other ways of making the self? This is what I would be most interested in.

I have to admit, Donna Haraway‘s “Cyborg Manifesto” – despite its shortcomings – wows me every time I read it. I am not sure if it is the fact that this text – so eloquently describing changes that seems so very real today – was actually written in the 1980ies, when none of the things that seem to make us cyborgs today were part of everyone’s everyday life. Or it might be the sheer amount of different ideas brought together and interwoven, from science fiction to Marxism to feminist theory. Could be this text wows me because its style is so radically different from the usual academic writing, because it dares to speculate, antagonize and call for action. Or maybe, because it does all of those things at the same time. If I look closely, I find that the argument is not all that clear and some twists seem out of place to me. I am not always sure, there is even such a strong conclusion in there. However, this texts achieves what good political theory – in my humble opinion – is supposed to do: it provokes thought and triggers the imagination. In fact, it sends me down a spiral of exciting new thoughts whenever I return to it.

Haraway and companion, By Rusten Hogness, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Haraway introduces the cyborg as what she calls “an imaginative resource” (292). The cyborg is an image that stands for embracing what Haraway identifies as three “crucial boundary breakdowns” of the contemporary world — between human and animal, between animal-human (organism) and machine, and between the physical and the non-physical (293/4). She suggests this image in order to launch a criticism of feminist discourse that questions its very basis – the idea that there is something about being a woman that naturally binds women. according to her there “is not even such a state as ‘being’ female” (295). The contemporary self, she argues, is fundamentally fractured. She asks then, “what kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective – and, ironically, socialist-feminist?” (297).  This is usually where I associate the Zapatistas and the peculiar way the Zapatista discourse manages to connect different struggles without levelling out the differences. Of course, their inspiring example also teaches us about the possible limitations.

Having tackled the concept of identity, Haraway goes on to question the postmodern conception of “biopolitics” and argues instead to think of the contemporary self as being constructed within the “informatics of domination”. This kind of domination works not through division and the imposition of categories but through permanently dissolving them, by blurring all distinctions and thereby disabling the crude (post-)modern tool of resistance – identification. Coding and information processing (rather than categorizing and subjectivation) are the ways in which this domination manifests itself. In its most advanced form it can eliminate the natural unity altogether – when in microlectronics there is copies without originals (303) or, as we would say, the digital copy is indistinguishable from the original. This is evident not just in purely digital environments but also, for example, in genetically ‘identical’ beings such as clons or identical twins where there is indeed differences inscribed in the genes themselves (Casselmann 2008). Even the genetic code of a living breathing person may change over the course of their life. In other words, coding always means recoding and there is never a wholly identical copy. The process of communication transforms all information and negates the possibility of complete identity.

The cyborg as a resource for political imagination – how does that work in the informatics of domination? Haraway draws on literature in order to give her answer. I have a “literary” cyborg of my own in mind. In the Start Trek universe there is a race called the Borg

Seven of Nine, a borg made from a human recoding as a human

(clearly, not the most original of names). These Borg procreate by “assimilating” other species, making their “technological and biological distinctiveness” part of their collective consciousness. The Borg absorb difference and create a unified whole in which individual distinctions are denied in favour of a collective unity. They are awfully efficient and – needless to say – the ultimate villains of the liberal consciousness. In one installation of the franchise, a young female, designated Seven of Nine, (incidentally dressed in a very revealing costume for the rest of the series…) is “freed” from the collective. It turns out, however, that she cannot be fully re-transformed into a human – some cybernetic implants remain as well as – more importantly – many character traits. Throughout the series the character remains trapped between being Borg and being human, never fully emerging as one or the other. She struggles with defining and re-defing herself and there is no choice for her than to remain in between. Interestingly, the franchise offers many more of these characters – the robot “Data“, who looks so much like a human and interacts with humans like a human but lacks emotion like a radicalized version of a vulcan. The half-klingon B’Elanna. The holographic doctor with the complex personality subroutines. Outside the Startrek Universe we could consider the Terminator or Marvin, the paranoid android. If we think of their struggles not as ones that seek to cross the border between human and machine but rather as continuous struggles for acceptance of the lack of any clear boundary, we may find the inspiration Haraway sees in the image of the cyborg. Just like Seven of Nine can never be fully human nor return to be Borg, we may never be woman or man, German or European, white or black but only ever the something that struggles to cope with lack of clear distinction between these categories.

What sounds like a grim outlook may be the one strategies that alleviates the effects of the informatics of domination. As nothing is fixed, the domination is constantly challenged by the very mechanisms that maintain it. Resistance is not about overthrowing domination but about continuing to struggles along the lack of clear boundaries. It is about turning the struggle into the purpose. Maybe that is why Haraway ends on the optimistic note:

I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (316)

Thank you all for voting for the texts we will read in our next three sessions. Sadly, Heidegger didn’t make the cut – he came third. This, however, gives posthumanism a chance, a topic I also look forward to.

Interestingly, these choices address one of the improvements you suggested – more diversity. We could hardly have found a more diverse set of texts and I hope we will enjoy it. Here is the order in which we will be reading them.

Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto

This text is somewhat of a classic in the area. Haraway connects feminist, socialist and technological ideas in order to come to a new idea of who we are/can be. It was written long before many of the technologies that we use every day became common place but already shows great insight into the possibilities digitization has created since the 1960ies. We may also find some unlikely parallels to the Zapatistas.

Latour: Power of Association

Latour is a sociologist and founding figure of what has become known as ANT (Actor-network-theory), a somewhat sidelined and – according to its proponents misnamed – strand of Science and Technology Studies. The innovation here, in short, lies in conceptualizing objects as actors and analyzing networks of actors, human and non-human, also called associations. This raises some interesting perspectives. The text I propose focuses on power and associations and may offer some interesting additions to the power debates we have already had in class.

Badmington: Posthumanism

Posthumanism might – or might not – be something to look out for. It has been discussed as one of the conceptions that challenge modern notion of humanism and human nature. Badmington’s article places post-humanism in context to postmodern thought and would allow us to discuss the idea in relation to our earlier readings. I welcome the opportunity to dive into something I haven’t worked on a lot.

On Wednesday, you will find a post on the first text – Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.

I would argue peer review is the central mechanism of subjectivation in academia – in and through participation in peer review one is created as an academic. The  idea is quite simple really: by having one or two experts in the field review a text, an editor of a journal or a book evaluates the presented findings for competence, significance, and originality. Peer review is supposed to discern “good” research from “bad”. It has actually evolved along with science and was first documented for scientific findings in the 18th century (Benos et al. 2007). The idea is appealing and it sort of makes sense – let people comment, who know their stuff and make sure, that research is worth reading.

Academic excellence today is largely determined by the ability to publish work, that has undergone what is called a double blind peer review (what you have done this week, sort of). The work shall be examined without looking at the person who created it and the reviewer shall be freed to say what they believe without considering possible consequences for themselves. In a system that trades in mutual recognition that seems a reasonable way to avoid that people stray from an objective judgement of the work. The blindness of the review, ideally, makes it possible for a junior expert to challenge a seniors research without having to fear for their career. And, part of the reason we tried the double blind review now is, that one reviewer in the open peer review we did last time remarked, that they felt distracted by the fact that they actually knew the person.

By Nikolaus Kriegeskorte [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

However, recent years have seen a number of significant criticism of this system and these criticism concern all of the expected benefits. Firstly, peer review does not, in fact, prevent the publication of research that contains errors – reader discretion remains advised. that does not mean, it does not contribute to making more obvious flaws visible – but no guarantees! This is, of course, most relevant in the natural science, where the production and collection of data is central and may be reproduced. Secondly, it is usually not that blind. The more limited the number of experts in a field, the more likely it is, that one can guess who wrote the review by considering from what perspective they criticize the argument. Thirdly, peer review tends to favour those who make small innovation within the orthodoxy. Findings and approaches that are weird, “out-there” or radical have a much harder time becoming part of the mainstream. Notable cases include articles rejected by “Nature” – the leading science journal – which presented research that was later honoured with a Nobel Prize (Kilwein 1999). The reasons are simple – radically new approaches are less proven and experts are more likely to doubt their validity.

In social science this later point has another twist to it. I have been the recipient of a number of peer reviews and one thing came up again and again – reviewers saying that, since they were doing this, whatever I was doing was obviously less important and innovative but might be made into something useful if it was more like what they were doing. No kidding. Those comments are not even evil, they are honest. Obviously, I think what I do is more interesting and innovative that what other people are doing – or I would what they do! This leads to some weird results when implemented – which are best illustrated by this comic. It is fairly accurate and has brought me great enjoyment.

In order to counter these problems and regain some of the good things about peer review – like getting suggestions from other smart people on how to make the paper even better – a number of variations have emerged. They are not as recognized as the good old double-blind, but maybe there is hope yet:

Open peer review

This is what we did for the first essay. Things here are not necessarily about judgement, but more about engaging in a conversation. At least ideally. The fact, that the researchers know each others names cannot just encourage restraint in a bad sense and make them less critical. It might also make them take the whole process more seriously. I once received a  paper back with a review that read – in its entirety – “This is a dull and boring paper not worthy of being published.”. I wouldn’t want to judge the truth of that statement, but it surely wasn’t what I consider an appropriate, professional response. I am all for open peer review, because I still have some questions (like: Why?).

Post-publication

The most radical break comes from abandoning the underlying principle – that publication is dependent upon peer recognition. Post-publication review means that work gets commented on after a first publication and it is left up to authors to amend their arguments as criticism arises. ScienceOpen is a platform that promotes this approach. It harnesses another essential of academic life – professional discourse. The idea is, that scientific debate will show the soundness of the arguments but that there is no argument for preventing ideas to be published. Surely, the internet has made this possible,, as cost have become a smaller factor. However, getting people to publish and review in these new and as of yet unrecognized settings is a challenge. For the most part, if you want to go somewhere, avoid any experiments such as this….

Clearly, I have an opinion on the matter. I would be interested in hearing yours – so go ahead and comment. Please, keep the anonymity of our little review process up as long as you can. I would like to use the opportunity during the next session to talk about the best ways to collect, receive and engage with comments on one’s work and this works best if you keep this “double blind”.  See you Friday!