Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour

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Herbal medicine and risk constructions: representations in Australian print media

“Geography has fallen on hard times” is how Harvard economic historian David Landes (1998, p. 1) starts his book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. In the first two chapters, Landes gives a candid and often blunt assessment of geography as a discipline. To Landes, the abolishment of geography at Harvard and other Ivy League universities was well deserved because of geography’s inherent intellectual weaknesses. Landes identified, among several others, three salient features of our discipline: “the lack of a theoretical basis, the all-embracing opportunism (more euphemistically, the catholic openness), the special easiness of human geography” (Landes, 1998, p. 4). It is indeed a bitter pill for geographers to swallow when our colleagues in other disciplines make such stinging remarks about geography. But the fact is, from time to time, geographers’ works truly deserve this kind of honest judgment. Dear and Flusty’s (1998) article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (AAAG) on “Postmodern Urbanism” is just one recent example (among many others) of this kind of work. I declare my position without any postmodern ambiguity. Although Dear and Flusty (1998) present some interesting points, their paper fails to present a set of coherent and convincing arguments. Not only are numerous arguments in their paper self-contradicting, but the paper’s overarching theme—to establish the Los Angeles School of postmodern urbanism—is problematic. Far from shedding new light, the authors generate a little heat at best or, at worst, create lots of smoke that clouds rather than clarifies our understanding of cities. I hope this review symposium will blow away the dense smoke that Dear and Flusty have generated in urban studies. In this commentary, I will first comment on Dear and Flusty’s postmodern urbanism, followed by brief remarks on postmodernism in general. I do not believe we can gain a clear understanding of Dear and Flusty’s postmodern urbanism without touching on Dear’s larger agenda: to promote postmodern geography.

Postmodern urbanism disrobed: or why postmodern urbanism is a dead end for urban geography

Today’s conflicts between the views that the humanities hold of science and engineering and the views science and engineering hold of the humanities weaken the very core of our culture. Their cause is lack of integration in today’s education among subjects that hark back to the medieval trivium and quadrivium. A new trivium is needed to provide every educated person with a basic understanding of the endeavors and instruments that help us address our world and shape a new morality—the humanities, in the noblest sense of the word, to civilize, science to understand nature, and engineering, broadly defined, to encompass the kindred activities that modify nature. Integration of these endeavors is urgent. It involves, in turn, an intimate interaction (the “biosoma”) of biological organisms, society, and machines—a new quadrivium. No domain can any longer be considered and learned in isolation.

A New Trivium and Quadrivium

This article examines the design of digital indigenous knowledge archives. In a discussion of the distinction between indigenous knowledge and western science, a decentred perspective is developed, in which the relationship between different local knowledges is explored. The particular characteristics of indigenous knowledges raise questions about if and how these knowledges can be managed. The role of technology in managing indigenous knowledges is explored with examples from fieldwork in India and Kenya and from web-based databases and digital archives. The concept of contact zone is introduced to explore the space in which different knowledges meet and are performed, such as indigenous knowledge and the technoscientific knowledge of the database. Design for the contact zone, this article proposes, is an intra-active and adaptive process for in creating databases that are meaningful for indigenous knowers. The meta-design approach is introduced as a methodology, which may provide indigenous knowers tools for self-representation and self-organisation through design.

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Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science

Citations

Networking the (Non) Human: Moby-Dick, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Bruno Latour

Herbal medicine and risk constructions: representations in Australian print media

Postmodern urbanism disrobed: or why postmodern urbanism is a dead end for urban geography

A New Trivium and Quadrivium

Design for the contact zone: Knowledge management software and the structures of indigenous knowledges.

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