The Cambridge Chat Thread

Well if you have any questions I can tell you everything about that. I can also fish out specific good Bourdieu quotes for it, or send you my word document where I just typed up select bits from Outline of a Theory of Practice as I read through it.

I gave Latour a go over the summer after my dissertation supervisor insisted I'd have to know about him to write on Bourdieu. I was very underwhelmed. Maybe I wasn't patient enough.

That would be really quite appreciated , thankyou. I've studied him for a couple of years, on and off, obviously not in the depth that you have, and it would be interesting to see another approach to him, even if we both broadly agree with his program.

It depends on what you're looking for in Latour. His major project, besides yet not disimilar from ANT, has been to redress what he sees as a disjunction between the prominence attributed to society over the material world, in which case he is one of the chief taproots of Materialization studies. He seeks, as it were, the place that habitus emerges from. You can encapsulate this approach in that aphorism of his, that "a pilot does not fly, nor does a B-52 bomber; the U.S. airforce flies". Like Giddens, he looks for the structures where technological choice, knowledge, tradition, practice, materiality, and so on, intersect and create the ontological world. He's particularly useful for archaeologists of my approach, those interested in STS (science, technology and society). Have you read Alfred Gell at all? Doing this makes Latour a lot easier to 'position'. I'm more skeptical about his epistemology of science side, but that's not something I have any time to pursue, really .

Is there anything objectively worse than circuits? (in the electricity moving sense, not in the huzzah let's get fit for rowing sense)

ML?

Anyone fancing linking me to this mythical place I can maybe find supervisors reports?

Anyone fancing linking me to this mythical place I can maybe find supervisors reports?

Is there anything objectively worse than circuits? (in the electricity moving sense, not in the huzzah let's get fit for rowing sense)

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http://www.camcors.cam.ac.uk/

Login in the top right (Raven). I get three links, it should be obvious.

Yeah, all the mechanics/pendulums swinging stuff before that. I just can't get a handle on it for some reason. Circuits I'm still mince at, but I can blunder through it a bit more easily.

with circuits it got to the point that I'm handing in incomplete problem sets not so much because I can't do them but because I just can't face the tedium of drudging through the questions...

Thanks guys.
This years reports unavailable.
Looked over some of last years, pretty depressing reading really!

Ugh, supervisor is being difficult. Emailed us an assignment "due on tuesday", is now sending me and my supervision partner angry emails asking why we haven't handed it in. And they think the supervision was arranged for a time different to what me and my partner have written down - a time I cannot make. So frustrating!