One of the examples discussed is the use of social networking sites as a model for knowledge creation and dissemination. They discuss the affordances of platforms like facebook such as selecting the circles of audiences for different posts and the ability to receive social and instant feedback on ideas. They explore the possibility of having SNS for scientists specifically, along the lines of Academia.edu or Researchgate where scholars can post their work and the use of question functionality can generate wide discussions. They also discuss the example of Wikipedia. One of the important ways in which the wikipedia model is helpful is that anyone can contribute to a topic and that authorship can also be given to specific parts of a contribution. With the benefit of hindsight, these examples raises questions of what it means when the digital tools for collaborative authorship and publication are often owned by companies with their own policies around monetizing data and privacy clauses, and what categories of analysis should we use to analyze the affordances of these platforms in the present?
Because this is an annual review article, the authors trace the trajectory of how encounter and intimacy have been shaped throughout the trajectory of the discipline. Different terms have been used to think about this particular space, some have included “contact zone,” which theorized the space of colonial encounters in particular. Moving from one type of encounter to another, the authors then think through the term in the context of transnational capitalism. This type of encounter has been based in frictions and processes and unevenness. Ultimately, the authors theorize the space/place of encounter as complicated, complex, etc.
Wikis (not Wikipedia) are presented as a compromise between collaborative scientific publishing and encyclopedic initiatives: open platforms edited by a large group of users with content control by a core group (people who have accumulated trust and expertise through sustained engagement with the digital infrastructure of the wiki and the topic), where it is possible to see revisions and comments. A wiki's core group can set up style guides and protocols for workflow, and future users work in the consensus of the core group. Ideally, the core group is not static and users can become a part, revising how the wiki is designed and operated. Also, a wiki is not meant to perform original research, but curate instances of knowledge creation so a user can get a dynamic, hyper-linked overview of a "field". Saying that, the authors offer an example of a wiki that integrates functions of a peer-reviewed scientific journal: Topic Pages by PLoS Computational Biology. With a static version of an article, Topic Pages will contain reviews and reviewer identities to be included later in Wikipedia.
First, she describes some of her own hauntings. She writes of her journey to a conference with an abstract in hand only to be distracted by a photograph. Rather, only to be haunted by a photograph. She traces her encounter with Sabina Spielrein, a key but often forgotten figure in the psychoanalytical movement. It’s Spielrein’s absence in a photo that leads Gordon on a detour to theorizing exclusions and absences. For Gordon, “a dead women was not at a conference she was supposed to attend—requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerful real” (42). As a reader, our notions of real, imaginary, and fictional shift. We are on this journey with Gordon as she tells the story of her own shifting temporalities and notions of reality. The uncanniness of her haunting experiences are transferred (42) to us as she writes her story. Or rather as she poetically dispels her story with all of its repetitions. We feel her frustration with Freud when she looks back and sees how he once thought of the unconsciousness as being related to the social and not just a private thing, a “self-contained closed system” (47). As we read, we see the “markings of her detour” (60).
She leads us to two novels: Como en la Guerra and Beloved. Gordon prioritizes fiction, but not necessarily in a fictional sense. She focuses on their complexities and their complications. She pushes us to think of ghosts behind or in between or (beyond?) the pages: how are these absences real in the sense they have material consequences? These novels are avenues for us to understand larger social realities. They are means to counter Freud’s “self-contained” notion of unconsciousness. To understand the state terror and desparacedio of Argentina, we must wait and be open to experiencing hauntings. We must engage with ghosts, even when they aren’t our own ((164). We must recognize that our unconscious is actually accessible to “wordy consciousness” (47). We must awake to reality, much like the character in Valenzuela’s novel. And we must know that history is always a site of struggle with the living and the ghostly. Like we see in Morrison’s novel, the power of the past is always lingering (139) in the present.
One crucial example McKittrick presents is when she traces Sylvia Wynter’s argument regarding the invention of Man, asserting that present orders of existence center on discourses of normalcy. It is the development and mapping of the uninhabitable and uneven archipelagos that reveal important ways in which Man’s geographies are overrepresented. Whereas Man1 dehumanized and disembodied subaltern populations by conflating their beingness with terra nullius, Man2 sought to guarantee in its middle-class model a foundation for a “normal being” and what needed to come under racial-sexual regulation. She argues that examining Man’s geographies reveals the limitations of existing geographic arrangements. Demonic grounds, on the other hand, put forth a geographic grammar that locates the complex position and potentiality of black women’s sense of place. She introduces music as a geographic act through which blackness can be read as a meaningful part of the landscape. She asserts that black women’s geographies challenge the “just is” of traditional geography, indicating an alterability of “the ground beneath our feet.” She claims that local-contextual experiences might be read beyond the margins, as part of an interhuman story that unhinges the body-self and expresses new forms of life that contest historically present, uneven, genres of human geography. Black women’s geographies and poetics challenge us to “stay human,” invoking how black spaces/places are integral to multiscalar geographic stories and how the question of seeable human differences put spatial and philosophical demands on geography.
The authors begin by depicting the traditional path along which scholarly publications tread, critiquing such issues as the need to publish new editions and articles when new evidence is found, the lack of context for citations, and the retraction of articles/books due to scientific misconduct. The authors present the issues involved with current publications systems and how they impede on the pursuit of dynamic knowledge creation processes. They claim that the production process is not visible to the reader, that the contribution of individual authors are not visible (including honorary authorships), mistakes cannot be corrected, and scientific discourse around a publication cannot occur (or if there is discourse, those authoring the comments are not credited). There is also a high risk among authors of being accused of plagiarism for reusing certain parts of other texts, resulting in unnecessary rewording and a greater workload. This renders the question of how one might locate the new contributions to the scientific field? In addition, there are legal and technical hurdles to reusing content, despite the increased possibilities of sharing and development of dynamic publication formats with the inception of the Internet. The authors proceed to examine the positive aspects of dynamic publication formats to bring publication up to the times with the Internet’s possibilities. Dynamic publications can evolve, trace who authored which ideas/theories that led to a contribution, provide an openness via working versions of works, and allow for innovative forms of remixing and reuse. The authors depict the ways in which dynamic publishing is already being implemented, including via blogs, open peer-review processes in some journals, wikis, and stack exchange. The authors conclude by asserting that SNS for scientists may be the ideal platform to realize a dynamic publication system due to their mixture of multiple opportunities to interact and engage with other users.
The author uses the convergence between his work on emerging evangelical movements and agri-culinary movements to consider “place” as a central topic of a comparative ethnography of late modernity. He is also utilizing the concept of place to point to some valuable angles for future ethnographic research.
The author uses ethnographic examples to discuss these convergences between emerging evangelicals and food activists through the analytical categories of cultural critique, value of authenticity, and the race-class entanglements in relation to place. The author argues that three future categories that hold analytical promise for ethnographic research are: senses of place, temporality, and cultural production.
Gordon begins by tracing the haunting of Sabina Spielrein that is both personal to Gordon and to the institution of psychoanalysis. Spielrein transferred from one invisible field, madness, into another, psychoanalysis, yet still she was moved to the shadows, rejected by Freud and Jung despite her immense contributions to the field in thinking about repetition, death, and the decline of civilization. Gordon questions what psychoanalysis lost as a result, not only what it repressed or marginalized, and urges that out of a concern for justice that we reckon with haunting as a prerequisite for sensuous knowledge. She applies this concern for justice to a discussion of disappearance in Argentina and the involvement of psychoanalysis, utilizing Walter Benjamin’s materialist historiography to provoke a different, “animated” recognition of the “violence of modernization” in the complicated neoimperialism that characterizes Latin America. Unlike the thousands of rationalistic human rights reports, Valenzuela’s novel captures the haunting elements of disappearing: she utilizes the examples of the punctum that brings to life the life external to photos, both when AZ views a photograph in the newspaper and when the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo display the desaparecideos. Gordon argues that in the portrayal of loved ones lost to the state in Argentina, disappearance was not torture, death, homicide, but a complex system of repression involving not only the authoritarian state authorizing torture and death but the complacency of the middle-class; disappearance was a present and lived thing in itself, a haunting. Unlike the bag of bones representing past death and the attempt of an authoritarian state to scare its population into submission, the ghost could not be completely managed by the state.
Gordon proceeds by documenting the continued presence of slavery (without a capital S) in the United States and the unfinished (failed) project of Reconstruction, utilizing Beloved as a sociological text to create the possibility of a becoming something else in the present and for the future. She contextualizes Morrison’s project in Beloved both through an examination of slave narratives constrained by the aims of the abolition movement, yet portrayed as the “real truth of slavery,” as well as Margaret Garner’s encounter with the half-sign of Levi Coffin’s hat and his obsession with his trivial property even as he purported to “represent” her. Gordon argues that Beloved recognizes what the slave narrative forgot, creating a palimpsest, detecting that which was not erased, and pushes forth a recognition that abolition is not emancipation. In addition, Beloved shows that the ghost can be just as haunted as the living, for it is a living force that has its own desires which figure the complicated sociality of a determining formation and is embedded in the social structure of history. Crucially, Beloved calls for accountability in a way that the slave narrative could not, arguing that we must recognize where we are in the story, even if we do not want to be there, accounting not only those who do not count but are counted.
Frickel, Elliot, and a large team of student collaborators created what they call a “Historically Hidden Industrial Database” (HHID). This comprised comprehensive longitudinal series of data about the location (street address) and type of industrial activity of manufacturing in key sectors highly likely to produce localized hazardous wastes, as well as patterns of urban succession in which residential communities occupied sites where polluting manufacturing had once taken place. They drew this data from census records and from annual state-level commercial registers—works with titles like Oregon Directory of Manufacturing. The researchers found that these registers contained much more information about historical industrial activities than government-generated databases, enabling them to assess gaps in government-generated registries used for regulatory purposes and to provide present-day community members with more extensive information about possible legacy pollutants in their neighborhoods.
Tracing the historical beginnings of academic publishing, the authors are able to clearly argue for a change in academic publishing and research dissemination. We’ve moved beyond a print era of publishing and instead of trying to force old styles of print media onto the virtual platforms, the authors argue we should use these platforms to rethink the publishing process, making it more dynamic and collaborative. Virtual platforms, in particular, can provide a more rapid feedback which has its pros and cons, and will change the way scientists collaborate with each other throughout the entire research process.