Jonathan Mair

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  • CRASSH Project: Speaking Ethically Across Borders

    I am currently a research fellow at CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, at Cambridge University. One of the things I’m working on is an interdisciplinary project on ‘Speaking Ethically Across Borders’. Right now I’m planning a reading group on the topic for next term. The outline is below, […]

    December 7, 2012
  • Cross-cultural conversations at cross-purposes

    Part of my argument in the recent neoliberalism debate was that, evidence of discontent about any aspect, be it ever so narrow, of what have been identified as neoliberal transformations is taken, without further justification, as a rejection of all of the phenomena that have been so identified My point was that just because lots of people […]

    December 5, 2012
  • GDAT 2012: Debating “neoliberalism”

    On Saturday I had the pleasure of taking part in GDAT, an annual debate on anthropological theory hosted by Manchester University. GDAT, the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, was started in the late 80s by Tim Ingold, and has been organized and chaired more recently by Soumhya Venkatesan. This was the third GDAT I […]

    December 5, 2012
  • Evolution and Religion Part III

      This post is the third in a series in conversation with Martin Michael Blume, prompted by his original post on www.scilogs.com. See my first post, Michael’s reply, and my second post.  Dear Michael, Thanks again for taking the time to engage with me earlier. Sorry that this is a bit of a long reply… In your comment […]

    November 18, 2012
  • Evolution and Religion Part II

    This is a reply to Martin Michael Blume’s comment to my previous post, which was itself was a comment on his blog on www.scilogs.com. Martin Michael — Thanks for the links (reproduced below) and for engaging with my comment! I’ve read those two papers now –they are thought provoking and contain some great lines (“evolutionary theorists brought […]

    November 18, 2012
  • Evolution and Religion

    The explanatory power of evolutionary theory is clear. However, these days, people seem to rush to evolutionary explanations for all sorts of real and perceived human behaviours. The danger of doing this is that in going straight to the question of the origins of what we’re trying to understand, we fail to put in the […]

    November 16, 2012
  • Ignorance and Power, Critical Studies in Education 50(3)

    Here’a another exercise in the anthropology of ignorance, this time focused on ignorance in education — a special issue of Critical Studies in Education from 2009. The introduction, by Neriko Musha Doerr explains: While resonating with Bourdieu’s theoretical formulation that it is relations of dominance that create the legitimacy of knowledge, this project pushes a […]

    October 31, 2012
  • Ignorance Mobilization – Joanne Gaudet

    I’ve just come across the work of Joanne Gaudet, a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa who has been working on issues of ignorance and the productivity of ignorance from a sociological — and especially sociology of science — point of view. She has a website with a number of interesting looking working papers […]

    October 31, 2012
  • Paul Stoller: Social Engineering and the Politics of Ignorance

    Paul Stoller has a post on the Huffington Post on education, ignorance and politics. Some of what he has to say relates to policies that aim to constrain the acquisition of knowledge. Here’s one example I find particularly astounding, not because it is an unusual position to take historically speaking, but because it comes from […]

    July 5, 2012
  • Cultures of Ignorance: CFP, 17th World Congress of the IUAES, Manchester 2013

    Jenny Diggins (Sussex) and I have just issued the following call for papers for a panel on the anthropology of ignorance, to be held at the IUAES Congress in Manchester next summer. Feel free to get in touch if you’re considering submitting a proposal but want to discuss it first.    Call for Papers at […]

    May 31, 2012
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Jonathan Mair

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