Pestilog

Two of My Favoritest Smart People

First of all, Kasia is totally hilarious. Check this out.

Second, I had a very interesting afternoon today. It was the first day back to reality for my department. The rest of the school has been suffering through their own assortment s of deadlines and draft submissions and what not. The Soc/Anth kids, on the other hand, were released like the hounds to scramble all over the globe for our field work during the month of April, and had our first departmental meeting for thesis writing today, and all 21 of us were crammed back in that corner room on the 4th floor of the Zrinyi building again for the first time since March. After being away in Ukraine for nearly a month, the discomfort of it all felt reassuringly familiar.

Today was also a special day, because Bruno Latour was a guest of the sociology department this weekend, and he presented a lecture on truth and objectivity in politics in the Monument Building this evening. I have been looking forward to his visit for months, since I have always admired his theoretical works, I have read and been totally confused by his writings since I began studying anthropology in college, and he's a crazy famous big shot.

He talked for a long time about creating sociology as an objective science, on that is bound by the thing that it studies. He said, that even if you are a shitty chemist, it is hard to write poor quality work, because you are so bound by your materials. If you mess up, your lab could explode. Whereas, you could talk circles of crap around cultural ideas. You could BS your way through entire books, and there may be few people to actually call you on it. Thought provoking sentiment--and terribly interesting considering that a large portion of this guys theoretical work has concerned the scientific production of knowledge. People cant BS about laboratory conditions? Its been a few years since I had my safety goggles on and my pipet in hand, but goodness, if there's anything that the natural sciences AREN'T, its exact and natural.

Labels: CEU, grad school, kasia, latour

posted by Veruka2 @ 8:28 PM