Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Monthly Archives: May 2007

The Difference that Theory Makes

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 14, 2007

A Monday morning driveby post: I was just reviewing some materials for a discussion I’ll be leading later today, and ran across the following quote from Michael Zinzun, reproduced in Leonie Sandercock’s “The Difference That Theory Makes” (1998 Towards Cosmopolis, p. 85). The quote captures some of the visceral tension involved in advocating for the [...]

Critical Theory

Motive and Lack of Opportunity

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 13, 2007

Students in one of my courses have an assessment task that requires them to read one common text each week, and then to choose at least one additional text from a list of supplementary works. The common text lays out certain basic concepts I want all students to be able to discuss, while the supplemental [...]

Teaching

Flights of Fancy

5 Comments Posted by on May 13, 2007

While I have been distracted from serious writing, a beautiful cross-blog discussion has broken out, provoked by an unlikely source: Zizek’s ill-conceived review of 300. In many significant respects, this cross-blog discussion shares some concerns with the discussion of apocalypticism from earlier this year – and, once again, I find myself intervening at an extreme [...]

Conversations, Critical Theory, Negations, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Random Thoughts on Difference and Consensus

7 Comments Posted by on May 11, 2007

I’m thinking at a positively glacial pace at the moment, distracted by endless marking and other matters. In the strange half-life of thought that has resulted from this, I’m finding various fragments of recent discussions bouncing off of one another in my memory – largely random, but I think there’s an associative connection somewhere there. [...]

Conversations, Critical Theory, Interdisciplinary, Links

Explaining Research Proposals

6 Comments Posted by on May 9, 2007

I’ll try to write something substantive again later in the week – at the moment, I’m absolutely drowning in marking, which leaves me no time to have interesting thoughts, let alone pull them together into something others might want to read… For my own reference as much as anything else, I’ve tucked below the fold [...]

Courses, Methodology, Teaching, Writing

Industrious Inaction

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 3, 2007

Scott Eric Kaufman has gone on strike, refusing to add new posts to his blog until a particular comments thread reaches 500 comments – terms and conditions apply, see blockquote for details: There will be no new posts on Acephalous until there are 500 (five hundred) comments on this one. The person who posts the [...]

Blogging, Links, Procrastination

Emoticon

5 Comments Posted by on May 2, 2007

My three-year-old son often tells me stories about his day when I pick him up from “school”. There’s a somewhat random relationship between the stories and anything that might actually have happened. Sometimes he’ll tell me something that happened at some point in the past, but not that day. Sometimes he’ll retell a story that [...]

Family

Newer posts →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.