is a combination of a few things:
One could think about it as the autopsy of an academic CV. A CV is designed to tell only so much. It registers the outcomes of a long, from time to time playful, often arduous but rarely simple process of knowledge production. What labour and play goes into the two-line-entries in terms of making, thinking, getting inspired, and mindwormed in and through various assemblages is what is displayed in this blog.
As you can see, it is a different organization of scholarly knowledge. Its cartography does not only highlight the hubs, but does so along with lines and curvatures that connect them to their aleatory paths, hidden inhabitants, and unexplored fields of potentialities. Ideas don’t appear in solitary (at least not for me). They may come as an answer to a question in the classroom, in trying to formulate a response to a public talk, while joking with friends, visiting an urban milieu for the first time … but rarely when I am alone, say, as I am taking a walk, or brooding on my desk. (That’s why I hardly understand the ever so quintessential link formulated between walking and thinking, or walking and ideas.)
In fact, as a student and scholar of Science Studies I know that walking and/or brooding solitarily is not how scientific ideas / facts / concepts are made (not emerge, not found, not discovered). This is true as much for Newton (see Simon Schaffer’s fascinating account of “Newton on the Beach“), as for big science organized around giant labs and institutes and centers. Its the product of interactions, collaborations, gatherings, talks, debates… on- and off-campus. It is a mycelium rather than a tree.
And so is this blog…..
To be continued…
Sanem Güvenç 