Archive for the 'photos' Category

In a professor’s house

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Earlier this fall I wrote to someone I’d met at Paris-8, a professor, to ask if we could meet and talk about campus politics. “Actually I just dropped out,” he said. (By which he meant “retired,” though it was in difficult institutional circumstances.) “But you’re welcome to come visit me in Brittany,” he added. Not [...]

In the Minister’s office

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Last weekend, under the auspices of a program called European Heritage Days, I went on a tour of the offices of the Minister of Higher Education. I’ve been in the building before for various academic events, but, unsurprisingly, the part that has the Minister’s office is separate from the part that ordinary visitors usually see. [...]

Photos of an Irish university

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Last month I was in Maynooth, Ireland, for a conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. It’s a small town outside Dublin, beside a canal full of lilypads. I went through a grim suburban railroad station in Dublin on my way there. But in the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, there was a pair [...]

Higher education marches against xenophobia

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Last weekend there was a march in support of immigrants and against the expulsions of the Roma from France. The march was called “In the face of xenophobia and the politics of pillory: liberty, equality, fraternity,” and was a commentary on increasingly harsh French policing of immigrants this summer. My friend Moacir, who came to [...]

Geometrical space in French universities

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Looking back at my photos of Toulouse 2-Le Mirail, I’m struck by a common visual trait: the sheer repetition of cartesian grids in academic space. The very tiles on the walls are gridded. The bars and grills of the windows recede along their grid towards an unreached vanishing point. In a courtyard at Toulouse, the [...]

La Manifestation: a fictitious political collectivity

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Une manifestation is the French term for a protest march in the street. It’s a pretty standard local political ritual, mocked and memorialized by local jokes and international stereotypes alike. “Don’t bother going today if you don’t feel like it,” an  American grad student tells me one day when I feel lazy, “there will always [...]

The activist poise

Friday, May 14th, 2010

In case you wondered what campus activists look like in Aix, here are some people who were distributing tracts for the election I wrote about earlier. This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew [...]

Student elections in Aix-en-Provence

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Last week I went to visit Aix, which might become one of my major fieldsites next year. The university building itself was falling apart; as it turns out, it was the one featured in last year’s complaint about the physical decrepitude of French universities. In spite of the physical decay, it was all lush with [...]

Occupied “free space” at Paris-8

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

For about two weeks this month, a large space by the entrance to Paris-8 was occupied by students. It had formerly been a coffeeshop operated by a private company, but had been closed months or years ago. To enter after hours when the campus was supposed to be closed, you had to climb up on [...]

Urban surrealisms in the metro

Monday, April 12th, 2010

There are times when I feel like ethnography should be less about seeing the local point of view and more about prying free all those sights, events, phenomena that are locally invisible. For everyday life, in my fieldsite at least, is full of little absurdities and small surrealisms that seem to pass without notice. For [...]