Archive for the 'photos' Category
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 [...]
Posted in france, photos, space | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
Posted in france, photos, politics | 2 Comments »
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 [...]
Posted in france, photos, politics, space | 5 Comments »
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 [...]
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Sunday, April 11th, 2010
After nights of fieldwork, ethnographers have to make their way home. For me, after I get off the metro, the walk looks like this: Except that the first time I try to take this picture, the camera focuses on the lines in the the bench where I propped my camera. When we correct for this [...]
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Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Last month I went to a debate organized at the Sorbonne, “Is the university burning?” (L’Université brûle-t-elle ?) Appropriately, it ended in chaos; but midway through, there was a bit of performance art. Actors in masks, some with stockings over their heads, made a pretend argument for burning the university. For the foreigners in the [...]
Posted in absurdity, france, photos, politics | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
In the Philosophy Department at Paris-8, the biggest philosophy classroom is located just beside the department offices. It has a variety of curious things on its walls. A painted character hangs from a coat rack. He appears striped. Bald. Stretched out by the neck. Striped shoulderbag too. My friend Emmanuel proposes that we translate this [...]
Posted in france, pedagogy, photos | 2 Comments »
Sunday, February 7th, 2010
Early this monday morning, I happened to be in a lecture hall at Paris-12, down in Créteil about as far as you can possibly get from my apartment and still be on the paris métro. I arrived in the room about 8:03am, an hour before anything was happening there. It was dark and empty. Amphi [...]
Posted in france, photos | 1 Comment »