[IS/MDIA 590]Yohta's Workspace-Community Data

Week5(2/13)

The Mismeasure of Crime p. 1-23.
(Clayton J. Mosher, Terance D. Miethe, and Dretha M. Phillips)

The difficulty of measuring crime data
Reliability, Validity, and Sources of Error in the Measurement of Social Phenomena

→critically examine the data and theoretically explain the cause.

Several factors potentially affect the cause of results such as:

→Selecting a precise indicator is important 

The initial steps in measurements are to:

(1)clarify the concept one is interested in and
(2)construct what is known as an operational definition of the concept

Potential sources of errors in the measurement of social phenomena

Potential bias from a questionnaire

Respondents

Question

1. Any guideline to help researchers validate their data, or at least improve its validity?2. Who should take initiative in community decision making?
I understand it is important to measure data critically. However, for some issue, it can be problematic when all the stakeholders see an issue critically and make no action.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective(Donna Haraway)

We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance of life.

Feminist objectivity(≒situated knowledge):

→Feminist embodiment resits fixation and in insatiably curious about the webs of differential positioning.Feminism is about the sciences of the multiple subject with (at least) double vision.
Feminism is about a critical vision consequent upon a critical positioning in unhomogeneous gendered social space. (p.589)

"Vision" in the context of feminism

"The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity"
Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. (p.583)
Passive vision, learn from what we see.

Question

1.This article relates to the discussion last week about objectivity and subjectivity. A dichotomy of objectivity vs subjectivity might not be the right question  Rather, answering the following questions might be more important.2. A real-world example of feminist objectivity seemed slightly unclear to me. Any concrete example?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Mushroom at the End of the World On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins(Anna Tsing)

A critical argument for "progress"

Why would expect economies to grow and sciences to advance? 
There might not be a collective happy ending. 
-Be critical in where we going, what for.
-Look ahead, rather than look around.
"Progress felt great; there was always something better ahead. Progress gave us the “progressive” political causes with which I grew up. (p.24)"

"Twentieth-century scholarship, advancing the modern human conceit, conspired against our ability to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds."

Precarity: the condition of being vulnerable to others.

"A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible."

Some Problems with Scale

Yet it is just these interruptions that step out of the bounds of most modern science, which demands the possibility for infinite expansion without changing the research framework.

Scalability:

        "Thus, too, scalability banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things."(p.38)
        →e.g. Sugarcane clones 

Matsutake: Doesn't fit a conventional flame of scalability?

→"Matsutake resist the conditions of the plantation. They require the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest—with its contaminating relationality. (p.40)"
→→Matsutake commerce does not occur in some imagined time before scalability. It is dependent on scalability—in ruins. (p.40)
"Matsutake had stimulated a nonscalable forest economy in the ruins of scalable industrial forestry. (p.42)"

Is scalability good?

"But it would be a huge mistake to assume that scalability is bad and nonscalability is good."(p.42)
"The main distinguishing feature between scalable and nonscalable projects is not ethical to conduct but rather that the latter are more diverse because they are not geared up for expansion."(p.42)

Question

    1. Tsing's Critical argument for progress has some elements in common with the idea of traditional history by Foucault. And this is not the only issue in Western society.

As economy stagnated, some workforces in their 50~60s(predominantly male) in my country find it difficult to adapt themselves to a paradigm shift that progress is not a natural outcome of their work.
Not everybody can change their value instantly. So once the "progress" stopped, how does that affect us, especially those who have persistent value in it?  

    2. There are many cases that the policy worked in a community doesn't work in the other community because of scalability.
      How a policy gauge scalability of the project before implementing? What would be a criterion?