http://hrc.rice.edu/2016_2017_riceseminar
Excerpt
The 2016-17 Rice Seminar proposes to look at specific nodes along a
network of contemporary life. These nodes, or intelligent
"end-points" able to communicate without hierarchical agency, are the
very cities that today aspire to be mega, ideal, sustainable,
virtual, smart, or resilient formations.
Linked by computers, mobile devices, and real time sensors, these are
places where the implicit connectedness of how we ought to live
together depends on distributed networks, rules, codes, protocols,
and infrastructures, all bound by a paradoxical, if not
panopticistic, social contract now located in Cyberia.
In such cities, the social fabric continues to collude (and
potentially collide) with the very resilience of disciplinary and
control societies. The regularity of social or architectural form
has, in fact, become far less relevant than the orchestration of the
data that a city produces, collects, and curates. The promise of
democracy in the connected city is "always already" contradicted by a
strict hierarchy that either structures access to information or that
predetermines how (and by whom) the very tools of communication talk
to each other.
As Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, once put it, there is
"one centralized Achilles' heel" to the Web's otherwise decentralized
system: computers may be free to talk to each other, but only if they
abide by given naming conventions. This means that the system can, in
theory, be brought to a halt by whomever is in control of a limited
number of root name servers, which until recently added up, ominously
enough, to the mere number of 13.
http://hrc.rice.edu/call_mellonpostdocs
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows [Rice Seminar 2016-17]
The position is for July 1, 2016 through June 30, 2017. Fellows
receive a $50,000 salary, benefits eligibility, and an allowance for
research and relocation to Houston. Primary obligations include an
active participation in all aspects of the Rice Seminar and
collaborating on spatial humanities projects currently underway at
Rice. In addition, fellows will develop or continue their own
research projects and give a presentation to colleagues at Rice.
Fellows will also design and teach (or co-teach) two semester-long
undergraduate courses, the topics of which will be determined in
consultation with the HRC and/or appropriate department.
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