30DoS 2020 - Day 9
Online Town
Online Town “is a video-calling experience that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel and lets you walk in, out and around those conversations just as easily as you would in real life. It’s also fun.” Online Town is like Zoom, but you set up a location that people can move freely in. As you approach someone, your video comes into focus. As you move away it fades. Great for holding large group meetings and tutorials. Unlike tools like Zoom, Skype, and Teams, it’s fully encrypted and no data is stored.
Link to website: https://theonline.town
There is not YouTube channel yet.
Canguilhem, by Stuart Elden
Elden Georges Canguilhem (1904–95) was an influential historian and philosopher of science, as renowned for his teaching as for his writings. He is best known for his book The Normal and the Pathological, originally his doctoral thesis in medicine, but he also wrote a thesis in philosophy on the concept of the reflex, supervised by Gaston Bachelard. He was the sponsor of Michel Foucault’s doctoral thesis on madness. However, his work extends far beyond what is suggested by his association with these thinkers. Canguilhem also produced a series of important works on the natural sciences, including studies of evolution, psychology, vitalism and mechanism, experimentation, monstrosity and disease.Stuart Elden discusses the whole of this important thinker’s complex work, including recently rediscovered texts and archival materials. Canguilhem always approached questions historically, examining how it was that we came to a significant moment in time, outlining tensions, detours and paths not taken. The first comprehensive study in English, this book is a crucial guide for those coming to terms with Canguilhem’s important contributions, and will appeal to researchers and students from a range of fields.
Link to book: https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509528776
Deborah Lupton
Deborah Lupton has a background in sociology and media and cultural studies. Her research combines qualitative and innovative social research methods with sociocultural theory. Lupton’s research interest is in digital sociology, including topics such as critical digital health studies; critical data studies; self-tracking cultures; and digital food cultures. Her ‘more-than-human’ perspective draws on New Materialism, that addresses conceptualising the boundaries of living and non-living entities. Instead of using the more widely used term ‘posthuman’, she prefers to use ‘more-than-human’ because it better encapsulates the entanglements of humans and nonhumans. More-than-human implies that the human always already incorporates the nonhuman, and the nonhuman incorporates the human.
Link to Lupton’s blog: https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/
Publications:
Lupton, Deborah (2016). The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity.
Lupton, Deborah. (2019). Data selves: More-than-human perspectives. Cambridge: Polity.
Lupton, Deborah. (2019). ‘Things that matter’: Poetic inquiry and more-than-human health literacy. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, , 1-16. doi:10.1080/2159676X.2019.1690564