Tensegrities

Juan Cole points to a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Seems like we ought to at least listen to what our senior military scholars are noting, right?

Also, a quick note about the Association of Internet Researchers conference this coming October in Denmark. I wish I could go, but I won’t be able to. Check out their list of presentations and abstracts, just to get a small sense of what people are thinking about in this field.

Thanks to Paul Walker for this link to a slideshare of a presentation by Simone Heidbrink on social media and Christian practice. I think I find much to agree with in the presentation, although her earliest slides about substituting “social media” for “Web 2.0″, although probably accurate, are an issue more for scholars than anyone else I think. Still, I’d like to find a way to be in conversation with the author, particularly given my own presentation planned for later this week (sorry for the long download time, I need to figure out how to put this Keynote presentation up at Slideshare).

I’m at the Media, Religion and Culture conference in São Paulo, Brazil, and just got done watching a really compelling video of some ethnographic work that Patricia Bustamente is doing with the Nasa people of Colombia. So it is interesting to come back to my room to rest a bit (which meant I opened up my RSS reader for the first time in days) and find that the first piece I opened up had a link to this post about the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

The day was actually yesterday, August 9th, but I figure there’s something mystical reminding me of it today — and in any case, we ought to be aware of these issues more than one day a year anyway.

I’ll try to blog more about the conference, but during it I’m so caught up with the discussions that I haven’t found myself blogging. You can read Lynn’s posts, however, and as I find more people blogging the conference, which I’m sure will be out there, I’ll update the list here.