signalnoise

I survived the geographers. My panel was the last session of the last day and it was on infrastructure. I'll leave you to imagine the size of the audience given those parameters. Suffice it to say, people were not turned away at the door.

One thing I did learn: geography is sort of weird. Most academic disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, are pretty sprawling entities. In other words, they are open to lots of methods and lots of research questions. But, despite that, you can usually find some good, core threads running through them. Like, you know, political science is usually about power, institutions, or political behavior/attitudes.

But, honestly, I have no idea what the fuck geography is about. I mean, I guess "space." But what the hell does that mean? I saw papers on news media, the Orientalization of commercial space, debt relationship between former colonies and their former colonizers, and the marketing of ethnic districts. I won't add to the confusion by digging into the cartography, remote sensing, spatial statistics, or computer mapping panels. You could see plain as day that geography is clearlyl being torn apart by very mathematical, empirical researches and very flighty, would-be philosophy types. It's an awkward, painful stage.

The best paper of the weekend was one I KNOW TheFuckOffKid woud literally have freaked out about. I know I was. The woman was doing some research on how the presentation of a country in the news media changes the way folks who emigrated from that country ("the diaspora") viewed their homeland. Now, this is not an inherently bad question. I'm sort of curious about it my ownself.

The problem is the method: focus group. Why? Well, here's why: One piece of evidence is a man who arrived in Canada 24 years ago, when he was six years old. He thinks the media has tarnished his view of Iran ..... and the presenter agreed or concurred. But, what the fuck? I mean, maybe his view of Iran was tainted more by his *parents* who *left Iran* than anything he saw on TV? Of course, in a focus group you can't measure that ... Though, a nice regression analysis where you control for "parental ideology" would cut right to the quick of the question. Of course, I'm sure econometrics are oppressive or some shit like that...

The paper only got better when the woman argued that we need to have news media that is sensitive to people from other countries, and I guess says nice things about their home. Which I guess I support. Though, I'm not sure how we do that. After all, what is the essential "true form" of a nation-state? Take Iraq: Should the media present the Kurd Iraq? Or the Shiite or Sunni one? And what about what Iranians or Kuwatis or Gulf War vets think of that presentation? Pretty soon your cute policy of inclusion turns into a goddamned mess. Worst of all - now my evening news is a mess of human interest stories. I'm a voter with limited time and resources. I don't want to know nice, fair and balanced things about other states. I don't have TIME - I want to know about important issues like Iran wanting to get nuclear bombs, funding terrorism, or the fundamentalists nutjobs in chargs posturing to blow up the US or Israel. This is the information *I* need to make policy choices.

Don't get me wrong - I don't want a misleading, jingoist media. But I also don't want a media so wrapped up in being "fair" or "sensitive" that the important messages get drowned out.

I won't even get into the papers that babbled about "The Virtual."

Worst of all: No one in the audience calls them on the shit.

Thank god my panel had good case studies, cool models, and people talking about "principal components analysis."

I always feel bad when I don't like other people's papers. It's not about them being rough, or early in the process. It's not about empirical work over theory. It's about the name dropping, or about not having hypotheses and jsut being descriptive. It's about not having a theory, not building new knowledge. I don't want to be an elitist jerk - after all, who says my dissertation will say a good goddamned thing right? But boy ... just yea: boy oh boy. It's hard to sit there sometimes.

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