BLISSFULLY LOST – A Documentary on HIV/Aids in Western Europe

Tuesday, Dec 2nd 2008 17 –21 h Screenings 17.30 and 19.30
wine reception and discussion

Bennett Room, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Keppel St, London WC1E 7HT

‘I could be way off the mark, but I don’t think anyone’s that bothered –
not with Aids anyway’

In their first work together South African filmmaker Darell Lourens
and German medical student Nele Jensen take advantage of their
different backgrounds to explore the perceptions of HIV/Aids among
Western Europeans in their 20′ and 30′ and the influence of decades of
public discourse on the collective conscience. Interspersed with
testimonies of professionals working in the field and people talking
about the impact that contracting HIV had on their life, the individual
stories intertwine and transform into a narrative that gradually
anatomises hegemonic images of HIV/Aids. Entrapping the audience
through its rawness and unvarnished characters BLISSFULLY LOST
not only challenges them to face their own personal bias and to question
their own tacit understanding of invincibility. Ultimately it highlights
the need of public discussion to reinvent its draggy approach to the
HIV/Aids situation.

GB/DE/FR/BE/NL/ZA, 2008, 58mins

Trailer: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JA0w8mVKOFc

ta, Uli

The ANTHEM group will be meeting from 4 to 7pm on Thursday 27 November 2008 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. We will be discussing a recent paper by Graham Harman, entitled “The Assemblage Theory of Society,” which examines the philosophical assumptions behind Manuel DeLanda’s Deleuzian assemblage theory, while contrasting it with the ontology of Bruno Latour. The main themes of the paper are realism, assemblage, essence, and emergence. We also expect Graham Harman to join us at some point (assuming his flight arrives on time).

If you are interested in attending this discussion, please contact Peter Erdélyi for a copy of the paper and for further details. Due to room capacity limitations places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

see: http://www.anthem-group.net/2008/11/20/anthem-session-graham-harman-on-assemblage-theory/

This meeting is the first in a series of annual meetings which aim to foster an environment of exchange and learning across different geographical approaches to science and technology. The aim is also that the network would be of interest to both PHD students and early career academics.

More details of the network can be found at: http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/projects/gsprn

A bit far away perhaps, but the university of Nijmegen in the Netherlands is organising a lecture series on doing post positivist research. Speakers include: Annemarie Mol, Mike Crang, Andrew Sayer and Jacob Torfing.

for more info please contact me or check the website

http://www.ru.nl/socgeo/content/currentprogramme.html

Bas

I have to admit that the term ‘relationality’ does not resonate for me (yet); while I subscribe to the tenants (such as Barad describes above–ideas of an emergent ontology from the interaction between agents), the idea of multiple ontologies and ontological politics is most compelling for my own work.

I draw heavily on Mol’s idea of the multiple object:

What does the multiple object mean for birdwatching? I use the term enactment to describe birding as an activity that through its practice makes and remakes itself. In other words, birding is a dynamic practice that changes its “shape” given a particular set of actors in a particular context. The significance of thinking about birding this way lies in the multiple ways people interact with birds, birds with people and both birds and people with the landscape. The importance of this research is not in uncovering and cataloguing what kinds of bird-watching-acts are out there, rather, it is about what might be made in the relations of “watching” birds; what is brought into being through the various enactments. Birding is a form of inter-species sociality and a kind of intervention in the always-social nature of the world. Thus, if these engagements between people, birds and place, called “birding,” occur in more than one way, or in multiple ways, then I am suggesting that these enactments can also be conceived of as a multiple object.

Perhaps in my argument of an always-social nature of the world, rationality is just another way to describe it.