Thursday, January 31, 2013

Afer closing a door God always opens a window.

Just as I was whingeing about the cost of interdisciplinary opinion-swapping, a mail from King's College came in with an invitation to a Methodological Choices and Challenges conference.  Yeeppie, this is SOOOOO me! I finally get to chirp to fellow interdisciplinary whales! And it's just down the road in Aldwych.

Interdisciplinarity will cost you!

Apparently, there are kindred souls out there: a conference dedicated to Interdisciplinary Social Sciences is taking place for the eighth time, in Prague. They are going to talk about pretty much everything under the sun: such is the nature of holistic approaches to understand the world.

It costs some to talk to the like-minded though: one is to cough up 450 US dollars upfront before one even opens one's mouth to air out one's cherished thoughts on "the psychology of the social" or "social sciences addressing social crisis points". It is to the editorial board of the Economist that I am leaving the sheer delight of tracing the price list for a conference in a Central European university posted in US dollars to the former Communist allies' pro-American sentiment (just remember the sellout of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in 1938). I will instead meditate entirely on the irony of the sheer astronomicity of the price for an impecunious PhD student like yours truly, whose main academic interest is exactly interdisciplinary research. Time to think of funding alternatives.

That said, I am also curious what is the most common disciplinary background among the participants, as, from my own experience, not all faculties are equally interested in intellectual cross-pollination. In fact, to date I am yet to meet a single lecturer in my school with academic pursuits reaching beyond their department, let alone faculty.  

Friz Klein's Sexual Orientation Grid

Apparently, in Gender Theory lectures in SOAS they tell young defenceless minds that there are five genders.  If it is so, then the way those genders interact can't be possibly squeezed into a the flat two dimensional Kinsey scale. So here's a better thing to try t account for all the rainbow hues that human sexuality can take on: Fritz Klein's Sexual Orientation Grid.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The mythopoetic lords of our world

Subconscious energy percolating through the mythic symbols of our minds creates reality around us. Our vital energy, the libido, is biological, however the way we use it is defined by enculturation, which happens via internalsing myths in the form of fairy-tales, religion, social norms, life-stories, common sense, stereotypes, etc. Whoever creates the symbols controls what we do with our lives, by channelling the libido for particular purposes. 

People raised on the symbols cooked up in corporate meeting rooms and newsrooms are virtual puppets of whatever ideology is prevailing: consumerism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism.