China after Comparison

The school year is swinging back into action.  With the arrival of the students, the academic myths revive, and the blight of last year recedes just enough to allow us a little sun on the facade of the university’s library. 

My colleagues Andrea Bachner and Eric Hayot put together a swell workshop called, “China after Comparison."  The presentations were short, 15 minutes, so everyone had to speed along as they talked.  Some folks like to rush, other scholars need a more leisurely pace, especially if they did not go to high school in the US.

I went last in the program, which is to say I gave the postscript, the non-China scholar hanging out with the experts.  It was a delight to be a novice once again.

Ideas were battered around, positions were assumed and then denied again, some posturing did take place, some young males were trying to impress with their alpha-ness, and certain women did look on with cool interest.  But if you don’t expect every sentence uttered to sound like Foucault, if you like to toss around ideas before they are fully formed, the talk was inspirational.

So here is excellent web site that Richard So from the University of Chicago described. His talk built on the theoretical survey provided by Jack Chen of UCLA.  Together their presentations were chock full of material you probably have heard about but now get to visualize.

Check out "Poetic Networks: New Computational Methods in the Sociology of Culture"  http://home.uchicago.edu/hoytlong/