Bureaucracy is so deadly dull because it’s so mundane. But, as Steve Woolgar points out in his book Mundane Governance, the Latin etymology of ‘mundane’ is ‘of the world’ - just the way things are. And that’s only true of your experience with bureaucracy if you belong in the world in which you are living. If, as a grown-up, you’ve had to do any adulting in a country where you’re unfamiliar with the rules, then you'll know that bureaucracy becomes anything but mundane because you are not ‘of the world’ in which you’re trying to operate. So in this post, I want to draw on an experience from my fieldwork to explore how mundane bureaucracy, when you’re away from home, can be a stark reminder that you are ‘matter out of place’.
Talking like a child: Language learning for anthropology fieldwork
In preparing for fieldwork, I took a class on language training with Piers Kelly. While Piers was talking more specifically about learning in a context where a language hadn’t been written down before or had very limited resources, I think there was a nice takeaway for any learner of a second (or third, or more…) … Continue reading Talking like a child: Language learning for anthropology fieldwork
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It's our 1st birthday in 2 weeks time (nooo, say what?? Where did that year go?) and a birthday is always a good time to take stock. Are we where we want to be in life? Are we using our time in the best possible ways? Are we spending the desired amount of time with the people we love and who care about us? So, we thought we would just... ask. Would you, pretty please, take our 5-minute survey and give us feedback about what's working for you, and what we could do better? Find the 5-minute survey here. We are hoping to get 100 people to respond to this survey, and are giving away 2 x $100AUD Amazon gift vouchers as thank yous for your participation. That basically means you have, at worst, a 1 in 50 chance of winning a gift voucher. Not bad odds! On the anniversary of our website launch, Monday, October 1st, we'll choose the 2 winners at random from the pool of survey participants who provide their email addresses at the end of the survey. If you're a winner, we'll contact you to find out what country you are in, and send you the Amazon voucher through your preferred Amazon country site. We really look forward to getting your feedback, positive and negative, and any suggestions you have for the future of The Familiar Strange.
Ep. #22 Just the way things are: Steve Woolgar talks mundane governance, & the rules that run our lives
"Although this stuff is very ordinary, very day-to-day, very unremarkable... it's actually quite dangerous, too." Steve Woolgar, emeritus professor at the Saïd School of Business at Oxford University and giant in the field of science and technology studies (STS), spoke to our own Jodie-Lee Trembath about the little niggling rules that we run up against … Continue reading Ep. #22 Just the way things are: Steve Woolgar talks mundane governance, & the rules that run our lives