For over a month, now I have been wresting with ideas about education, training and ethics.  Last night, I received an email from a student asking me if we could have an extra class added into my course in applied epistemology so that everyone who is presenting could have more time for their presentations.  In [...]

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This past weekend, I was down in Kingston at the biennial IUS Canada conference presenting a paper on the use of ethnographic knowledge in Romano-Byzantine military PME (Professional Military Education) as part of a larger session on “Educating for Cultural Awareness” organized by John Hawkins.  It was an interesting session in a lot of ways, [...]

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I just finished re-reading a very interesting post by John Matthew Barlow over at the CT Lab on Objectivity and Revisionist Historiography.  Towards the end of it, he notes
As the American historian Peter Novick notes, the idea of objectivity in history is about progress, moving towards some objective truth about the past. But this is [...]

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I’ve been heavily involved with the Hamdan Symposium over at the CT Lab, and a lot of the time I had for blogging (which isn’t all that mch :)) is being taken up over there for now.  Things should get back to normal over the weekend.

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Note: This is a very difficult post for me to write.  The difficulty doesn’t lie with the subject area but, rather, in what language I will have to use in order to try and communicate my thoughts on the topic.
One of the axiomatic assumptions that professions, as a group, seem to hold is a taken-for-granted [...]

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One of the nice things about being a pessimistic romantic is that one can still have a sense of wonder about everyday things.  That sense of wonder kicked in again today upon reading a very nice, plain English exposition by Cobalt on why Anthropologists working with the US military can be unethical (actual, “a dick”; [...]

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Galrahn over at Information Dissemination, just produced another brilliant piece on the realities of 21st century networks called The Challenges of the 21st Century Conversation.  While the subject of the post is US Naval “evangelists” (”Champions” in business terms), the post itself examines the complex interplay between narrative, myth, discourse control and the role of [...]

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In much of the debate over the past several years on the potential ethical dangers of the relationship between Anthropology and the Military, the vast majority of the ethical concerns that have been raised have, to my mind, been based on a collectivist model of ethics (aka “morality”).  I’ve noted this in a several posts [...]

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Canadian universities are suffering from an ethical failure of nerve.
Many of us have become diffident about our roles as professors, administrators, staff and students. We seldom engage in genuine debate about the university’s role in society. We seldom discuss the good and bad uses to which our research might be put. We seldom ask ourselves [...]

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CTlab member Brian Glyn Williams, PhD, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, recently testified as an expert witness for the defence in the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, “Bin Laden’s Driver”, in the first US military tribunal since World War II. He has since been interviewed about the case on National [...]

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