Silent lectures are intended to evoke the multiple, intertwined meanings of basic concepts. As I’ve discovered in my teaching, sometimes silence on my part is the best way to stimulate the user to become active in the process of making associations.
Each silent lecture is self-timed. After downloading the file, click on slide show; the powerpoint should run automatically. If you are an instructor, you’re welcome to use the silent lectures in your course. I’d appreciate your feedback.
Have You Been Tested?
“Have You Been Tested?” That is the opening sentence of the introductory essay for a Special Issue on the Sociology of Testing in the British Journal of Sociology, for which I and my University of Warwick colleague, Noortje Marres, are guest co-editors. We wrote that sentence prior to the winter holidays. It is uncanny.
Put to the Test
This silent lecture was prepared for the workshop, “Put to the Test: Critical Evaluations of Testing,” Warwick in London, December 10-11, 2018. You’ll find it here as an approximately 4 minute video.
Ratings and Rankings
This silent lecture was created to for the workshop “Performances of Value,” Warwick in London, May 4-5, 2018 and is now available on the YouTube site of the journal Theory, Culture & Society.
Performance
Musicians, dancers, and actors perform; and audiences applaud. Coaches and sports statisticians measure athletes’ performance. Companies monitor the performance of their employees, stock markets register the performance of firms, and at the semester’s end students are asked to evaluate their professors. Top Ten lists are ubiquitous; online ratings of restaurants, movies, and books abound; and we are frequently asked to rate the reviewers. This slideshow explores the interplay of the real-time skilled achievement of effective performance and the evaluative principles of measurement. From the bedroom to the boardroom, pharmaceutical companies and management consultants promise enhanced performance. We live in an age of performance anxiety.
Demonstrations
What is an effective demonstration? Protestors demonstrate. Engineers demonstrate their inventions. Rock bands, technologists, and website builders make demos – working models at various levels of completion that point to capacities for further development just as a protest demonstrates capacities for further escalation. An engagement ring signals commitment and demonstrates future earnings potential. This slideshow explores the interplay of political, commercial, and technological demonstrations. A Steve Jobs’ demonstration of a new Apple product is orchestrated to resonate with Mac or iPod users as a quasi-social movement. And before it was a film, Al Gore’s slideware demonstrated the threat of environmental catastrophe. Demonstrations are important for a vibrant democracy. Because political and technical issues are increasingly intertwined, effective demonstrations are likely to mobilize charts, graphs, models, and simulations no less than the mobilization of protestors in the street.
Models
We live in an age of modeling. This slideshow explores the interplay of models as representation and experimentation. A model can gesture to some exemplary, even utopian, point. As a figure of imagination, it can be a guide, a model, for action. Models can also represent the current situation or state of knowledge, whether of protein folding, a national economy, or the urban environment. But as we also know from the practice of fashion designers and architects, a model is not simply a means to represent a final product to the client but is also a method for testing and experiment. Examples here include: the extraordinarily detailed scale models of a real estate developer, the hydrological model of the Keynesian economy, and fashion boutiques in Tokyo’s Shibuya district in which the young salewomen model ensembles which they themselves distinctively fashion.
Frequently Asked Questions
In this silent lecture, Gernot Grabher and I play with the genre of frequently asked questions. Keywords: innocence, anticipation, confusion, frustration, resignation, desperation, provocation, hostility.
David Stark 