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The Institute for Research in the Social Sciences
(IRiSS) announces:
2005 Qualitative Social Science Workshop
Dr. Sherry Ortner
Professor of Anthropology
Columbia University
Serious Games: Beyond Practice Theory
The idea of serious games is an attempt to get beyond practice theory in a variety of ways to build on its basic insights, but at the same time to make it more cultural, more political, more historical, and more critical. This particular talk is taken from the in-progress introduction to a collection of theoretical and ethnographic essays that expand on various aspects of the concept of serious games.
RSVP to IRiSS-info@stanford.edu is encouraged.
Contact is Tali Even-Kesef <taliek@stanford.edu>
About the Speaker: The first half of Professor Ortner's career was concerned, empirically, with the Sherpa people of Nepal, and produced a number of books, articles, and a film. The most recent of the books is Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering. Starting in the early '90s, however, Professor Ortner began shifting her research over to the United States, with special focus on social class in America, but also covering a wide range of other issues. She has just finished her first book from this project, New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture and the Class of '58. She is thinking of doing at least one more American project, probably concerned with "Generation X" and the remaking of American consciousness since the 1970s. Professor Ortner also had an ongoing interest in social, cultural, and feminist theory. She is currently working on a series of papers about the status of "the subject" (the person, the actor, the agent, the individual, etc.-all different, of course) in social and cultural theory. (Source: http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/people/faculty_fellows/ortner.html)
About the Series: Stanford is inaugurating an inter-disciplinary workshop for qualitative social scientific research with a series of talks by distinguished scholars. The workshop's purpose is to showcase qualitative research of interest to a broad social science audience and to bring together Stanford social science faculty who employ qualitative methods in their own work. With the lecture series, we seek to present premier scholars whose work both constitutes major substantive and methodological contributions to their own fields and speaks to the interests of scholars across the social science disciplines.
Upcoming Events:
Professor Michael Burawoy, UC Berkeley
"Global Ethnography: Comparative or Relational"
April 5 at 3:30 p.m.
Professor Todd Gitlin, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
"On getting people to tell you more than they want to"
Anticipated rescheduling of workshop this May
The workshop series is supported by the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS)