I'll be giving a presentation at George Mason's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution on February 9 on research methods and crowdsourcing in conflict affected settings. As I've been preparing, I've been lucky enough to have the input of the TechChange team and in particular the inimitable Rob Baker as I developed the portion of the … Continue reading Pitfalls to Research, Technology and Crowdsourcing
Month: January 2012
My thoughts on “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, Or How I Learned to Love Offensive Realism
The strength of John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is also its inherent weakness. This review will analyze the strengths of Mearsheimer’s approach to the argument, and will then explore where the argument appears to be lacking. What Mearsheimer creates in this book is a carefully argued defense of offensive realism, and he … Continue reading My thoughts on “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, Or How I Learned to Love Offensive Realism
A video on the inspiration for the blog title
Hi everyone, more content will be coming soon, but for now the BBC produced a nice little video about the Viennese coffee houses that inspired the title of the blog. Starting the 23rd, I'm back to academia and thus back to producing fun new pieces, hopefully with some guest contributors!
A Good Question
I often try to balance my excitement around peacebuilding, technology and social change with a sober understanding of the limits of technology in this space. Of course sometimes these limits can be easy to forget about, and you need a student to bring you back to earth. For those who haven't taught, having a student … Continue reading A Good Question
A Post on Pragmatic Meaning: Part 2
I ended the first post in this series claiming that Facebook is a space for developing Pragmatic Meaning, while Twitter is not. As discussed in the last post, we are looking at a long-tail process when we set about making meaning in a political environment. In the context of a political movement if we compare the … Continue reading A Post on Pragmatic Meaning: Part 2
Mobiles for education…a memory from Samoa
TechChange has a course coming up that breaks a little bit from the standard “ICT4D” content. It’s titled “New Technologies for Educational Practice” and I was trying to think of how someone would put this knowledge to use. It all seemed abstract, so wracked my brain for cases when I used technology in my own … Continue reading Mobiles for education…a memory from Samoa
A Post on Pragmatic Meaning: Part 1
The title of this website refers to Habermas’s Theory of Pragmatic Meaning, and uses a reference to the coffee house as the place where political meaning is made regardless of class, family, or economic station. With this in mind, I’m currently writing a paper for the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences that draws on … Continue reading A Post on Pragmatic Meaning: Part 1
Charles P. Martin-Shields 