Commanding a clear view: Words, concepts, and social science

To lay my cards on the table at the outset: I am broadly sympathetic to Frederic Schaffer’s overall campaign in favor of conceptual elucidation: “investigating the ways in which the social world is built up linguistically and the ways in which social actors deploy concepts to pursue their goals.” On numerous previous occasions I have been, like Schaffer, decidedly critical of scholarly efforts to “fix” the meaning of a concept (like the West or civilization) and then to use that scholarly reconstruction as a base from which to legislate appropriate and inappropriate practical claims using that concept—as though our task as scholars were to correct the social world rather than to explain and understand it. So Schaffer’s careful explication of techniques for elucidation, grouped under the headings of “grounding,” “locating,” and “exposing,” provides a refreshing alternative to the sort of advice about concept analysis one typically receives from scholars engaged in the kind of project I think rather problematic

Resilience, resistance, infrapolitics and enmeshment

A great deal has been written in the International Relations literature about the role of resilience in our social world. One of the central debates in the scholarship concerns the relationship between resilience and resistance, which several scholars consider to be one of mutual exclusivity. For many theorists, an individual or a society can either be resilient or resistant, but not both. In this article, we argue that this understanding of the resilience–resistance connection suffers from three interrelated problems: it treats resilience and resistance as binary concepts rather than processes; it presents a simplistic conception of resilient subjects as apolitical subjects; and it eschews the ‘transformability’ aspect of resilience. In a bid to resolve these issues, the article advocates for the usefulness of a relational approach to the processes of resilience and resistance, and suggests an approach that understands resilience and resistance as engaged in mutual assistance rather than mutual exclusion. The case of the Palestinian national liberation movement illustrates our set of arguments

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Three Thoughts About What ‘#occupyirtheory’ Might Mean

It is a basic principle of a broadly pragmatist approach to theoretically analyzing politics of all kinds that the important innovations emerge in worldly practice before they show up in academic writings. Theory – and theorists – follow along behind overt political action, extracting and systematizing insights in such a way that they become more widely available than they would if they simply remained in their original context. In so doing, theory and theorists provide conceptual instruments—including explicit visions of alternate futures that may have been only implicit in worldly practice—that can inform future political practice, albeit in ways that belie or even contradict the abstract, idealizedpurity of the kinds of theoretically-informed explanations produced by academics