Sometimes, an irresistible writing prompt presents itself. Bruno Latour, a French philosopher and anthropologist whose work I’ve learned a great deal from, has started a new research/activist project (as he occasionally does), to collect ideas and experiences related to the … [read more]
About two years ago, I wrote a post here describing a simple and cheap method of coding text documents such as interviews. (I’d encourage you to go and read it first before you continue. I won’t repeat the original argument … [read more]
My 2019 annual write-up of the year’s best new music. I publish this post into the ether once a year to summarize what I’ve particularly liked during the last twelve months, in the hope that you might discover something new.
Book piles accumulate in my office and on my night table all the time. Books are visual signposts of where my head is at, what’s next on the thinking agenda, of the big and small topics that make up the project that is Carsten’s head.
A personal reflection on the death of Johnny Clegg, giant of South African music, in July 2019. … I met him once, very briefly. In my mid-20s, when I was living in Johannesburg, a colleague and I bumped into him holding court in a café at Rosebank Mall where we had gone during our lunch break.
2018 was another year full of outrageous distractions, the misconfigurations and abuses of the public sphere relentlessly encroaching on whatever space one tried to carve out for thinking, experiencing beauty or getting some rest. A year to test our commitments, … [read more]
Across the social sciences, including business ethnography, the so-called “best practice” for qualitative data analysis is to use coding, the process of categorizing data by applying tags to portions of it. These tags, and the data they label, can then … [read more]
Starting this year, I will occasionally post lightly commented lists of books I’m currently reading. My tendency is to occupy myself with nonfiction, erring on the side of theory, anthropology, philosophy, politics. For those who got to know me (or … [read more]