A few nice American Democracy Project images I found:

Séminaire de Timothy Mitchell “Recalcitrance : Methods in the American Study of Middle East Democracy” (Ifpo, Damas, 13/12/2010, 18h00-19h30)


Image by l’Ifpo
Dans le cadre du séminaire

« Perspectives et territoires de la recherche au Proche-Orient »
intervention de Timothy Mitchell (Columbia University), sur le thème
“Recalcitrance : Methods in the American Study of Middle East Democracy”
الاستعصاء: مناهج في الدراسات الأمريكية بشأن الديمقراطية في الشرق الأوسط
Séminaire proposé par Thimoty Mitchell, "Recalcitrance : Methods in the American study of Middle East democracy" (Ifpo, Damas, 13/12/2010, 18h-19h30)

Photographie © Jim Hat (http://picasaweb.google.com/jameshat99)

American studies of the question of democracy in the Middle East are often concerned with how to produce a new kind of political person. Democracy, they say, requires people to be equipped with civic virtues, such as tolerance, trust, and respect for diversity. There is no reliable evidence that such virtues facilitate the emergence of more democratic forms of politics. Interestingly, however, some research projects now go further, and use methods designed not only to measure the presence or absence of these virtues, but to equip people with tools to strengthen them. In other words, political scientists are trying to change the world to make it conform better to their theories. Other scientists and social scientists, such as economists, have for a long time worked with a similar relationship to the world they study. Can we use these experiments to think differently about how democratic claims become effective?

Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.
He completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. His 2002 book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, draws on his work in Egypt to examine the creation of economic knowledge and the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics; the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; the relationship between law, private property, and violence in this process; and the problems with explaining contemporary politics in terms of globalization or the development of capitalism. His current research brings together the fields of technology studies and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks. Mitchell has served on the editorial committees of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the American Political Science Review and Middle East Report.

Timothy Mitchell’s web page at Columbia University (http://www.columbia.edu/~tm2421/)

462 Hollywood American Legion Post #43


Image by The City Project
Designed in 1929 by the firm of Weston & Weston, the building with its Egyptian Revival design and its location combine to create a prominent landmark.

Photo credit City of Los Angeles ZIMAS.