Exemplary+Texts

__**Michel Foucault – A History of Sexuality, Volume 1**__  I usually go back to this book whenever I'm stuck conceptually. I find that two of the concepts developed in the book – the incitement to discourse and biopower – are useful in helping me frame my work in relation to institutional and societal events. For example, the incitement to discourse immediately forces me to ask why something is made public as opposed to something else, which forces me to turn my attention to the wider world as opposed to being solely focused on my project. Similarly, biopower allows me to ask why certain information is valued as opposed to other information. Again, my attention is forced onto the meso and macro scale as opposed to be exclusively micro.

__**Tom Boellstorff – Coming of Age in Second Life**__  I find this book interesting methodologically. Similar to Boellstorff, I will be dealing with a research project whose site cannot be easily identified. Second Life – much like Plone, AutoCAD and CMAQ – represents a distributed site with little to no geographical continuity. Rather, it is a distributed phenomenon that must be approached through the technology that brings its community of practice into existence. As such, Boellstorff's methodology can be enlightening for my own project, which is simultaneously multi-sited and distributed. Boellstorff's methodology is a reminded that – though he does not actually venture into this particular area of analysis – the technology being used to access virtual spaces can be an analytical and methodological entry point into the study of networked phenomena.