Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century (Scott Noble, 2011: 119 mins)

Documentary Stream



Human Resources explores the rise of mechanistic philosophy and the exploitation of human beings under modern hierarchical systems. Topics covered include behaviorism, scientific management, work-place democracy, schooling, frustration-aggression hypothesis and human experimentation.

Sources:

Anarcho -- Anti-Capitalism or State Capitalism?

Beissinger, Mark R. -- Scientific Management, socialist discipline and Soviet power

Chang, Iris -- the Rape of Nanking

Cockburn, Alex and St. Claire, Jeffrey -- Whiteout: The CIA, drugs and the press

Gatto, John Taylor -- The Underground History of American Education; Dumbing Us Down

Goliszek, Andrew -- In the name of science

Klein, Naomi -- The Shock Doctrine

Kohn, Alfie -- What does it mean to be well-educated?; No contest: the case against competition

Lemov, Rebecca -- World as Laboratory: Experiments with mice, mazes and men

Noble, David -- Forces of Production: a social history of industrial automation

Ritzer, George -- The McDonaldization of Society

Shepherd, Harold & Herrick, Neil -- Where Have All the Robots Gone?

Smith, Sharon -- Subterranean Fire: A History of working class radicalism

Szulc, Tad -- The CIA's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic

Please join us for a showing of the acclaimed, award-winning documentary, Human Terrain, on Friday, March 11th in the central UK Student amphitheater at 2:30pm. Sponsored by the UK Department of Anthropology, this film critically interrogates the use of social scientists to collect "cultural intelligence" for the counterinsurgency campaigns in the Iraq and Afghanistan. The film is directed by James Der Derian (International Relations, Brown University) and David and Michael Udris.

Website: http://humanterrainmovie.com/

Synopsis: ‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates ‘Human Terrain Systems’, a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.See More