Those of you on Facebook might have noticed that I’ve been helping the UQ Branch of the NTEU expand its online presence. I was motivated to do this after hearing that the Queensland Division was reconsidering the ‘expense’ of having a tent with free food and drink for NTEU members at the Labour Day celebrations because not enough members have been turning up.

Having gone to the event last year I can attest to how few people were there, but I also found it a bit strange that there weren’t more people there my own age. In an election year when the main issue was workplace reform, it seemed just as likely that the NTEU hadn’t been pitching its message in the right places. Now, it’s not as if I think web workers or younger academics are in any way inclined to see themselves in need of labour politics (far from it) but inviting people through a familiar interface does send a wider message of engagement. Anyway, I’ve set up the group as an experiment in seeing what might happen if union membership got a bit of a makeover… so do consider joining if this sounds good to you.

I haven’t been a union member very long, for the same reason a lot of my colleagues offer: when you are a sessional or junior staff member it makes little sense to spend your minimal wages on union membership, especially when you have a HECS debt and no chance of any ongoing relationship with your employer. For some reason I always felt that the union had little cause to advocate on behalf of sessionals either, figuring it already had its work cut out recruiting and representing full time staff under a Howard Government.

But things are changing: this website shows there is growing recognition of the significance of casual labour in the university. Filling out the survey there will help build a case for what’s actually going on in workplaces around the country, and I urge everyone on casual contracts to do it.

Talking to Michael McNally yesterday, he asked me how long I’d been in Brisbane, and whether there was any likelihood of an ongoing job. This is my fifth year at UQ, and even though I have achieved a lot, there is no structure in place which would mean I could be offered an ongoing research job by the university. Teaching seems out of the question given how little turnover there is in Brisbane and how few tenured positions there are in the first place. So unless something else comes up I will have to apply for more federal funding and another contract early next year to start again the year after — maybe in Brisbane, but probably not with an academic partner also on contract and wanting work.

A key problem research careers pose for labour politics is that a lot of the claims are about affective rather than financial security. I get paid well but I have to live with the anxiety of not knowing whether I can come up with a good idea at the right time to keep my job. This leads to the trap of overcommitment (i.e., overwork) as a safety-net against those times (that always seem imminent) that motivation or inspiration won’t strike when they have to. This has the added side effect of normalising a particular rate of output that teaching staff then have to compete against when applying for grants of their own.

All of this seems a genuinely new problem for humanities researchers who, unlike the sciences, don’t work in teams in labs set up by leading professors. Research careers have been rare in this area in the past. And while some of the union’s recent campaigns indicate it is coming to terms with this changing landscape, it has a long way to go. I actually think the ARC has done quite a lot to improve the range of options for academics wanting to pursue research careers — changing the guidelines for Professorial Fellowships to favour younger scholars is the latest example. There is now a clear trajectory from APD, ARF to APF that can genuinely rival the teaching and research path.

Of course, my current study indicates that conventional labour politics must be urgently renovated to take account of online culture. I’ve just been writing to Sydney University academic Brigid Van Wanrooy about her Centre’s submission to the Government’s National Employment Standards exposure draft, which called for a limit to working hours in Australia.

These two graphs, taken from the submission document, show the difference in working hours between countries with regulated hours and those that don’t.

Meanwhile this graph I just love because it shows how working hours have changed since the year I was born!

While the figures make a strong case for regulation, as stark as they are they lack the nuance required to understand workers’ motivations for working long hours (as an earlier paper of Brigid’s, co-written with Shaun Wilson, makes clear.) Further, I’d argue that online technologies are changing our capacity and willingness to report when we are formally working.

For instance, the employees I’m interviewing have the internet at home and will keep reading work email ‘recreationally’ (with a glass of wine, watching TV, in bed) often until they go to sleep. They regularly begin the day checking and writing messages over breakfast or get up earlier to do so before the kids are awake. As I argue in this article, soon to be published in Feminist Media Studies, this kind of ‘flexibility’ is being trumpeted by tech companies as the way to deliver women the freedom to maintain family commitments while still embarking on paid work - which doesn’t do anything to change the workplace culture that demands long hours as a sign of employee loyalty.

But other things my study picks up include how people use social networking sites to develop and maintain contacts and relationships for future work possibilities – what we might call “prospective” work that takes place in addition to their current job. That is when they aren’t spending a “second” or “third” shift promoting their band or some other quasi-professional pursuit through these same online networks. Are they still working in those moments, according to the sort of statistics government policy relies on?

These are some of the things I’m looking forward to talking about this Labour Day. It would be great to know if you’re coming, either here or here.

Thanks to everyone who responded to my call-out for help! I am now very happily assisted and looking forward to the year of work ahead. Except that I’m unlikely to be blogging with any regularity for the time being. On top of the Working From Home project and the online cultural studies book, plans are underway for a couple more - a monograph looking at recent representations of ‘Work on TV’ (I’ll put an outline up about it somewhere soon), and something on Underbelly written in collaboration with Jason Wilson. In light of some of these reflections I’ve also managed to gain approval for a CCCS postgraduate course starting next semester which I’ll be teaching with Graeme Turner and Mark Andrejevic.

These aren’t the only reasons that it feels important right now to step away from the insistent temporality of blogging in preference for some long term thinking, planning and writing. I must admit that the past few months have made me increasingly concerned about the relationships developing between blogging, scholarship, celebrity and elitism (for some stimulating reading on these issues, including insights on why the ‘winner takes all’ economy affects scholarly blogging as much as any other creative industry, take a look at Matthew Hindman’s manuscript, Voice, Equality, and the Internet available here. Among other things, it signals how empirics will slowly build the case against the participatory utopians).

I’m not suggesting that academia has never operated free from elitism or celebrity of various kinds, but I’m also on the record as being committed to self-reflexivity and using institutional power in ways that avoid reinforcing established voices of authority. In that sense, I wonder if this space might be better used by other people to continue discussing issues in academic life. I’m not at all sure it requires me to be the one leading it.

This isn’t a resignation, then - I’m wary of the manifesto imperative blogging itself seems to encourage - more an invitation to offer thoughts in comments, including expressions of interest for more people to become writers for Home Cooked Theory. I have always wanted to believe that blogging held the potential for collaborative, ‘world-building’ experiments, and that’s why I’ve stuck with it this long. But, I have to say that the evidence is looking pretty shaky these days… or maybe it has just felt particularly lonely here lately.

The sense I have now - of a moment being over, of an idea that may have run its course - is similar to the one I had when I passed on the work of facilitating the CSAA-forum. There is only so long anyone can manufacture enthusiasm, optimism and connection when the raw material of mutual will isn’t there. This is about an equation between labour and value that my arms and shoulders tell me I’ve been on the wrong side of for too long. I hope that this space won’t suffer the same fate of becoming an anonymous repository for book announcements and conference notifications. There is more to a career in academia than these things, otherwise we wouldn’t work so hard to try to get one. This blog has been an effort to reflect on those other dimensions that distinguish a vocation and mean more than the triumphs of output: the things that occupy us most of the time, every other day. That was the intention at least, from the beginning. The future is up to you

Without wanting to read too much into this, it is becoming clear that if I can’t find some assistance soon, I’m going to have to think about moving elsewhere to continue my research. One of the downsides of being a ‘research intensive’ staff member is that access to a pool of students looking for work is quite limited, and depends on building relationships with teaching staff who work on on different schedules - namely the temporality of the semester - that don’t easily match those of fixed term contracts. Unfortunately these efforts are also regularly thwarted because of a degree of mutual envy that goes on between staff in either position, a kind of ‘grass is greener’ problem which makes researchers jealous of the security of tenure and its benefits (precisely the ongoing relationships with students and co-workers that enable research teams to be built) and teaching staff assume researchers have it easy being able to spend all their time reading and writing books without the imposition of admin and contact hours. Having a 75/25% research/teaching split before this current postdoc, I saw this from both sides, and probably have more to say about it than others, if anyone had a spare 5 minutes to think about any of this stuff anyway.

However, there are some wider issues at play that contribute to my current problem, which includes a decline in Honours and postgrad enrolment in the areas I do research (which isn’t helped by the few advance studies options available at these higher levels, and a backlog in PhD completions - itself partly a result of RHD students being employed as teaching, research or general staff elsewhere in the university). Add to this the increased staff:student ratio, the trend toward specialisation to cater for students’ vocational aspirations, better funding for research in other disciplines and unis, and a booming employment market outside academia…

And even if these other factors weren’t an issue, the interdisciplinary nature of my research means that the kind of expertise I need is particularly hard to find in the disciplines of my own training. Like so many other forms of cultural work, being a research fellow means developing a suite of entrepreneurial skills to entice people to invest in, work with and just generally help you, without the reassurance of any ongoing structural support, and without anyone with the time to show you how to do it.

Last week’s address to staff from the new Vice Chancellor showed just how stretched teaching staff are across the country, particularly in line with the 12 years of stalled funding under the previous Howard Government. And while this is a genuine problem, from my experience there is little imagination or effort on behalf of school management to address this medium-term blow-out* by drawing on - indeed, expanding the contract length for - the growing numbers of research staff. Unless we are talking about recruiting already established senior scholars to do this, which has the added outcome of boosting pre-defined research strengths for quality assessment purposes.

Hopefully there are already Heads of School and Faculty Deans with the foresight to have seen the imbalance in research-only appointments and current teaching capacity, recognize that a large number of experienced teaching staff are nearing retirement, and figure that it’s in everyone’s interests that they be replaced by scholars who have spent a few hours in the classroom. And here I mean time building a coherent syllabus and disciplinary framework that students can follow rather than being contracted, on successive 4 month binge-sessions, to assemble an ever-changing suite of guest lecturers for the hundreds of students currently being crammed into theatres. If this is the experience of most undergraduate students over the past 8-10 years, it’s little wonder they aren’t continuing further.

Meanwhile, the Humanities have a long way to go in providing adequate career resources, facilities and support for the amount of government and industry money their researchers are bringing to universities, which is worth bearing in mind as the global financial meltdown begins to bite on the past decade’s main revenue stream: international students.

*Current figures at the VC’s disposal suggest that undergraduate student enrolments have reached a plateau, and from next year will probably begin to decline.

According to AstroBarry - “Astrology for people who think”:

LIBRA (September 23-October 22): Something’s got to give in your day-to-day routine, Libra, insofar as you’re balancing (or trying to balance) a brimming schedule of work duties, domestic chores and personal-care maintenance measures. If you’ve been managing it the same way for a while now, chances are that your desire to put in a good effort every day may be waning. You desperately need some instance of reinvention in the daily grind, in order to rekindle your passion for productivity. It could be something as simple as finding a new workstation location, a different type of exercise class, a shift in your waking-up and going-to-sleep times, or a consolidation of household tasks into one chock-full day a week. Alternately, you may crave a much larger change—a totally different job, a drastically improved nutrition plan, or a part-time assistant to help with what’s not getting done. It’s all about pulling a vastly relieving breath of fresh air into your stale ho-hum workflow. Otherwise, should you ignore the need for reinvigoration, the quality of your efforts will continue their downhill slide. And if any certain person (a heartless boss, a selfish spouse, a bumbling colleague) is standing in your way, refusing to acknowledge your ongoing investment with wholehearted support of these greater-self-appreciation moves, then maybe they don’t appreciate you enough.

Some publishing developments this week:

- The Affect Reader manuscript is finally finished and off to the publisher (isn’t it Greg?!). Until we actually get a contract, it’s probably best to keep the contents under wraps, but for the moment I’m just so pleased and proud to have made it this far. Working as co-editor with Greg has meant overcoming some significant barriers of time and geography, without taking into account the difficulties of co-ordinating a range of contributors across continents. But it will be an important achievement if this book brings Greg some appropriate recognition for his long-standing commitment to scholarship in this area — work that is brilliantly on display in the introductory chapter. Fingers crossed more people can read it soon.

- The first chapter Catherine and I wrote together, ‘Broadcast Yourself: Moral Panic, Youth Culture and Internet Studies’ has been published in a new collection, Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia-Pacific Region edited by Usha M. Rodrigues and Belinda Smaill. The contents page and introduction is available in PDF here.

- The proofs arrived for my forthcoming piece in the special commentary section of Feminist Media Studies, ‘The New Architectures of Intimacy? Social networking sites and genders” edited by Usha Zacharias and Jane Arthurs. Other authors in this feature will include Catherine (another sample from our book in progress), Becky Walker, Nicole S. Cohen and Leslie Regan Shade, Yuping Mao, Rustem Ertug Altinay and Sarah Gorman.

- An article that summarises the project of my last book, “Communicating Investment: Cultural studies, affect and the academy” was published in The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies (along with an excellent piece by Nick Couldry on Reality TV and neoliberalism).

- Colleagues Marianne Liljeström and Susanna Paasonen (who I was visiting this time last year) have been offered a contract for their edited collection, Disturbing Differences: Working with Affect in Feminist Readings. My chapter will be called “Writing scholarly affects: Fallible voices as feminist practice.”

Yesterday I met with an Honours student who wants to write her thesis on non-commenting blog readers. Specifically, she’s trying to explore and understand whether long-term blog readers develop a ‘para-social’ relationship to their favoured blogger, even when they may not participate on the blog itself - how readers form attachments to particular writers and why.

So often people writing on blogging are bloggers themselves, and for that reason can’t necessarily appreciate the motivations of ‘lurkers’. Even to use the word ‘lurker’ already implies certain things (just like the term ‘leech’ when opposed to ’seeder’). It shuts down the possibility that there are a whole range of pleasures and uses and contingencies surrounding blogging consumption that take place off-screen, eluding capture by text or archive. I know that some people would suggest that the format of blogging software is an integral dimension to why commenting can appear difficult (as opposed to conversation threads on LJ, for instance, or because of the overall temporality of blogging/posting culture). But reciprocity was supposedly an important founding ethic for blogging, and this is an economy which is quite different again from the refrain of participation that enthusiasts champion as the promise of participatory media. How then to reflect the fact that blogging is for many people still a broadcast medium, with communication being a one-way transaction? Surely this is one of the great empirical problems blogging research should address?

I have no idea how many people read what I blog, for example, and find it funny when wanna-be A-Listers spruik how many readers they have (as if they could know exactly, and as if metrics somehow proves that a) blogging and b) being read is inherently affirmative). Anyway, yesterday I couldn’t offer any specific recommendations for writing in this area, beyond the relevance and limitations of certain fan studies approaches and perhaps the notion of mundane celebrity. Of course it might sound like a trick question to find out who reads this blog, but I thought it might be worth asking whether anyone can share what’s been written on these issues already? Or those of you who do read this, or other blogs regularly, would you be willing to say why in a comment?

I’m currently looking for a research assistant to work one day a week. The work will vary, but the main tasks will include bibliographic searches, hunting down references, photocopying and scanning, and writing reports for projects in progress or being developed. It would suit an undergraduate or honours student with fairly high computer literacy, capacity to use research software, and an interest in new media and online culture. My research pages give a sense of the work I’m doing.

I may also need someone in a couple of months’ time with interviewing experience, and would be happy to train the same person to do that too. Basically I’m looking for a reliable team to get my APD research finished, with the view to this leading on to future collaborations. Without regular access to students through teaching, and with my research becoming increasingly specific, I’m finding this a little hard to establish. So if you know of anyone who might be interested, please let them know. I’d like a one page CV and description of the person’s general situation, within the next week or so.

Looking through my trash folder I just found an email that links to video of the keynotes from last year’s Cultural Studies Now conference at the University of East London. Among others, you’ll find Kuan-Hsing Chen, Dick Hebdige, Ien Ang, Doreen Massey, Judith Halberstam, Rosi Braidotti, and of course, that significant moment featuring Stuart Hall.

When I wrote about the conference last year, one of the main organisers Ashwani Sharma claimed I offered ‘a rather comfortable, privileged, bourgeois, apolitical and somewhat ahistorical view of academic life.’ So now, just to prove him right, it looks like I’m going to have to increase my broadband quota if I want to relive some of these inspiring speeches from the comfort of my Ikea sofa.

I have been in Tasmania for the past week hanging out with friends and family and drinking lots of local Pinot! At the moment I’m on Bruny Island where I grew up, and this morning I drove over a mountain to go to yoga in a place called Adventure Bay. I could hear the waves crashing from the beach across the road from under my lavender relaxation pillow, in a hall where my mum and I once dressed up to go to the Easter bonnet parade.

Bruny is changing: it is no longer the modest, remote, embarrassing place of my childhood, where my city friends were too scared to come visit because it was so far away. Now it’s the place where rich people come to “get away from it all”, take wildlife cruises to be awe-struck by nature and generally fantasise about another, simpler life. Weird parts of my past and present life collide here. My friends are currently staying in the cabin my Dad built with two other blokes on the beach at Cloudy Bay and that Peter Beattie rented just before he left for the US. I’m trying to prepare for a seminar on “rural cultural studies” but the seminar papers that have been sent out in preparation are blowing out the broadband. My cousin who met me when I flew in last week is renovating her house to let Bob Brown use it as his city office (he is the partner of another cousin). Meanwhile I just found out my godfather has been working as a consultant to the Exclusive Brethren on its school curriculum.

I’ve been having a lot of nightmares since I got here. I wonder if it’s to do with the confusion my body feels in this acutely familiar place that is also so far from many other things and people I now love and call home. At night, the different lives it seems I’ve lived since leaving this place fight one another, vying for supremacy, trying to trick me into looking backwards at all the wrong moves I might still be able to correct. But in the daylight, I discover other things that reassure me I’ve been following the right path.

Like in the room where I’m sleeping, I’ve been remembering some of the first “books” I wrote in primary school:

Initially with the help of teachers, like this one:

these stories chart the years I spent trying to fit in at the private school I was sent to in the city. Their increasingly cloying dedications “to Jenna, Kate and Jacki who I like” and insular subject matter “Angela’s Rock and Roll Party” (which was, as far as I can recall, more fact than fiction) actually show how much my imagination and appetite for excitement narrowed in four years.

I went from blissful operatic Freudian fantasies (falling into a lake that I found in a cave!?!) to quite desperate attempts to make friends and fit in with the cool group.

That I thought I could do this through writing helps explain why so many of those friendships did not last in the process of my becoming a writer by profession; but the positive feedback I got from writing also explains why I persisted with it.

These comment sections sections at the back of the books are an early indication of why the post/response of blogging would be such a revelation to me, years later. The internet promises the ultimate (infinite) audience for feedback, even if the forms of reciprocity and encouragement also often fall into pre-established friendship groups - when they manage to rise above schoolyard antics. It was all a lot simpler though when someone I kind of knew just signed with the comment: 11/10.

It’s funny to find these little relics given what else I’ve been reading. Despite my brother’s warnings, I just finished Blind Faith, Ben Elton’s take on the micro-celebrity of reality television and - I guess - Web 2.0. It imagines a world where blogging and uploading video of all major life events and daily activities (including sex and childbirth) are compulsory acts of citizenship.

The quite credible depiction of office life in the near future certainly raises the stakes on my own reading of workplace affect that I finished before going away. It’s also an important book to read as Catherine and I try to strike a balance between advocacy, defensiveness and participant observation of online cultures. I don’t think we could ever be accused of the evangelism I’ve seen displayed by some of the bigger name bloggers and web enthusiasts, which might actually contribute to the book’s vision being realised, but even our position would be open to the thrust of Elton’s satire. What will save us from his dystopianism, as the exodus from Facebook is showing, is the persistence of certain bourgeois notions of privacy, as well as the consistently limited numbers of people who share the desire to write.

In Courage, another book I just finished, Maria Tumarkin claims she was thirty before she could ‘really, genuinely’ think of herself as a writer. Until then she had various strategies to avoid such a realisation, including convincing herself ‘that I had never wanted to be a writer in the first place’, and relegating writing ‘to the status of a verb, to turn it into one of the many actions I was given to performing from time to time’ (p. 150).

Tumarkin says it was fear that led her to dissociate herself from writing: ‘of being a talentless hack, a pen pusher, one of those people whose profound lack of talent is matched only by the blind conviction that they have something vitally important to say’ (p. 151). Overcoming that fear involved seeing writing as ‘a noun again, to recognise it as part of my inner-most identity… It was simply the need to write, which was akin to a compulsion, and which was not so much the sense of rightness [others] had described but rather a sense of must-ness’ (p. 151).

This is a deeply attractive description of writing, even though being a writer is something I still struggle to identify with. Maybe it’s because I haven’t quite turned 30! Or maybe it’s because of my own fears - RSI, blindness, Alzheimers, cancer - that are all Western and bourgeois too, and which I suspect Maria would hate. More rationally, I am quite determined not to follow a lineage of people who have used the label of ‘writer’ as a convenient alibi, to excuse me from all of the things I might otherwise be tempted to use it to avoid: reciprocal relationships, family obligations, community involvement, political activism, general politeness, cooking dinner for my partner or putting the garbage out. These are all things I want to be able to maintain as well as being a writer, and yet romantic visions of it as courageous or radical make me shy and pessimistic that might be possible.

In two days I will have to leave the views of the lagoon and the veggie patch which grows strawberries and raspberries every day to face smoggy Sydney again. But at least on Saturday I will be home to my beautiful boy, more post-rock at The Tivoli, some expanded wardrobe choices and the challenge of keeping many conflicting desires and histories in happy animation.

On Saturday night some friends and I went to see Ang Lee’s latest film, Lust Caution. At the time, it felt long, exhausting and tragic — especially given I was already tired from the night before and dissecting the week that spawned not one but two quasi-manifestos from lady bloggers. Was there something in the internets?

We all left the cinema feeling vaguely depressed and graceless, having been transfixed by the incredible performance of Wei Tang as the heroine Wong Chia Chi. As if to confuse us even more, we ate dinner backing on to a carpark in Chinatown, where one restaurateur was celebrating the New Year in a quite bizarre fashion, singing personal interpretations of John Denver mixed with Christmas carols and dedicated to the hundreds of diners by then smoking and drinking under temporary marquee (this latter reappeared in my dream that night, where another ubiquitous blogger tried to beg his way into my beachfront wedding).

After Kenny Rogers, the ABBA megamix got going, and it was like being forced to spy on a well-catered suburban Australian wedding of the type I used to waitress for in Hobart. It couldn’t have been further from the vision of China for which we had just witnessed the most intense and committed displays of bravery, and in spite of an apparently endless suite of flawed men. I’m still feeling unhinged by the whole thing.

But it did help me appreciate the complicated, chaotic, compromised world we live in, and how regularly it seems to involve being constantly buffetted by the most incongruent trivia just to make sure we don’t ever remain completely comfortable in our response to something. This lack of certainty and my resignation to it feels closely tied to what I understand by ‘having a scholarly temperament’, even though I also lament the way it prevents me from accessing many familiar kinds of mundane reassurance.

Instead Saturday night left me overwhelmed with desire for histories we can hardly dream of, let alone hear about, even if we had time to read all the books we own, or were quiet enough to be able to listen well. It also made me crave more scholars and writers who are driven to blog for reasons other than marking career achievements or articulate position taking (conscious that these are all things I am also seen to be doing); perhaps because they are vulnerable or courageous enough to use this medium to reach out for others who might have their own much better sense of what might be worth caring about.

On this: if you are an Australian reader and you haven’t heard about GetUp’s campaign to help aboriginal elders get to Canberra by Wednesday, they are taking donations here. Any excess funds are being used as part of a long term campaign to make sure ’sorry is the first step’.