Last chapter
Posted on | March 13, 2010 | No Comments
I am finally writing the last chapter of my book. It is the one called “Long hours, high bandwith: Negotiating domesticity at a distance”.
This chapter illustrates how office and home space are each transformed and rendered visible as ambient technologies allow a widening number of close companions throughout the working day. The “full time intimate community” (Ito 2007 ) enabled by online devices is one way that relationships are developing to compensate for the lack of physical time available to share with loved ones. In other contexts, however, the constant flow of email from morning to night can help workers feel valued in a way that may not be obvious in their present domestic relationships.
And so forth. Since the book is about work’s “intimacy”, this is where I talk about the language workers use to justify why they stay in contact with work so much.
If the romantic notion of love typically involves the desire to spend time with another, can we begin to see the constantly-connected behaviour of workers in this book as a form of unrecognised intimacy? If employees regularly claim to “love” their work, what does love mean in this context, and how seriously should we take it as a rationale for the long hours they choose to spend in work’s company?
On topic
Posted on | March 13, 2010 | 1 Comment
I hadn’t seen this before. Thanks to Acheron LV-426.
Please discuss
Posted on | March 9, 2010 | 13 Comments
Graeme Turner, who is currently based at the Annenberg School, sent me this article the other day. It’s lucky I didn’t read it straight away, given my depress-o state lately. The letters the author talks about receiving from graduate students reminded me of emails I got last year after my New Matilda article came out, around the time of the State of the Industry conference. I’m wondering if there has been any discussion of this piece elsewhere that I’ve missed? Does any of this bear relevance to Australia?
International Women’s Day
Posted on | March 8, 2010 | No Comments
This afternoon the Women and Work Research Group at the University of Sydney held a special event for International Women’s Day. I was asked to present some of my research from the Working From Home study. Here is a copy of the text from my talk, and a powerpoint presentation for those interested in some of the images from my study. Thanks to all the people who came. More feedback is very welcome!
Boo hoo blues
Posted on | March 8, 2010 | No Comments
I went on holiday last month for the first time ever, I think, since I began working in academia. Of course, there have been lots of trips before – many that wouldn’t have happened without a job to pay for the airfare – but they have all involved work. The exceptions have been holidays spent with family for Christmas, which is necessary and wonderful, but somehow not the same as time away from all communication and everything regular. For two weeks I didn’t check email, read a Word document, or type. I went to bed early, watched pirated DVDs in air-con between beach-side swimming and reading sessions, and ate a lot.
Before leaving I was joking to my old boss that I might not come back because I could be so overwhelmed by the experience. I’ve been struggling to finish my book, and I still haven’t finished, even though it was due at the end of January. Boarding the plane was a bit like going to my cousin’s wedding in 1999, a time when I had to be a bridesmaid in Sydney just days before my Honours thesis was due. The temptation to run away from academia has been a major feature of my experience ever since.
I hadn’t taken any significant time off for a year. The State of the Industry conference took a whole lot of energy that I’m not sure I’ll ever find again, and the trouble with public events like that is the sense of finality when it’s over. I went back to work the next week, wrote a few more abstracts and chapters, and organised a masterclass with a visiting Professor before Christmas.
I’ve come back to a new admin role in my Department (Honours co-ordinator), twice as many graduate students as last year, and an ongoing headache caused by the institutional inclination to conduct all departmental business via email. I’m well rested, but immediately exhausted, and I can’t see how to change it.
I’m hoping this is just a symptom of having the manuscript partly written. The subject of the book is the intimacy of work in middle class information jobs, and though it’s based on the interviews I’ve done with others, it’s my own battle with the phenomenon that is proving so hard to wrestle into readable form.
On the flight over to Bangkok I noticed a number of recent films with characters troubled by their over-investment in work. I watched The Proposal, Love Happens and Where the Wild Things Are. Even the latter I couldn’t help reading through the lens of my project, given the intensity of the scenes with Max and his mum. (I had to miss the Eddie Murphy vehicle, Imagine That, to watch An Education, which I should probably write about separately). Thinking about it now, I wonder whether I was so moved by the Jonze film because it reminded me of my childhood (I really loved the original book), and the excitement of unknown possibilities. And of course, the film anticipated my own holiday escape to an island for a utopian adventure free from the cares of the adult world.
One of the resolutions I made waiting for the plane coming back was to try to write here more often. I know that I’m still dealing with the change from being a “research only” academic to teaching and research, and my regular shocks, confusion and frustration are partly the reason I haven’t been writing here lately. If the workload feels immense, the shift to Sydney University is also something I’m still coming to terms with given the issues it brings to bear on my day to day life.
I also wonder if some of the feelings of disconnection and isolation I’m having might be to do with the form of intimacy that have become routine in the many multi-platform mini-broadcasts of friends and acquaintances on a range of online media. They make me happy, but increasingly I wonder if they are part of the apparatus that means I don’t get to know very much about people in the timeframes structuring my existence right now.
And here begin the dilemmas of a thirty-something blogger.
Crossroads panel
Posted on | December 26, 2009 | 2 Comments
Proposals are due this week for Crossroads in Cultural Studies, to be held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in June 2010.
As a member of the conference committee I’ve been busy organising a number of the spotlight sessions over the past few months, but have yet to organise my own paper and panel! Eek!
If anyone is thinking of going and would like to be part of a panel on labour politics and online work cultures, please get in touch ASAP… very keen to hear from people near and far for what promises to be an exciting and genuinely international conference with work and labour at the fore!
#IPF09 debrief
Posted on | December 23, 2009 | 8 Comments
Now one cannot demonstrate scientifically what the duty of an academic teacher is. One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems. If he asks further why he should not deal with both types of problems in the lecture-room, the answer is: because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform. – Max Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’
The irony of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference was that it involved so much more labour than usual: physical (getting to NYC), mental (writing the paper), administrative (scheduling video shoots, uploading slides), promotional (coercive tweeting, list-serve participation, appearing in videos), emotional (patience with long-winded theory boys…). So I want to avoid writing a report of what I saw. The summary gesture of the conference blogpost is something I’m feeling less inclined to write over time, since so much effort goes in to making big events like these happen. Trebor’s drive and ambition are evident forces to behold 
A lot comes down to serendipity and the chemistry of participants. There was, and continues to be, amusing frisson between key stakeholders brought together by this event (epitomised in one complaint from the audience, after the very first panel, that the papers were too boring). I suppose my lingering questions are to do with whether the territory being claimed by the iDC project is for politics or scholarship, and whether this matters.
There are now at least four extensive takes on what happened. It’s a comprehensive overview, especially given that most presentations were archived in some digital form. This is the unequivocal advance IPF made: new media devices and crowd-sourcing can broaden the audience for conferences for those who are a) interested b) literate in digital platforms and c) able to access the massive broadband infrastructure that makes these technologies work. Of course, in combination, these three factors exclude significant numbers, even within the host nation of the event, so it is a specific kind of achievement to celebrate.
For me, the conference was less interesting for the amount of new research presented than for the overall climate of Theory that was taken to be the legitimate register of scholarly performance (and here I’m purposefully separating academic work from the contributions of artists and activists). Given the critical landscape I usually inhabit, this was a confronting, almost nostalgic experience, and one that seemed extremely revealing of the hierarchies within the present international division of academic labour.
At this conference I heard things said by professors from prestigious US and European knowledge institutions which I might applaud but correct in a promising undergraduate essay. In some cases this was a genuine and objective problem of disciplinary impasse and ignorance; in others it was an outrageous display of ex-nominated discursive privilege being traded like currency. It had nothing to do with the best political intentions of speakers, and the enthusiasm for new ideas shared by everyone I met. But passionate, overarching proclamations were unremarkable, even encouraged, via the metrics of Tweetability, and the rhetorical position adopted in pre-conference publicity.
In the lead-up to the conference, relevant disciplinary histories and alternative theoretical legacies were routinely discounted on the iDC list in preference for excruciatingly detailed debate about Marx’s writings. Anyone with the time to read these macho arguments – for pedagogical intent rather than sheer bewildered entertainment value – learned plenty about the consequences of theory fetishism, as well as the relative amounts of time different writers have at their disposal at the end of a working day.
In the absence of disciplinary focus then, the lack of self-reflexivity on the part of some participants was professionally unthinkable to those attending from interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies and gender studies (which precede the conference’s closest disciplinary neighbour, internet studies, and which trouble the possibility of any unified project for that field too). Once scholarly formations are abdicated, it’s almost inevitable that speakers become open to the charge of practicing politics from the security of a scholarly location. So while few academics today would agree with Weber’s distinction between science and politics quoted above, it is one instance of how this problem has been shown to occur throughout history. I don’t subscribe to easy distinctions between politics and scholarship either, as my next paragraph will show. But I want a more convincing rationale for why these lines are necessarily more blurred when it comes to studying the internet.
Much has been said about gender at the conference, whether publicly, privately, or in ‘counter-public’ online back-channels. The fact that organisers and delegates alike worried openly about ‘the problem’ during and after the event is certainly one way of appreciating the dynamics of the iDC list leading in. But perhaps what hasn’t been said is that in an academic context an awareness of gender politics is not advanced by quoting the number of women on the program and claiming superiority over conferences that are worse. It is certainly not illustrated in the actions of a prominent speaker who used part of his presentation to express relief that a female colleague was on his panel (to keep the boys in line?) and who was later feted for being the most ‘participatory’ of presenters.
We all share responsibility for creating the conditions for inclusiveness. But an awareness of gender politics in an academic context involves respecting epistemological difference. It means recognising there are stakes involved in the very act of defining what counts as intellectually valuable. In a scholarly setting, feminism is not a political insight that can be enacted simply through the incorporation of certain kinds of bodies. It is an actually existing intellectual field that speaks directly to the very tensions around labour value that this conference regularly claimed as novel.*
When disciplinary differences arise (eg. when the writings of a major postcolonial feminist scholar are openly dismissed on the iDC list by someone who has written perhaps three times the amount of posts of any other member) the performance of territorialisation reaches dizzying heights. A lack of distinction between scholarship and politics provides an avenue of ambiguity leading away from complex discussions. Such encounters between different intellectual lineages cannot be avoided if we are actually interested in improving our theoretical concepts. They are also necessary if we seek to promote a time-frame for critical thinking that can resist the manufactured urgency of new media studies generally (an urgency that clearly also relates to capitalist processes).
Given that my job is to write and teach about contemporary culture, some of the problems I’m most haunted by after the conference are those raised by the students in the final plenary (something that Trebor’s report also mentions). Their enthusiasm for the event and their anxiety about entering the conversation without credentials were matched only by their curiosity at the modes of intellectual performance inherited and perpetuated by delegates. I got the sense that the forms of interaction these students are familiar with online already offer a more accommodating environment for their passions and interests than the odd rituals of academic knowledge production. This may explain why they aren’t so bothered about whether Google or Facebook provides them this platform.
The challenge I took from the conference – and it is a significant one, in an international market for higher education – is to demonstrate and translate the value of scholarly work to present and future generations of digitally literate students. For they surely deserve to believe in a world that is more complex than the space between the monoliths of commerce and politics.
*I tried to sketch some of that history in my (short!) presentation.
IPF09 delegates rearrange chairs to form a circle for the closing plenary and facilitate the Web 2.0 mantra: participation
Smart choices
Posted on | November 24, 2009 | 8 Comments
Thanks so much to New Matilda for publishing this piece just before the conference. I tried to crystallize some of the things mentioned here in recent days and months.
See you on Thursday, I hope!
Related reading #SOI09
Posted on | November 23, 2009 | 1 Comment
With thanks to Tammi and Jen…
The RED Report: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education, Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2008
From the introduction, by Professor Rob Castle, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and International), University of Wollongong:
To maintain for permanent staff the ideal of being teaching and research academics, we have had to rely on sessional staff. The analogy I’ve always made with sessional staff is to describe them as the proletariat of the academic profession, but that Victorian description of an industrial working class just doesn’t fit as well as that other part of Victorian life, the domestic servant.
In many ways the lifestyle of the traditional teaching research academic is totally dependent on the contribution of sessional staff, in the way that Victorian middle class lifestyles were dependent on the domestic servant. They slept in the attic, ate in the kitchen and you grumbled constantly that what they did was actually not quite what you wanted. But nonetheless, they were absolutely essential to your being and to your lifestyle. I think this applies equally to many sessional staff today.
From the opening summary:
The analysis of current policy and practice across the participating institutions found that
- Evidence of systemic sustainable policy and practice is rare;
- There is a general lack of formal policy and procedure in relation to the employment and administrative support of sessional teachers;
- While induction is considered important in all universities, the ongoing academic management of sessional teachers is not as well understood or articulated;
- Paid participation in compulsory professional development for sessional teachers is atypical; and
- Despite various national and institutional recognition and reward
initiatives, many sessional teachers continue to feel their contribution is undervalued.
Tags: academic labour > casual academics > sessional teaching > SOI09
10 things graduate students want
Posted on | November 21, 2009 | 4 Comments
Over the past few months panelists for the SOI conference have been meeting and sharing plans for what they will present in their allotted time at the beginning of each session. The conference format is not the traditional paper-giving mode, but rather an open discussion with the audience following a series of provocations from invited participants.
What follows are some notes compiled from one such meeting – the postgraduate students’ panel that is the final session on day 1. I wanted to post these before the conference so that anyone interested might get a sense of what we’ll be talking about; also because the group decided they will finish their session with a list of “10 things graduate students want.” This seemed like something that could benefit from some dialogue. So after reading their ideas, maybe some of you might like to leave your thoughts to add to the mix. We can then draw them in to the conversation on the day.
The panel comprises:
Tammi Jonas (University of Melbourne & CAPA)
Brady Robards (Griffith University)
Simon Sellars (Monash University)
Hannah Stark (University of Adelaide)
Their task is to respond to the day’s events and present their own perspectives on ‘the state of the industry’.
*Notes compiled by Alison Huber*
NB: These notes are designed to reflect some of the things we talked about on the day, not what the presentations will consist of themselves. Speakers will now prepare presentations that build on what we discussed. Also, while some of these topics will have been covered earlier in the day, the panel felt it would be useful to offer the postgraduate’s perspective on these matters. In no particular order, the four topics that will be addressed are:
1. Sessional teaching, inc. course coordination and tutoring
* Lack of adequate training and support; lack of work space in which to meet with students; what sort of impact does this have on the experience and quality of teaching?
* Disparity across institutions in relation to wages – some universities expect their tutors to attend lectures and meetings and mark essays all without payment of any kind, while other institutions pay for much more of what’s involved in tutoring; some institutions are no longer paying postgraduates for giving guest lectures, claiming that its real payment is the experience. At stake here is: what should be reasonably expected from a tutor in a time vs. wages analysis? With increasingly time-consuming models of assessment for markers (eg, monitoring blogging or other online tasks), and the increase in the numbers of email rather than face-to-face contact with students, old models of remuneration are becoming increasingly redundant.
* Payment in relation to experience – while tutors with PhDs are paid more than those who are still postgraduates, what about rewarding tutors for their years of tutoring experience? There are several issues that could result from this though – it could lead to disadvantage for those who do have experience (because they will be more expensive to hire); at the same time, it could also return tutoring to its original purpose, which was to give postgraduate students access to the experience of teaching undergraduates. Also noted in this conversation was the fact that some departments continue to give tutoring work to very experienced tutors, many of whom have long finished their PhDs, and so take the work away from those inexperienced postgrads who are then never given the chance of sessional tutoring. The question here seems to be, what is the status of ‘experience’ in sessional tutoring?
* Morale – to what extent do the conditions of sessional teaching contribute to a lack of morale, and to what extent might this impact on the learning experience for students? Under these conditions, is the standard of education being compromised?
2. Professional development and mentoring
* the obscure nature of the PhD candidature and its processes at many institutions – there were a variety of stories shared here about people needing to muddle their own ways through their candidature, with little guidance until reaching milestones. This is an issue partly to do with supervision, but also to do with the way that the postgrad is often left to his/her own devices in a ‘survival of the fittest’ model of candidature. Again, the disparity across different institutions became obvious here. Can there be a coordinated effort to ensure that students have equal access to professional development throughout their candidatue?
* since it seems clear that there are not enough jobs in universities for the volume of PhD graduates in Australia, to what extent might departments and institutions have a responsibility to help students think about work outside the university, and how the skills of the PhD transfer into the wider workplace? How can we avoid the pessimism that many students feel about their prospects when they are constantly told that there are ‘no jobs’?
* what about the end of the PhD, when students are often ‘cut loose’ from their scholarship, their office (if they had one), etc? is there a way that institutions can assist students in that post-PhD moment between submission and reports, to help them transition into (full-time) work? The NTEU has lobbied for an extension of scholarship to include this time, so that students can get on their feet following submission; this is a time of confusion and exhaustion for many students.
3. Collegial atmosphere/ growth of a departmental culture/ networking
* everyone talked here about the importance of feeling part of a research culture in a department that includes both the academic staff and the postgraduate students. A variety of examples emerged here about models that have been successful in producing a sense of community, as well as some about the lack of a supportive environment in which to study.
* in an ideal world, ‘supervision’ is not just a one-on-one hierarchical model, but actually a ‘peer’ model, where students have access to other academic staff in a collegial context (eg, seminar series), and where they work with each other; this is part of the way to avoid the sometimes lonely life of the solitary postgrad.
* the group noted the importance of physical spaces in developing this atmosphere: meeting rooms or tea rooms, as well as offices on campus that allow students to use their postgrad experience like a ‘real job’ where they go in daily, 9-5 (or similar), to an office where others are doing the same thing around them.
* the encouragement of networking outside the home institution – this can be an issue of funding (in terms of enabling students to attend conference etc), but how can universities further help their students form or access a network of scholars in their field? This is particularly important for students who find themselves isolated in their department because of a specialised PhD topic.
4. Post-PhD career path
* in a similar vein to Topic 2, the panel thought that many of the challenges/ decisions that a student faces post-PhD are not discussed openly, and again people are left to trial and error to find out ‘what happens next’. What are the options for post-PhD? How prepared should one be for this time during candidature itself? What is an academic job interview like, for example, and can institutions help to prepare for these sorts of experiences during candidature? If publications are so important to getting jobs and grants, why are they not made more of a feature/ requirement during candidature?
* increasingly, the experience of work in the immediate years post-PhD is one of piecemeal casual employment; what does this mean in a broader sense for universities, and how does it affect the purpose of the PhD? How long should one be prepared to pursue this sort of work in the years following a PhD qualification?
Other things we noted
We did discuss the idea of presenting a Utopian model for PhD experience; while some of the panel liked this idea, others thought that it was dangerous for giving the impression of this being a panel of ‘dreamy’ or naïve postgrads who don’t live in the reality of university budgets and policies (which is not the case). So we want to find a balance between outlining an ideal world, and finding a way that this ideal can operate within the current constraints of university politics.
It’s also important to find the balance between complaining about things that are inadequate/ wrong in the system, and offering suggestions for ways in which conditions could be improved.
We realise too that there is not really any new information here in what we discussed; rather we see this panel as being important in highlighting what we already know to be the deficiencies and strengths of the current postgraduate/ PhD experience in order to have an open discussion in such a forum. The group represents a range of positions/experiences, both positive and negative, and we want to highlight these differences in the panel.
Tags: academic labour > casual academics > post-PhD > sessional teaching > SOI09
Currently consuming
Blogroll
- {im@ no jaz}
- A Wild Young Under Whimsy
- Adrian Miles
- ana australiana
- archive : s0metim3s
- Creativity/Machine
- Edu-Factory
- Event Mechanics
- Fifty Two Acts
- Geert Lovink
- How The University Works
- Life during wartime
- Making Wifi
- Marika Luders
- Mentalization-Positive
- Purse Lip Square Jaw
- SA Stories
- Silver in SF
- Snurblog
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- Supervalent Thought
- Tama Leaver
- Tammi Jonas
- The Memes of Production
- The Vapour Trail
- Unemployed at last