Course outline

Posted on | June 30, 2009 | 2 Comments

Thanks very much for all the tips as this was coming together. Since I was moving house yesterday, the day the reader was due, I’ve written something based on what I already know rather than what I hope to get across before giving the lectures. I’ve got a bag of books about romance packed for in-flight reading this afternoon! Cavell is winning so far.

One thing I would like more help with is finding anything recent, non-cynical, even celebratory about love and marriage from a gender or cultural studies perspective. I guess I’m really asking for readings in media and cultural studies rather than critical theory/philosophy. The previous version of this course was quite philosophy-heavy, and I’m trying to do something a little different, as the following will show…

I suppose since I am teaching a gender studies course about love and proposed to a bloke, this is a point of interest in other ways too…

WEEK 1 Introduction
27 July

Reading
· Dale Carnegie, Selections from ‘Six Ways To Make People Like You’, in How to Win Friends and Influence People (Revised edition) Eden, North Ryde, 1988; [Original publication 1936].

PART ONE: GETTING INTIMATE

WEEK 2 Friendship and Authenticity
3 August

Reading
· Erving Goffman, ‘Regions and Region Behavior’, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The Overlook Press, New York, 1973

Further Reading
· ‘Genuine Twitterati Earn Seals of Approval’, The Australian, 16/6/09
· Jason Kincaid, ‘The Fake Follow Becomes A Reality With FriendFeed’s New Design’, Tech Crunch (online) 25/8/08

WEEK 3 Friendship and Distinction
10 August

Reading
· Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Elective Affinities’, in Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Richard Nice (trans) Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984.

Further Reading
· Jason Wilson, ‘“Digital White Flight”? Facebook, Class and Social
Networking’, New Media Research Group Blog

WEEK 4 Intimacy and Privacy
17 August

Reading
· Emily Nussbaum, ‘Kids, the Internet and the End of Privacy’, The
Weekend Australian Magazine, March 24-5, 2007

Further Reading
· http://postsecret.blogspot.com/
· http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/
· http://secrettweet.com/

WEEK 5 Public Friendship
24 August

Reading
· John B. Thompson, ‘Self and Experience in a Mediated World’, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995.

Further Reading
· Christine Rosen, ‘Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism’ The New Atlantis, Summer 2007.
· Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity, Sage, London, 2004.

PART TWO: FALLING IN LOVE

WEEK 6 The Love Plot
31 August

Reading

· Lauren Berlant, ‘Love, a Queer Feeling’ in Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (eds) Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001.

Further Reading
· Plato, Symposium, (trans Robin Waterfield), Oxford University Press, 1994.
· Linnell Secomb, ‘Ch 1: Sapphic and Platonic Erotics’, Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007.
· John Armstrong, ‘The Romantic Vision’, Conditions of Love, WW Norton and Co, New York, 2002.
· Adam Phillips, ‘On Love’, On Flirtation, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994.

WEEK 7 I Want To Know What Love Is!
7 September

No readings; Students lead lecture

WEEK 8 Moving in Together
14 September

Reading
· William H. Whyte, ‘The Web of Friendship’ and ‘The Outgoing Life’,
from The Organization Man Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963 [Originally published 1956]

Further Reading
· Jacqui Taffel, ‘Love keeps its distance’, Sydney Morning Herald
· Katy Guest, ‘Loving together and living apart’, The Independent
· Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Falling In and Out of Love’, Liquid Love: On the
Fragility of Human Bonds, Polity, Cambridge, 2003.

WEEK 9 Getting Married
21 September

Reading
· Judith Butler, ‘Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?’ differences, 13.1, 2002.

Further Reading
· Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991.
· Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Free Press, New York, 1999.
· http://www.beyondmarriage.org/

—MID-SEMESTER BREAK: 28 September-2 October—

PART THREE: THE USES OF FRIENDSHIP

WEEK 10 Intimate Citizenship
5 October

Reading
· Melissa Gregg, ‘Normal Homes’, M/C Journal “Home” Vol 10, 4 (August 2007)

Further Reading
· Michael Warner, ‘Public and Private’ in Publics and Counterpublics,
New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, Mass: Distributed by MIT Press, 2002.
· Lauren Berlant, ‘Introduction: Intimacy, Publicity, and Femininity’,
in The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in
American Culture
· Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Duke University Press, Durham, 1997.

WEEK 11 Friends With Benefits
12 October

Reading
· Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’, in Michel Foucault:
Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol 1, Paul Rabinow (ed), Penguin, London, 2000.
· Herman Nilson, ‘Aesthetics of Existence,’ Michel Foucault and the
Games of Truth, (trans Rachel Clark), MacMillan Press, London, 1998.

Further Reading
· Dossie Easton and Catherine A Liszt, The Ethical Slut: A Guide to
Infinite Sexual Possibilities, Greenery Press, San Francisco, 1997.

WEEK 12 The Commercialisation of Intimacy
19 October

Reading
· Alison Hearn, ‘Variations on the Branded Self: Theme, Invention,
Improvisation and Inventory’, in The Media and Social Theory, David
Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee (eds), Routledge, London, 2008.

Further Reading
· Ned Rossiter, ‘‘YourSpace Is MyTime, Or, What Is The Lurking Dog Going To Do – Leave A Comment?’ Re-Public, (online)
· Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2004.
· Anthony Giddens, The Transformation Of Intimacy : Sexuality, Love And Eroticism In Modern Societies, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992.

WEEK 13 Compulsory Friendship
26 October

Reading
· Arlie Russell Hochschild, Selections from The Managed Heart:
Commercialization Of Human Feeling, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1983.

Further Reading
· Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of
Information, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004.
· Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, Gregory Elliot (trans) Verso, London, 2007.

Category: Teaching

“Brand representatives” now

Posted on | June 23, 2009 | 3 Comments

A message from the Vice Chancellor…

Senate approves University brand recommendations

Senate have considered the outcomes of our brand project and agreed to adopt the recommendation that our brand should position us within the community as an institution that lives out a life of the mind through active and energetic engagement. As a visual signal of our refreshed public image, Senate also approved the adoption of a new logo which, while retaining links with our heritage, is more modern and dynamic.

I believe this brand position accurately describes what is important to us as a community, as well as giving us some important aims to aspire to. It is not a “new” position, but rather articulates how we see ourselves and how we wish the community to see us. And it is a position which pays tribute to our most important asset – our people.

Further work is now being done to finalise the logo and determine how it will be used. We will officially start using it from 11 January 2010 but will be communicating the changes to you later this year. For all ceremonial purposes, we will return to using the original 1857 coat of arms design.

The new logo will not be the only change you will see. Adopting this brand position means moving away from our current over-reliance on sandstone and research income to communicate our message. From now on, we will emphasise the intellectual strength of the University and the impact we’ve had on the wider community through our research and teaching. This will mean changes not only to our marketing and communications material, but to the way we talk about ourselves and interact with our communities.

To help us achieve this, we will be inviting people to take on the role of brand representative for their faculty or department. Brand representatives will work with the brand team to identify what needs to be done in their area in order to adopt and implement the brand.

I encourage you to take some time to read through the updated brand website.* It details how the brand positioning was developed, contains full details of the next steps and will help you prepare for your involvement in the change since each of us will have a role to play by making sure our own activities demonstrate the strengths and qualities reflected by our positioning.

* For USyd staff only

Category: Academia

Professional precarity, 1

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

This is a note to self, and to anyone who didn’t catch Mark Bousquet’s recent post on professionalism and academia. It really highlights how the sacrificial labour of academics helped to make voluntary labour commonplace beyond the campus, in turn contributing to a broader deterioration of professional status that can no longer be rewarded financially or psychologically.

Bousquet raises similar issues to those addressed in Andrew Ross’s latest book when he writes:

Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.

What’s particularly interesting is how Bousquet charts some of these changes in relation to managerialism:

the tenure-track faculty now retain professional status in at least partial relation to their managerial function—they manage a vast range of parafaculty (adjunct lecturers, tech support, undergraduate tutors, graduate teaching and research assistants). Just as much legal work is done by paralegals supervised by lawyers, and physicians increasingly function to manage non-physician medical practitioners, nurses of various grades, students, nurses’ aides, technicians, secretaries, and other personnel.

And the economies of corporate campuses:

The smoothly-functioning campus is a post-Fordist company town, with a churning pool of self-subsidizing cheap labor that takes loans to spend in the company store, voluntarily poses for company marketing materials, pays for the privilege of serving as a “brand ambassador” for the campus, and so on.

These are problems I hope we can think through at the State of the Industry conference in November. Well worth reading Bousquet’s book in preparation for those discussions.

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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Suggested reading: online friends and intimacies

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 3 Comments

Just in time for my course outline, a fantastic manifesto addressing the limits of online social networking on Geert Lovink’s blog. A taste:

Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

And this:

Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

I’m looking for more provocative readings like this for my course on Intimacy, Love and Friendship next semester. This course was previously taught using classic readings in philosophy, but I’ve decided there’s little point me trying to replicate that version. Instead, I’ll be encouraging students to reflect on the ways intimacy, love and friendship are enabled and performed in media they use - particularly online media.

This the first course I’ll be teaching with my own content, so I’m slightly more excited than daunted at the moment. My aim is to create a cultural studies course that is sensitive to gender normativity and that makes use of online material as much as offline - any suggestions towards this end would be very welcome.

Of course I’ll post the outline here when it’s ready.

Category: Reading, Teaching
Tags: > > >

Getting near fear

Posted on | June 1, 2009 | No Comments

Weather

It’s June. My last month of being a postdoc. Things were supposed to be a lot more organised by now. At least it’s writing weather…

Category: Randoms

Published!

Posted on | May 27, 2009 | 4 Comments

The opinion piece referred to previously is in the Higher Ed section of The Australian today. The print version has a very cute cartoon alongside with a sandstone tower and a book as the draw bridge. The young girl struggling to cross the moat bears an uncanny resemblance to my grad school self. I’m gonna pin it on my office notice board. Thanks to Bernard Lane for running this.

Category: Academia, Events, State of the Industry 2009

Progress

Posted on | May 16, 2009 | 2 Comments

Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support in response to the rejections. What a weird week. After going public with all the feedback, a friend suggested I should write an opinion piece about it for the Higher Ed. I’ve sent it off and I think it might be getting published — although of course it’s my viability as a public sphere commentator that’s precisely at issue, isn’t it? Won’t get any hopes up.

Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, a couple of fairy godmothers forwarded the proposal to some editors who have given me much more encouraging responses. From drought to flood… Now I am in a panic to send sample chapters since the amount of time I’ve wasted feeling depressed and unmotivated has left me behind schedule in writing.

It just goes to show that what I say in the column is pretty accurate/ depressingly obvious: it’s not what you know in this business. This is but one story that highlights the economies of circulation, status and value underpinning the notion of “quality” that systems like the ERA are designed to assess.

Oh, and that the answer to any career-related question is always: networks.

Category: Academia, Politics
Tags: > > >

The tenor of rejection

Posted on | May 8, 2009 | 8 Comments

1.
From the proposal you sent, this looks like a thorough and thoughtful study of a phenomenon that is quietly changing the lives of many of us. That said, I’m afraid that we are unlikely to be able to sell your book in sufficient quantities for publication to be commercially viable… The book would indeed be used by students as you indicate, but it is unlikely to be a required text and they are more likely to access it through the library or as a chapter in a photocopied reader. Our experience is that we generally aren’t able to find a significant readership for academic studies of this kind among general readers, even where the topic is an issue related to their lives.

2.
Thank you very much for your email and attached proposal. It looks like it will make a very interesting book, but I am afraid it doesn’t fit with my current plans for commissioning on the media list. I am sorry about this and I wish you every success with placing the book with another publisher.

3.
Many thanks for writing with this outline. I think it’s an interesting project but for us to be even able to consider it, I’d have to ask you to really play down the Australian-based empirical material, and I suspect that this would rather change the nature of the project. I’d need you to synopsize other material from other global contexts to provide balance and to think of the book as more of an overview. I do think the project works fine as it is; it just wouldn’t fit with our series and I would worry that the focus on the Australian material would significantly reduce the market.

We don’t yet have a volume on social networking in our digital media series. I’m keen to commission one which lays out the key concepts and equips students to think critically about social networking as a facet of digital culture, drawing together the research which has been done on this so far into a readable narrative. I wondered, given the material on this in your outline, whether this might be a project that would be of interest? There would be scope to position yourself in relation to the topic of course, but the volume would also have to function as something of a primer (albeit at the upper levels of undergraduate study). Anyway, let me know if this might be of interest and we can talk further.

4.
First of all, sincere apologies for the long time it has taken me to get back to you on your proposal. I’ve now had a chance to consider your project: while this is an interesting approach, I’m afraid I do not think the market would be large enough to justify a paperback publication…

5.
Our priority is to publish textbooks that will be prescribed for specific courses. Unless we can identify a strong market and specific courses for which the book can be prescribed as a core text, it falls outside my publishing program. I believe your proposal is not a prescribed textbook, therefore, I am unable to pursue your proposal further.

6.
I enjoyed reading the outline, and agree that it looks like an interesting project. However, we feel that the the material would need to be expanded to include other countries - and the US in particular - to make this a viable project for us. If you are able to make these changes (and we appreciate this is a big ask), and place the US at the heart of the book, we would encourage you to submit a revised book proposal.

Category: Academia

Design help

Posted on | May 6, 2009 | 1 Comment

The State of the Industry conference needs a poster to advertise itself. We can guarantee exposure!

If you or anyone you know might be willing to offer an idea, please get in touch. So far the organising committee has been thinking a hallway image would be good. I think this could help symbolise how the themes of the conference are the things that usually get relegated to hallway conversations. But a hallway also conveys a sense of waiting (for class, for interviews), and some sort of path leading to a destination… that may yet prove elusive.

What do you think? More thoughts/suggestions welcome.

Category: State of the Industry 2009

Writing elsewhere

Posted on | May 4, 2009 | 6 Comments

Today I added another page to this blog with a running list of publications. Until recently I’d been able to keep this fairly current on my work page, but I don’t have access to my own profile page in my new job (!). In fact, the whole faculty is relaunching its website at the moment, yawn, so it’s not likely that’s going to change any time soon.

Apparently I’m going to need to have this list ready for ERA preparations anyway so this is one way to try to keep control over this stuff in my own time if possible. My only encounter with the administrator in charge of our ERA submission so far was an awkward confrontation where he walked in to my office uninvited and demanded that I prepare a document for his perusal and expert opinion in identifying my “top 20%”. When I asked what that even meant, he couldn’t tell me.

I don’t think I’ve put my current book outline/proposal online before, so feedback on that would be welcome right now: I need motivation! And if there’s something missing that you’d like a copy of, please get in touch.

Category: Academia, Publications
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