home cooked theory

‘I wanted to make her feel special like it was a limousine’

Driving home the other night I was bowled over listening to some of the stories taken from the Storycorps project. It’s an oral history initiative taking place in little booths across the US where people can interview loved ones about everyday events and memories. The aim is to create an archive of contemporary American life [...]

Young people

Rowan writes:
Mel, I’m curious about your statement… ‘it helps to be The Young Person when giving guest lectures like these…’ I am assuming from the capitalisation that you see this is as a stereotype of some sort or a construction, and one you obviously feel keenly when you give a guest lecture. When you have [...]

More History of Theory

I know I did a bad job of reporting Ian Hunter’s paper last time, but hey, if you took a look at the paper he spoke from you’d know why. Ouch my head hurt. So perhaps tomorrow’s will be a little closer to my level… I can live in hope:
Title: ‘Historiographical Revisionism, “Cambridge School” intellectual [...]

Enough with the paranoia

Maybe we should just stop inventing things altogether in case terrorists use them? I’m not one for cybertopianism, but it seems we aren’t even allowed a moment of enthusiasm anymore. Things are bad when optimism, oh yeah and democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of movement seem hilarious ideals.

Questioning what’s queer

Tomorrow we’re hosting an exciting event, it’s my colleague’s book launch and beforehand he’s giving a lecture which will summarize a lot of the amazing work he’s been doing over the past few years. Mark’s in his final few months working here at the Centre so I reckon it will be a bit of a [...]

Liberal pop-feminist side project

Since writing the blogging chapter I’m starting to develop a bizarre fascination with a particular strand of US feminism that’s really vocal online but which I don’t hear coming from places near me, geographically speaking. I think I’m interested in it from the point of view that some of my friends are developing in their [...]

Put another way…

Re-reading the amazing Roland Barthes collection, Image Music Text, I stumble upon a passage which seems to encapsulate so much of what I was trying to express in the last post. This is a section called ‘The Teaching Relationship’ and it begins by saying, ‘Imagine I am a teacher’:
I speak, endlessly, in front of and [...]

What makes a good lecture(r)?

This week I gave my first ever lecture on blogging. I’m not sure how it came about, really, aside from the equation: can lecture + has blog = the blogging lecturer. To me there’s something a bit wrong with this formulation. Then again, for time reasons I actually asked to give my lecture on blogging [...]

Gender + blogging

Another footnote. In my chapter I ended up writing a critique of this sort of appraisal, which tends to stop at the point of saying isn’t it great that blogs reflect how historically women have used knitting as a way of getting together to talk. What these comments consistently fail to do is explain why [...]

Curses

John Frow’s abstract for The History of Theory seminar has just gone up. How much do I not want to be in NYC that day? Why does it feel blasphemous to say that? [Fears of exposed geekness continue...]

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