Getting organised
Posted on | June 15, 2006 |
Filling out the CRN nomination and contemplating the prospects for ongoing employment last week have me feeling super anal about getting my affairs in order. I’ve just updated a bunch of stuff on my work homepage (check out the ‘research‘, ‘publications‘ and ‘MACS‘ pages) which led me in a bout of inspiration just now to summarise my new project. This is all very well given that the assessments for my ARC postdoc application will come out tomorrow, no doubt deflating any of my optimism or apparent talent to actually do what I propose below. However, on the flip side, these are the things I plan to study for the next 18 months, whether or not I get funding to do it, under the rubric ‘Working from Home’:
* to analyse the rhetoric of ‘flexibility’ in discourses surrounding workplace culture, and how this annuls the political potential of multiculturalism and theories of difference;
* to ask how flexibility plays out differently for workers at various levels of a workplace hierarchy - whether at the upper, middle or lower ends of the spectrum - particularly for women;
* to understand the role of new media technology marketing in the aestheticisation of new economy labour, to the point of normalising an ethical blindness towards the conditions of labour behind the technologies themselves;
* to establish the impact of new media technologies on changing attitudes to work and home space, and the gendered expectations regarding the labour performed in each;
* to highlight the ways in which the idea of freedom in neoliberal society is no longer freedom from work but freedom to work - in more places and more often - albeit at times that are personally convenient. Charting the challenge this poses to traditional labour ideology is a key objective of the research.
Huh. So much easier to write this stuff when you don’t have a book due…
Comments
4 Responses to “Getting organised”
Leave a Reply
June 15th, 2006 @ 12:20 pm
this sounds very much like what biella coleman was writing her syllabi about in the fall. you might want to check her out if you haven’t already.
June 15th, 2006 @ 3:47 pm
Thanks - sounds great. Is she actually at U Chicago? (Like I need another reason to want to work there!!!)
June 28th, 2006 @ 2:27 pm
[...] Yes, if the ARC application process has taught me anything, it’s that I have to embrace my cultural studies textual analysis background. It may not be the preferred methodology for many on the Humanities and Creative Arts panel, and I may be overly conscious of its limitations. But for the time being, it’s the methodology I know best. The difficulty I seem to be having is bringing this background to bear on a context - the workplace - that is not particularly used to being analysed in this way. This seems to me why academics might show some discomfort with my new project. By bringing the theoretical tools of cultural studies to bear on the site of cultural studies’ own practice (which, despite the heroics of subversion and resistance, is essentially the office cubicle of everyone else in the information industry), it’s that much harder to assume the speaking position of the detached observer. This latter position cultural studies has been much more happy to adopt when it is ’simply’ reading texts more easily understood as the object of others’ ‘leisured’ ‘consumption’. « Melbourne [...]
July 28th, 2006 @ 5:44 pm
Let’s not leave the abject out of it … my current “Mutual Obligations” diary is emblazoned with the slogan “Options For Your Future” (I am obliged by Centrelink to contact 12 employers per fortnight, even though my current income support is of the level $0.00, and has been, for the most part, since outgrowing my APA scholarship; needless to say, freelance or “honorary” academic work is not classified as a valid “Mutual Obligation” activity–unless, of course, it is paid. Which it isn’t.).
And speaking of “flexibility,” lets not forget its meaning in terms of globalization; “flexible production” is the prerogative of multinationals which, without fail, leave behind immiserated communities and local ecologies.
Great to see that the spirit of the humanities (knowledge for knowledge’s sake) is alive and well in Cultural Studies: “whether or not I get funding to do it,” indeed! How very noble of you!