Abstract writing

John and I have been brainstorming about potential papers for the CSAA conference given that abstracts are due at the end of the week. Is anyone else planning to go?

I’m plotting a presentation that will finally draw together my two research interests - affect and workplace culture - using the trajectory of Claire’s character in the last season of Six Feet Under as a talking point. It will be the first time I’ve done a critical reading of a TV text, although I have tried something similar for film before. I am slightly suspicious of myself doing this, however, because generally I am really sceptical about academic work that uses a media text to ‘prove’ an argument the writer has already decided upon. The thing is, I’m not decided on what I think yet - the depiction is just a really great introduction to some of the themes I want to raise. And showing some footage will be a nice break from the breathless monotone which often comes from racing through far too many words in 20 minutes.

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’.