The State of the Industry
Posted on | August 29, 2008 | 6 Comments
Frankie magazine has a feature this month on postgrads with cool PhD topics. [Disclaimer: I know two of the three interviewees quite well; in fact it feels as though I "know" half the people in the issue in one way or another...] Nestled in with other stories of “creative types” who do what they do “simply for the love of it”, the spread has me thinking about the alliances developing across different industries — how a new generation is developing a profile in the media sphere despite the slow institutional change in the work contexts they navigate.
I saw this Frankie story develop in various ways by getting emails about it when it was being put together and then watching the reactions to the publication amongst friends online over the past few days. It’s just one example of how online culture is a big part of this new employment landscape. The networks of contacts rendered visible on Facebook and MySpace are archives of opportunity for people needing help – fast – to deliver on their current project. Whether it’s the RA I recruited from my blog readership, the photographer who can capture the story, or the IT specialist who knows how to get the website up in time for the deadline, social networking and online presence functions have emerged in force as tools for young workers to cope with the high-pressure conditions of cultural labour. It’s an organic development from previous professional networking practices, some of which were already taking place online but are now explicitly and effectively instrumental.
Typically, I have reservations about some of these matters. I feel awkward seeing scholarship packaged between glossy fashion spreads with skinny models, and I think stories that glamourise work “for the love of it” perpetuate the problem of gaining sustainable living wages for artists and writers of all types. Jason and Ian both mention the financial penalty of further study in their Frankie profiles, and it is these years of extended poverty that factor in to questions of housing affordability, health care and having a family down the track.
Influenced by my colleague Mark Andrejevic’s latest book, I also worry about the willingness of large numbers of people to sign up for trademarked forms of sociality – work-related or not – with companies they know close to nothing about. And in the case of the university, it seems as though online cultures have conveniently filled the void in campus culture for local students in the face of funding cuts to vital infrastructure, including student unions.
But speaking of networks, I’ve mentioned here before the idea of a conference I’m organising with Emily Potter, Clif Evers and Alison Huber to be held in Sydney next year as a sign-off event for the ARC-funded Cultural Research Network. Well, the time has come to start preparing for it, and in the spirit of next-generation academic practice, we’ve decided to do quite a lot of the planning here.
For one thing, we thought it would be useful given our location in three different states. But we also want this conference to be the end point of a wider conversation that’s well overdue, and to that end, we want to open up some alternative forms of participation. We want your input.
The conference will bring together stakeholders from the community, the media, industry and academia to discuss the work of cultural research today. We have three days set aside for discussion, and for convenience we’re placing them under the themes ‘teaching’, ‘research’ and ‘outreach’.
It’s tradition for academics to see these as interrelated dimensions of their job, but we don’t often get a chance to talk about each at length and in turn. In fact the issues we want to discuss are the ones usually relegated to the socialising in-between formal conference sessions, but we think they deserve attention in their own right.
The conference aims to be controversial, to short circuit some of the assumed structures of knowledge and power in the academy, to interrogate the status quo, and ask difficult questions about what it means to research culture – and be involved in a research culture – in the university today.
Some of the key concerns of the conference will include: the politics of labour and cultural research; different models for teaching and research; the place of industry partners in academic work; intellectual property; the notion of ‘academic expertise’ and its currency; the roles of academics beyond the academy; the future of academic labour; and the contemporary ‘career path’ of the PhD graduate.
But perhaps the main point of the conference is to introduce a new crop of Australian Humanities researchers who have things to say about all of these things. While we don’t intend to dwell on the politics of generationalism, we do think there is a distinctiveness to the experiences of those who have entered the university as students and employees since the 1990s. Our careers have been marked by a particular set of expectations and parameters that have failed to be met with enough frank and informed discussion. So this is a big opportunity to have some robust public debate about the academic industry we’re inheriting.
Right now we’re compiling a list of themes to cover and participants who want to be involved in the event. The conference will be organised around short provocations rather than papers, and we need help narrowing down a list of these. Next up we’ll be posting from our wish list of topics and inviting you to comment, add suggestions, offer feedback and alternatives. Stay tuned and get involved!
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6 Responses to “The State of the Industry”
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August 29th, 2008 @ 5:58 pm
I like this idea. An ideas and strategy state of the industry conference specific to academia. Given this:
“While we don’t intend to dwell on the politics of generationalism, we do think there is a distinctiveness to the experiences of those who have entered the university as students and employees since the 1990s.”
And this:
“…the whole issue has me thinking about the alliances developing across different industries — how a new generation is developing a profile in the media sphere despite the slow institutional change in the work contexts they navigate.”
[which is not new at all, just the instrumentality as you mention more visible]
…I am expecting it might also be useful to interweave the platform with strategy-educated cultural workers, art workers, non-profits whose work is very much aligned with / parallel to/informed by, or indeed counter-formed by academic research, who are aware of the first point, above, indeed deal with it everyday, and bring ‘industry’ (and by industry I actually mean ‘cultural work’) perspective on the academic context. i.e. Those who watch their own generation (including themselves) fall in and out of the academic industry in pursuit of their commitments to cultural work. It would be very important to frame such contributions not as examples of “refusal” of academic constraint -but of an approach that entails a broader commitment to cultural work that refuses predetermination by states of industry. Of course need a better adjective than refuses. ‘Navigates?’
August 30th, 2008 @ 8:40 am
i.e. the alliance of academic and non-academic ‘cultural work’ perspectives with volitional and systemic investments in/commitments to the terrain, arguments and achievements of such an event would be in many ways different from the official map of academia-industry alliances. I think my post above just expressed hope that some element of programming would account for this rather obvious point I realise I just made here, and not there.
August 31st, 2008 @ 10:30 am
Yes Rach. Exactly. One idea we have already is to have a couple of respondents at the end of each day who speak from outside academia in just this way – people who might open up the terms of debate and further displace the established ways of approaching issues/ problems/ challenges given how they manifest across institutions.
But to the extent that we can program this depends on people’s willingness to volunteer. Hopefully there will be participation throughout the three days that reflect these kinds of crossover too.
August 31st, 2008 @ 9:13 pm
The comments above are all very well, but shouldn’t you be talking about the hott doodz in Frankie?
September 3rd, 2008 @ 11:32 am
the frankie writer and i exchanged emails about this article, she didn’t let me know I wasn’t needed. guess i am not sexxxy enough.
you may be interested in the 2015 report/project at UWS as one university’s response to dealing with the generational shifts that will occur in the industry over the next several years. the report is written as if omg aging population of academics! but it is a constant process, not a one off crisis… neoliberal managerialism…
September 6th, 2008 @ 5:07 pm
well i am very interested in the up coming conference, so will try to keep track of things here. the proposed topics and methods sound excellent
i am interested too in your comments about frankie / social networking:
along with your accurate comments about networks and the employment landscape, i’d add the observation that it creates a kind of an expectation regarding ‘collegality / friendship’ which we are under increasing pressure to live up to. if you agree to sign up to someone’s network (by adding them on facebook etc.), does that mean you also sign up to be on call for their tight deadlines for copy or ideas for grant applications or references? how we pass on the ‘high pressure’ associated with cultural labour to those we’re networked to is interesting to me.
in my time volunteering on projects like this is not art – and since then – i have been disappointed / frustrated with the refusal to ask for/demand more reasonable timelines and workloads amongst ourselves. i see less of this in the academic context (a few deadline hating colleagues aside
). working across diy/volunteer cultural sites and the academy i am increasingly aware how *time* (to think, to draft, to work) is a privilege not often granted.
(frankie article is a case in point! i received an email asking if i was interested in being interviewed and (from memory) was given a day to respond…)