Phew

Posted on | February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

That was close. Lots of deadlines to start the year, but now they’re mostly out of the way I can take a minute to catch up with myself. It’s probably obvious that since moving to the beach I’ve been quite reluctant to stay inside blogging after hours, with visitors and the magnificent Leonard Cohen entertaining my weekends. Still, there’s plenty of news to report.

Most of the things I’ve been writing in the past month are affect related. They include a new version of the paper I gave last year drawing on the Working From Home project, a book chapter for a new collection on affect and feminist methodology, and a contribution invited for a forum to be published in the Journal of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on “the affective turn”. That’s without mentioning the huge achievement of my summer/Greg’s winter, which was to finish the final edits to The Affect Theory Reader manuscript. With fingers crossed, it should be published by Duke some time in the next year. We’re quietly confident it will be worth the wait!

In each of these pieces I’ve been developing my thinking around affective labour, so if anyone is interested in reading more please get in touch. (I have a new email address now I’m at Sydney, too, in case you’re wondering where I am.) Since teaching a course together last year, Mark Andrejevic and I have been engaged in ongoing discussion about labour and its relation to cultural studies and the new economy, but we need more references and participants in these conversations, so I’d be interested to hear from other people working on similar questions.

Mark is (as always) interested in theorizing exploitation in web 2.0 and participatory media, whereas I’ve been drawing on my fellowship study to ask questions about the difference between affective and immaterial labour – comparing feminist and cultural studies writing on these questions with the Italian Marxist legacy. This is alongside another research collaboration I have been part of and which culminated in the recent issue of Theory, Culture and Society on precarious labour – congratulations to Ros Gill and Andy Pratt for bringing that great collection together.

I will be speaking at a symposium organised by Ros at the Open University at the beginning of April, and will also spend a few weeks in London before that. I will bring lots of these research goodies with me, so if you’re in the area and would like a visitor, let me know – I aim to be there March 16 to April 5.

The next few weeks I’m coming to terms with being a Sydney local again with some events around my respective ‘hoods. On Thursday and Friday a group of us in the Cultural Research Network are holding a stakeholder meeting at the University of Wollongong discussing rural and regional broadband connectivity. I’m looking forward to talking through some issues that have been on my mind for a long time – that is, since I grew up on a farm in Tasmania! The abstract for my contribution is below.

Stay tuned next week as well, as the Gender and Cultural Studies Department hosts a two day workshop on “Glocalising Sex and Gender”. It’s at the Redfern Town Hall, and I’m gonna be talking about dating websites :-)

“Available in selected metros only”: Negotiating the promise of online connectivity

Melissa Gregg, University of Sydney

This paper considers the benefits a cultural studies perspective can offer debates around rural and regional telecommunications provision. It begins with a critique of the metrocentrism dominant in recent scholarship of new media, arguing that academic, business and government discourses share progressivist assumptions in equating online connectivity with freedom. It highlights how the gap between the promotion of connectivity and actually existing infrastructure leads to an ontological resilience among rural residents who “make do” with deferred promises of community and participation. The relationship this bears to the political subjectivities described in recent queer theory is briefly explored. The paper develops to suggest that a parachute model of policy consultation privileges those in rural communities with the social and cultural capital to advance established interests – leaving the everyday lives of the majority of residents unrecognised. In encouraging ethnographic studies of technology use that spend time in rural locations, the paper concludes that the different priorities that drive country life – the prominence of environmental concerns, the importance of civic institutions, and above all, distance from the temporalities that dictate the terms for assessing political participation – offer important correctives to the ideologies of individualism and innovation that drive new media consumption.

Category: Events, Publications, Travel

Comments

One Response to “Phew”

  1. ben
    February 12th, 2009 @ 6:39 pm

    Hmmm, participatory media. Remember my harsh words about “participation” last year? In which I agreed with Morley and declared that I was “against” it? I’m rethinking this somewhat. My usual schtick was to note that the word “participate” never has a literal object, thus acting as a cover for the shadowy arms of naturalised social corporatism, and a dutiful relationship with the state. I’m now interested in what happens if we move the focus away from citizen-actors and towards more abstract flows, while keeping the terminology. “Participation” then turns into something more interesting and ambivalent, something more discursive. Rather than servicing a crypto-authoritarian, biopolitical demand for “social fitness”, “participation” then becomes something a bit more hackable, subject to discursive tweaks — a different kind of agency.

    Sorry, thinking aloud.

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