home cooked theory

Course outline

Thanks very much for all the tips as this was coming together. Since I was moving house yesterday, the day the reader was due, I’ve written something based on what I already know rather than what I hope to get across before giving the lectures. I’ve got a bag of books about romance packed for [...]

“Brand representatives” now

A message from the Vice Chancellor…
Senate approves University brand recommendations
Senate have considered the outcomes of our brand project and agreed to adopt the recommendation that our brand should position us within the community as an institution that lives out a life of the mind through active and energetic engagement. As a visual signal of [...]

Professional precarity, 1

This is a note to self, and to anyone who didn’t catch Mark Bousquet’s recent post on professionalism and academia. It really highlights how the sacrificial labour of academics helped to make voluntary labour commonplace beyond the campus, in turn contributing to a broader deterioration of professional status that can no longer be rewarded financially [...]

Suggested reading: online friends and intimacies

Just in time for my course outline, a fantastic manifesto addressing the limits of online social networking on Geert Lovink’s blog. A taste:
Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always [...]

Getting near fear

It’s June. My last month of being a postdoc. Things were supposed to be a lot more organised by now. At least it’s writing weather…