A requiem for academic blogging

Posted on | November 21, 2009 | No Comments

I’m about to post an update in preparation for next week’s SOI conference, but it seemed fitting to mention separately that an article I wrote some time ago about labour politics and academic blogging has just been published in Convergence. Well, fitting in the sense that last week I was in NYC at a conference about digital labour where it seemed like almost everyone was talking in another language (or maybe in a time warp? Read the tweets, watch the videos and you tell me). Also because next week’s event will be the culmination of what feels like a long, and (this week at least) tiresome amount of work I have been doing in the past few years to advance an agenda around academic labour.

I wrote this paper while living in Brisbane, and it has had several initial airings – at AoIR 2006, in a fantastic panel with Jean Burgess among others, and Cultural Studies Now in London. That was the Sunday morning time slot that all long-haul flying Australians lament as their fate but it was acutely memorable for me… it was perhaps the only time I’ll share an academic platform with the remarkable Nadia Mizner and Kiley Gaffney: such amazing women doing incredible things.

A lot of HCT readers will see themselves in this piece in one way or another, so I wanted to thank those of you who were part of the moment it’s trying to capture. The more I see of graduate and junior faculty life the more I appreciate the generosity and significance of what can take place here and other precious online spaces. (If you don’t have access to the journal and would like a copy, let me know).

In the past year especially Facebook and Twitter have irreparably changed the sensibility and community described in the piece, and in many ways that is hardly a bad thing. But their more encompassing reach and their capacity to make familiar the broadcast impulse behind blogging hardly change my concerns about the split between virtual and actual labour politics. Both must be realised in combination to change the present conditions of academic life.

Category: Academia, Publications, Research, Web(log) Stuff
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