home cooked theory

Queer Thinking preparations

Plans are well underway for this year’s Queer Thinking events. As was the case last year, the Sexuality and Space Group at Sydney is teaming up with New Mardi Gras to bring a special guest speaker for the weekend. This year it is the brilliant Professor Sara Ahmed. Sara is a regular visitor to the [...]

Mad Men revised

My updated paper on Mad Men (following peer review) is now available here. What a great experience this time – some really helpful reports. But I am keen to hear any more feedback before submitting the final version. I’m still not quite happy with the conclusion and wonder if it is to do with the [...]

Surveillance and Everyday Life

Sydney University’s Surveillance and Everyday Life project is running a two day conference next month, and the program (pdf) has just been announced. Looks like I’m speaking on day two. The paper is something I’m working on for a collection on ‘identity technologies’ edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. This is one of a [...]

Orientation

An impressive new post at Music for Deckchairs takes on an extreme case in recent university marketing strategies – no doubt expressing some of the reservations others may feel in the lead up to a new academic semester. It reminds me of the remarkable experience I had heading out for lunch outside the Quadrangle at [...]

Flux or precarity? It depends who you write for

Two articles I read this week offer contrasting insights into the state of the work world at present. One is from a notorious business cheerleader, one is from a Leftist magazine, but it seems to me they are writing about the same thing. The first piece, coming out in next month’s Fast Company, describes Generation [...]

Willunga Connects – public release

This time a year ago I was heading off to Willunga, South Australia, to study the roll-out of the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network. Just before Christmas, the South Australian Government’s Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology released the public report on our findings. This is the only research of its kind that [...]

Participants needed: Popular Music and Cultural Memory project

Brisbane music writer/researcher/legend Ian Rogers is in Sydney next month to do interviews on a project called Popular Music and Cultural Memory. He needs help recruiting participants for interviews during the period Monday Feb 13th til Wed Feb 22nd (also in Adelaide Jan 16-25 and Canberra Feb 1-8). As he puts it: “The interview is [...]

NTEU Future of Higher Education Conference

Has anyone heard of this conference? I hadn’t – even as a union member and a Sydney employee – but am interested to know who would go based on the speakers listed. From the titles alone, it’s not clear that any of the academic speakers are active teaching staff in the present, let alone the [...]

Holiday consumption

This fascinating post at Supervalent Thought is timely motivation for new year writing projects. Makes me wonder if I should rethink my avoidance of MLA. I’ve never been, having lost touch with literary studies after my Honours year. I still think in terms of textuality though… indeed the more I go through peer review processes [...]