home cooked theory

Please discuss

Graeme Turner, who is currently based at the Annenberg School, sent me this article the other day. It’s lucky I didn’t read it straight away, given my depress-o state lately. The letters the author talks about receiving from graduate students reminded me of emails I got last year after my New Matilda article came out, [...]

Boo hoo blues

I went on holiday last month for the first time ever, I think, since I began working in academia. Of course, there have been lots of trips before – many that wouldn’t have happened without a job to pay for the airfare – but they have all involved work. The exceptions have been holidays spent [...]

Crossroads panel

Proposals are due this week for Crossroads in Cultural Studies, to be held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong in June 2010.
As a member of the conference committee I’ve been busy organising a number of the spotlight sessions over the past few months, but have yet to organise my own paper and panel! Eek! [...]

#IPF09 debrief

Now one cannot demonstrate scientifically what the duty of an academic teacher is. One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to [...]

Smart choices

Thanks so much to New Matilda for publishing this piece just before the conference. I tried to crystallize some of the things mentioned here in recent days and months.
See you on Thursday, I hope!

Related reading #SOI09

With thanks to Tammi and Jen…
The RED Report: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education, Australian Learning and Teaching Council, 2008
From the introduction, by Professor Rob Castle, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and International), University of Wollongong:
To maintain for permanent staff the ideal of being teaching and research academics, we have had to rely on [...]

10 things graduate students want

Over the past few months panelists for the SOI conference have been meeting and sharing plans for what they will present in their allotted time at the beginning of each session. The conference format is not the traditional paper-giving mode, but rather an open discussion with the audience following a series of provocations from invited [...]

A requiem for academic blogging

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 [...]

Final stretch

It’s getting close… here is the official poster for next month’s State of the Industry conference (also available as a .pdf here). Thanks go to Clif for the design and imagery. We loved the idea of the fading glamour of the fun park and also the rollercoaster symbolising the highs and lows of the academic [...]

Women in research

A new report shows that women’s progress in science has stalled over the past 15 years. While this won’t sound like news to many, I was shocked to read the statistic on how many women are Federation Fellows (8.5%). When you add that to other recent news stories, particularly with regard to the ongoing pay [...]

keep looking »