Also, on Friday 24th, Kane and I are organising an all day workshop, ‘Researching intimacy, sexuality and space’ at The University of Sydney. It will feature a series of speakers from Sydney and elsewhere, and finishes with a public forum with Sara and others debating “Why Gender Matters.”

Full details of the line-up will be available shortly. For now, I wanted to mention that in preparation for the Friday event we are running a weekly reading and discussion group that people here may wish to follow online or come along and join.

We’ve decided to group the discussions under three themes that relate to the Friday program and the drawcard speakers – Annamarie Jagose, Kate Lilley, Melissa Hardie, Lee Wallace, Kane Race, Elspeth Probyn and Sara. The readings will give a good sense of each speaker’s background and key ideas, and we will use the meetings to discuss how their work and the different lineages relate to each other – and to the field.

Here’s how it will look:

Week 1 – Sex (AMJ)
Week 2 – Style (KL, MH, LW)
Week 3 – Space (SA, KR, EP)

The themes are broad but from each we will get a chance to discuss 1) politics of queer/sex/identity 2) aesthetics and style – especially in cultural forms 3) theories of space, embodiment, belonging, scenes.

If you are interested in coming along to one or several of these we will meet on campus each week starting this Friday (3rd) at 3pm. Both Kane and I will be there and possibly other faculty depending on availability.

The following readings are the starting point for this week’s meeting:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.
Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.
Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Get in touch to find out more…

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 series of pieces inspired by teaching my course, Intimacy, Love and Friendship, which runs again this semester. I welcome input and more examples! Details below.

All in your hands: Smart phones, intimacy and adultery

This paper explores emerging practices of intimacy, publicity and privacy evident in a range of mobile media applications, particularly those that facilitate and obscure adulterous behaviour. The forms of surveillance imagined through these technology designs, and their gendered assumptions, will be features of the analysis. The paper draws together a history of writing on love and flirtation, theories of intimacy and friendship, and empirical studies of mobile media – including research conducted by the author on technology use among white collar professionals. In this framework, smart phones are shown to reflect the vulnerabilities of contemporary relationships as much as their changing function. If mobile technologies provide an infrastructure to relieve the tensions inherent in normative coupledom today, they also hold the potential to refigure our sense of domesticity’s function, most obviously in terms of the link between physical proximity and intimacy. The surveillance capacities of new media devices here offer insights into emerging models of friendship, sexual ethics and care.

The past few weeks I’ve been away from Sydney, my job and my computer, and now have some much needed new year energy as a result. I am (maybe?) joining the #pomodorojerk writing group when I am back at work, although I am a bit ambivalent about productivity as a value system. I mention it in case you might want to join too.

So far summer has involved about 2500kms of driving – from Sydney to Port Douglas – visiting relatives and friends. It has included a fairly average attempt to read whole books, including novels: Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot; Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing; Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (belatedly). These are all campus novels, in one way or another, so they weren’t an ideal way to tune out from academic life. Still. It helps sometimes to see your world as a genre.

I’m also most of the way through a biography of Elton Mayo which I think will be the source of a lot of writing and thinking plans in the coming year. I had no idea he was Australian and taught at the University of Queensland! This history opens up all kinds of interesting pathways and connections.

With the benefit of aircon, I’ve been catching up on Homeland as well. Read Jason Jacobs’ great take on it here. (And please, no spoilers; I’m still at ep 8).

The idea for MACS arose from a sense that PhD students and junior staff are often at a distance from existing forms of collaboration between researchers in different universities within the one city. While much emphasis is placed on the end product of research, and there are plenty of avenues for presenting and publishing our work, the early stages of an academic career involve particular anxieties that can be ameliorated with the support of a community of peers. The MACS group is an attempt to create a space for discussing everything to do with our work aside from the end product, to share accumulated knowledge and resources to gain insight into the opportunities available within our field of research. It aims to provide a space for networking, information exchange, peer support and mentoring. MACS meets at an off campus venue that is designed to be centrally located.

Since I began teaching in a department setting I’ve found it increasingly difficult to see how postgrads and ‘ECR’s can connect with each other across institutions without significant leadership. While there have been advances at some levels – the postgrad bursary schemes attached to symposia and conferences in various fields, for instance, and the CRN Early Career Researchers node which culminated in the 2009 State of the Industry conference – we lack a sustained response to the situation in which junior scholars regularly feel alone in their field at a local level.

There are major obstacles discouraging young researchers from finding their peers within institutions as much as across them. It depends on context, of course, but in universities the size of Sydney (and these are the universities with large grad student cohorts) it is hard enough for those on faculty to know their colleagues in other disciplines, leaving aside the productivity pressures that challenge the whimsy of collaborative collegiality in the first place.

The isolation that can affect students within particular departments is further compounded by the culture shock of those who travel large distances to enrol in research higher degrees, sometimes from the other side of the world. This situation calls for an amount of professional and pastoral care that the competitive world of the contemporary university hardly encourages.

In recent years it seems clear that Facebook has emerged to fill some of this void. Its non-committal affect is a less time-consuming version of the PhD/junior faculty blogosphere I have written about elsewhere. But as a result it is also less useful for facilitating ongoing relationships of critical experimentation, exploration and trust. We would do well to have reservations about encouraging students to turn to a corporate entity with dubious political motives in order to solve a problem with the university experience.

Anyway, rather than get carried away in a critique of white collar networking and its self-promotional dynamics here, I’ve started a new MACS blog to house debates like these. Part of the aim is to provide an archive of discussions relating to the research conditions young scholars inherit. There are already excellent resources online addressing many of these issues, some local, some not. But the point – as my “Banal Bohemia” piece argued – is that we need to get better at making connections between cyberspaces of support and the industrial conditions that make it hard to have these conversations face to face. The field of cultural studies began by attacking the forms of elitism evident in the humanities; a natural extension of this project today must surely involve collaborative activism targeted at the point of reproduction for a still exclusive system.

Alongside the announcements that are part of the network’s rationale, I imagine it might be useful to have a schedule of guest posts on the MACS blog too. These could include research and industry matters, advice from established academics, features on current PhD projects and so on. Feedback on these ideas is welcome, as are volunteers!

Finally, I should acknowledge that this initiative is also designed to make a clearer distinction between the mentoring and professional development work that this blog has sometimes been used for (looking back at that link makes me realise how little has changed), and more reflective writing of my own that is both personal and research oriented. With any luck, this should mean more writing in two places.

In coming months, the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS – the organisation that runs Crossroads) will be calling for nominations for a board election that will take place prior to the general assembly in Paris, 2012.

After serving on this board as the Australia/New Zealand representative since 2004 I will not be seeking reelection.

Our region is represented proportionately like others, and there is now a vacancy for a representative from Australia or New Zealand. So this is just some advance notice that the board will soon be seeking formal expressions of interest – and candidate statements – from those of you interested in running. All current ACS members will then be asked to vote.

As part of the election, key executive positions are also up for nomination, which means that anyone considering running as a regional rep has the opportunity to run for Chair or Vice Chair.

With this in mind, I am very keen to encourage and invite all scholars in our region, particularly the established leaders in our field, to consider offering themselves as candidates.

The ACS has representatives from all over the world, so this same information applies to other areas too.

Feel free to contact me for further details.

One is that it breaks the stranglehold of multinational publishing houses owning the terms of access to our work. While I always appreciate the effort that goes in to editing and peer-review, traditional scholarly publishing is not always an ideal way to share new ideas. This is particularly important for those of us who want to be read by people other than currently employed academics and enrolled students. Given the politics of institutional subscriptions to journals it is hardly the case that publication guarantees a relevant readership anyway, leaving aside the open secret about just how much time teaching academics have to read articles at all.

Tied to this is the way in which existing networks of academic exchange – be they conference circuits or “walled gardens” like Facebook – sometimes constitute a narrowing of consensus among established interest groups. What’s striking to me within 24 hours of joining academia.edu is the number of non-Anglosphere users. This is genuinely exciting and pedagogical and it ties in with some of my longer term efforts (through involvement with the International Association of Cultural Studies, for instance) to agitate against Anglo-American dominance in scholarship.

I was reminded and re-angered about this recently at the Boston ICA during the session on “The university in crisis.” Despite the different geographical location of the four speakers, and a searing indictment of the Bologna Process offered by my fellow panellist Isabel Gil, question time was dominated by US speakers spanning several generations seeking to discuss exclusively US experiences. This left me lamenting the function of “international” as well as “communication” in “International Communication Association” – and wondering what lessons might need to be learned for such a grouping to attract associates from further afield. (To the young guy who came up to Isabel and I afterwards and apologised on behalf of his peers: thanks for noticing.)

So, I will continue to post publications here on the blog – and it’s perhaps not a coincidence that there is a new one I’m adding today on autonomism and the politics of love. But in an effort to expand critical horizons (and be open to the “common wealth” of scholarly peers beyond Empire, to draw from Hardt and Negri), I will also be urging lots of you to make use of this fantastic, open-access resource.

Between marking and closing off the semester’s grades I’ve been working full time on the Willunga research. The final report was actually due last month but I’ve reconfigured the scope of the project slightly and the timeframe too. Essentially this is to capture more data by way of the local primary and high schools. Right now every Willunga student from grade 3 upwards is taking an online survey about their technology use and their thoughts (if any!) on the NBN. This will offer some better and more extensive comparative material to analyse in relation to the established older residents that were the focus of the first version of the survey. I’m looking forward to sharing the results soon.

In the meantime, I’m heading to Paris and Leeds this week to speak at some more conferences. The American University of Paris is hosting a two-day event premised on the longstanding influence of Stuart Hall’s essay, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’. The lineup looks terrific. I wasn’t sure of the best way to tackle “the popular” in my work right now, until I thought more generally about the politics that have surrounded the NBN roll-out in Australia. So that will be the basis for my talk.

The Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference also features a great selection of speakers. It’s so great to see this field developing strongly now, and the work of the conference organisers in continuing to generate energy through these gatherings is a considerable part of that.

For me, it is a big moment because this will be the last conference I speak at before my book is finally (!) published next month. The abstract for my presentation is below.

Labour Politics and the State of Exception

In State of Exception (2005), Giorgio Agamben describes how nations temporarily suspend the usual rule of law under conditions of sovereign threat. When the state is in danger, strategies are developed to justify heightened and/or extended powers for the period of presumed risk. Adapting this notion to the workplace, this paper draws on a three year study of information and communication workers to discuss the “state of exception” affecting labour claims in the technologically mediated workplace. It shows how employees learn to cope with a growing number of job related communication requirements, including email, instant messaging and social media, to maintain the viability and relevance of their positions. For these workers, the “normal” working day is suspended in order to maintain the outputs of the organization, just as attempts to quantify or articulate labour claims are suspended in the face of technology’s unique properties. This is despite the fact that communicating via technology can only ever be a structural feature of these jobs. The paper analyses the shared rhetorical strategies of workers who justify the extent of their labour given their exceptional status in privileged professions. This leads to a broader set of questions about the morality of academics who draw on similar discourses to justify their location in careers that enable them to study such circumstances.

Anyone who has been paying attention lately will be aware of the various crises and challenges facing universities around the world. From the fallout of the ongoing economic crisis, to political interference, to externally imposed regimes of assessment and evaluation, it seems that the Ivory Tower is no longer a sanctuary from the harsh realities of the “real world” – if it ever was. Some of these problems are common to all disciplines and fields, but some are likely to be felt in particular ways by communication studies programs and scholars. In this panel representatives from a variety of academic backgrounds and institutions, in the U.S., the UK, the EU, and Australia, will discuss the current crises they have experienced and observed, and offer their views on how we – as individuals, and as a collective – might best respond to protect and enhance our mission as teachers and scholars of communication.

I’m not big on crisis narratives, but I do welcome the opportunity to have a grounded conversation about the challenges colleagues are facing in an international frame. The Euro/Anglophone makeup for the panel is obviously a limitation but it’s a start. (Organising Crossroads and participating on the ACS Board over many years has made me appreciate the difficult logistics of creating international dialogue… just as it has broadened my understanding of ‘the university’ and its various ‘crises’.)

One of the articles that’s been circulated widely in recent weeks is William Deresiewicz’ ‘Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education’. Starting as it does with anecdotes from Yale and Columbia, and diagnosing the PhD oversupply problem as ‘universally’ acknowledged, this opening context made me wonder whether the current ‘crisis’ is only gaining recognition now that it is evident in locations that have the most academic privilege to lose – in the same way that the ‘precarity’ movements have revealed how very few workers ever had the benefits of ongoing salaries and jobs for life.

Of course the situation is more complicated than this analogy would admit. Many academics do face genuine threats to their livelihoods, and the overwhelming reliance on sessional staff in many locations besides Australia is a clear and pressing concern. In Work’s Intimacy, I address some of this in a chapter called ‘Part time Precarity: Discount labour and contract careers’. Interviews with sessionals, students and full time academic staff provide points of comparison across the campus hierarchy. Noting the pressure felt by tenured academics as much as the system’s aspirants, the chapter questions the grounds upon which the sacrificial labour of white collar apprenticeships can be said to be justified.

At the same time however I do think it’s important to turn the crisis narrative around, to see the benefits of a wider and more international constituency for higher education (in staff cohorts as much as student ones). Sometimes it seems impossible for those on the Left to imagine a future for universities beyond a rhetoric of loss, even though there are clear examples of initiatives underway that can drive activist pedagogy where it is needed.

In preparation for the panel I’ve been looking back to other ‘crisis’ moments: for instance, the period marked by Stuart Hall’s ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’. This essay offers a useful reminder that ‘cultural studies in Britain emerged precisely from a crisis in the humanities’ and that ‘most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do serious work in it’ (11-12). None of the founding figures of early British cultural studies mentioned – Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, or Hall – held faculty jobs in the beginning. They taught workers in adult education classes, often at night and on contracts. The stress and political commitment involved in this practice (often revealed if you read interviews with Williams and Hall in particular) bears relevance to the drive and resolve of ‘the precariat’ of untenured labour today.

Based on his experience of Oxford, Hall had ‘always planned never to return to the university, indeed, never to darken its doors again. But, then, one always has to make pragmatic adjustments to where real work, important work, can be done’ (12).

He further writes:

When cultural studies began its work in the 1960s and ’70s, it had, therefore, to undertake the task of unmasking what it considered to be the unstated presuppositions of the humanist tradition itself. It had to try to bring to light the ideological assumptions underpinning the practice, to expose the educational program (which was the unnamed part of its project), and to try to conduct an ideological critique of the way the humanities and the arts presented themselves as parts of disinterested knowledge.

Reading these words today, I can’t help but think that part of the work cultural studies has to do is to continue this project of questioning the assumptions underpinning the practice of the humanities – and that such work also includes questioning the privileges (and morality) of the tenure system.

But before taking off on Wednesday I wanted to ask what you all think. Is there a crisis in Australian academia? Does it matter? There is certainly a history of talking about ‘the state of the industry’ on this blog – but I’m keen to hear whether people feel much has really changed in the past few years. We’ve seen the introduction of new schemes, such as DECRAs, though the word on campus is that literally thousands of applications have been submitted for just a couple of hundred grants across the entire sector. And this small window of opportunity has come amidst other developments, like the ERA and journal ranking debate.

Of course these are just the big ticket items. I also think it’s important to talk anecdotally and empirically about the quality of life young academics maintain. I was out with a colleague the other night who teaches 900 students in a first year course and spends every weekend working – especially since he feels obligated to answer all of his students’ emails. Imagine! And this is supposed to mark some kind of graduation from a succession of short-term positions in universities overseas where he wrote the necessary books and articles to develop a profile post-PhD. Most professors I know didn’t have a monograph until they were already well established on a permanent teaching payroll. In those jobs, class sizes were smaller, they were not ‘enhanced’ by online delivery, and students could not send questions about their assignments to you on the weekend, via Twitter.

So: apart from the difficulty of listening to senior colleagues who feign empathy with the job market, what are the biggest issues facing young scholars in Australia? Please leave a comment below or drop me a line before the panel on Friday. And if you’re heading to ICA – do come along to the session – it’s on Friday at 1.30pm.