home cooked theory

In unity

**We urgently need billets for the State of the Industry conference. There has been an amazing response from young interstate scholars wanting to come, and we’ve funded airfares for everyone we could, but some people won’t attend if they can’t get accommodation. Please let me know if you can offer a bed or a couch.**
Taking [...]

Mid-semester break

I have a little break from teaching now and will be a) catching up on a few ongoing projects b) having a birthday holiday!
Some of you would have heard the interview I did on Radio National yesterday about Facebook in the workplace, which drew on the material mentioned here a few weeks ago. Thanks [...]

Active campuses

It’s great to see two big campaigns hitting campuses at the moment. Today’s rally for international students is a great initiative that deserves serious attention. We hear a lot about the value of the international student market to the national economy, which is why Julia Gillard is overseas right now at her most eloquent. But [...]

Remembering Eve Sedgwick

This is something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Hope some of you might like to come! We are also looking in to the logistics of recording it – so it would be good to hear if people would find this useful.
Remembering Eve Sedgwick: The beginnings, present and future of queer theory
A [...]

Overload

Think your job is bad? Read this. Overload reports on “the role of work-volume escalation and micro-management of academic work patterns in loss of morale and collegiality at UWS.”
Apart from highlighting the inadequacies of workload formulae across every level of academic life, it’s also one of the best reports I’ve read showing the [...]

“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 [...]

Published!

The opinion piece referred to previously is in the Higher Ed section of The Australian today. The print version has a very cute cartoon alongside with a sandstone tower and a book as the draw bridge. The young girl struggling to cross the moat bears an uncanny resemblance to my grad school self. I’m [...]

Progress

Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support in response to the rejections. What a weird week. After going public with all the feedback, a friend suggested I should write an opinion piece about it for the Higher Ed. I’ve sent it off and I think it might be getting published — although of course [...]

The tenor of rejection

1.
From the proposal you sent, this looks like a thorough and thoughtful study of a phenomenon that is quietly changing the lives of many of us. That said, I’m afraid that we are unlikely to be able to sell your book in sufficient quantities for publication to be commercially viable… The book would indeed be [...]

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