home cooked theory

Manchester

Did anyone see that film with Sandra Bullock, The Proposal? I’m in Manchester now and being here is like the place she went to meet her PA’s folks. It is light all the time. It was light when I went to bed, it’s bright blue sky at 4.30am. The joys of cross-hemisphere travel! Anyway, this [...]

Literature and cultural studies

One of our grad students in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies is organising a panel for the Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in June. It’s exploring links between literature and cultural studies. As part of the preparations, she is doing a survey of postgraduates and early career 
scholars working on literature in the [...]

Why bother?

This semester I teach Arguing the Point: Research in Gender and Cultural Studies. It’s a graduate course for students writing a thesis for the first time and those new to our discipline. The classes are a mixture of themed discussion and practical workshops. A final “After 5″ hour focuses on research skills. Tonight I’m spending [...]

On topic

I hadn’t seen this before. Thanks to Acheron LV-426.

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 [...]

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