home cooked theory

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 [...]

Writing elsewhere

Today I added another page to this blog with a running list of publications. Until recently I’d been able to keep this fairly current on my work page, but I don’t have access to my own profile page in my new job (!). In fact, the whole faculty is relaunching its website at the moment, [...]

The State of the Industry: Initial program launch

Thanks to John, Angela, Graeme, Emily, Clif and Alison, it’s time to formally announce:
The State of the Industry:
The future for cultural research in the university
26th and 27th November 2009
The University of New South Wales, Kensington
The State of the Industry is a two day conference that will discuss the future for cultural research in the [...]

Cultural studies and obsolescence

Last night, along with a few other cultural studies scholars in Sydney, I was invited to meet the new CSAA President, Amanda Third. The idea was to “think out loud about the fact no-one has come forward to hold this year’s CSAA conference” and to see what people are thinking about “the CSAA version of [...]

Cultural work and creative biographies symposium

Wednesday April 1st 2009
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
Michael Young Rooms: 1, 2, 3 & 4
Organisers
Rosalind Gill, Centre for Citizenship Identities and Governance (CCIG), The Open University
Mark Banks, Department of Sociology/CRESC, The Open University
Stephanie Taylor, Department of Psychology/CCIG, The Open University
The last decade has seen a huge growth of interest in cultural [...]

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