home cooked theory

#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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Crossroads 2010

I’ve just spent an amazing few days in Hong Kong with the ACS Chair, Ferda Keskin, meeting with the conference organisers for Crossroads 2010. Lingnan University will be the hosts and I have to admit being extremely excited after seeing the facilities, meeting with staff and hearing plans for the program.

We’ll be able [...]

Rural broadband

At the end of last week I spent two days at the University of Wollongong listening to a range of stakeholders and researchers talk about broadband. The workshop was organised around the ideas of self, place and “making do” and was an effort to talk about the cultural reality of communications infrastructure in non-metro areas [...]

Border as method

Notes from the “Precarious Employment, Differential Inclusion and the Proliferation of Borders” seminar featuring Brett Neilson, Sandro Mezzadra and Rutvica Andrijasevic at University of Western Sydney, November 13, 2008.
People seem to like notes, and blogging them helps me remember some of the ideas I’ve been hearing lately. Below is a bunch of thoughts I captured [...]

Good trip

I haven’t yet had a chance to say thanks to Adrian and my other generous hosts at Monash last week… even though the Qantas debacle meant I was a little bit late and spent most of the day in transit everyone made me feel very welcome and not too much of a screen studies amateur. [...]

The social networking strategy that wasn’t

When photos of the Prime Minister’s ‘butler’ appeared in various Sunday papers this past weekend it was the latest example of an emerging genre of so-called news stories based on allegedly revealing photos available on Facebook (Australian readers may well remember the media frenzy around swimming star, Stephanie Rice).
Rudd’s apparent reaction to the front page [...]

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