Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to persuade yourself that you are either happy, active, or useful. Even the lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country still rich with the loot of a hundred years. Presently there may be coming God knows what horrors – horrors of which, in this sheltered island, we have not even a traditional knowledge. – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

At the time, this passage seemed to capture some of the texture of the 2008 financial crisis – an event that marked a turning point for many of the employees studied in my book.

Whether it was the sense of foreboding haunting the workplace as job losses became a reality, or the broader feeling of anxiety that the turmoil in global markets spelled for investors, the middle class office workers I interviewed in boom time Brisbane were far from encountering actual hunger or poverty.

Their tremendous work ethic, which saw them attached to their email from morning to night, stemmed from a different set of fears: that the happiness and success to which they felt entitled as ambitious professionals could suddenly not be their destiny. “I’m starting to realize I might have to go down almost 50 per cent of what I was getting paid,” a retrenched marketing manager told me: “maybe even less, because there’s just so much competition out there.”

The publication of my book in the past week has coincided with a renewed period of economic uncertainty. As the US battles the prospect of recession, and volatility reigns on the share market, riots have spread across Orwell’s “sheltered island,” to the disbelief of so many. We have witnessed scenes of horror as the extent of ordinary political disaffection has been revealed.

Watching these events – on cable television, Facebook and YouTube – an already clear division in the experience of power and participation in a knowledge economy is further reinforced. Our culture is one that values and rewards ambition, particularly when this is appropriately targeted to the pursuit of paid work. But it cannot afford to acknowledge that such aspirations will never be sustainable for all. It is abundantly clear that there are structural conditions that determine the distribution of opportunity, in spite of the ways neoliberal discourses try to make failure a personal responsibility.

A major motivation for my recent research has been to better understand a situation in which so many educated professionals remain protected from an awareness of others’ lack of access to work – how social inequalities fall off the radar in the course of busy day-to-day priorities. When your own job is both demanding and rewarding, it is hard to relate to the much larger majority in a global economy for whom (to use the words of Andre Gorz) the spoils of a merit-based society are forever distant, the prospect of fulfilling work “a bad joke.”

I wanted to mark this week by returning to Orwell, especially since the quotation above was cut from my manuscript in the production process. For the publisher, the difficulty of securing copyright for the passage outweighed the significance of its message. And right now this seems to be just another indication of our misplaced legal and political priorities.

Thanks to Sen Raj for the cute pic.

Thanks to everyone who came out to welcome Lauren Berlant on her visit to Sydney last weekend. It was an incredible paper, and we are all in the department basking in the afterglow of a fantastically inspiring visit.

I also wanted to say sorry to those who couldn’t make it in to Saturday’s lecture – which sold out. While it’s disappointing that people were turned away, this also sends a strong message to New Mardi Gras that there is an appetite for this kind of Queer Thinking in Sydney. We hope the program (and our involvement) will continue in future. If you hope so too, let them know – there is a feedback form in the “About Us” menu of the NMG website.

For now, big congratulations to all of those involved in Saturday’s great program – and happy Mardi Gras everyone.

I was nervous before the meeting because in the past fortnight I’d only just realised the extent of the Howard Government’s changes to the Family Law Act. I knew the laws had been amended, but I didn’t realise that every marriage celebrant in Australia must now use this formulation in the service itself for the wedding to be legitimate:

Before you are joined in marriage in my presence and in the presence of these witnesses, I am to remind you of the solemn and binding nature of the relationship into which you are now about to enter. Marriage according to law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.

I felt a bit sick when I read this the other day. I’ve been to marriage equality rallies and I’ve taught same-sex entitlements in class. But I’d avoided reading guidebook examples which show the legal requirements in detail. I only discovered the true force of the stipulation in my friend Michelle’s beautiful memoir of her marriage to Heather in Canada. (Michelle’s book, Ghost Wife, shows the implications of these words in the most vivid love story that reaches across couples, families, countries and generations. It needs a publisher if you know one!)

Yesterday we asked the celebrant if we could add some of our own words before the compulsory part of the service to make it clear that we don’t agree with the new statement. I figured this might be better than inviting guests to “boo” after the final line (?). I shouldn’t have been so surprised that politicians would feel entitled to dictate love’s terms to advance the interests of the nation: after all, I have read Lauren Berlant’s work for many years. I suppose what I do find shocking is the extent of the joylessness in the formal processes around marriage – as opposed to the pervasive optimism of its spin-off industries.

Take this, for example. Happily Ever Before & After is the booklet issued to couples by celebrants on behalf of the Attorney General. It lists “things you need to know” about marriage, including health and welfare benefits, taxation, making a will, and joint ownership of assets. It also has a services section listing counseling resources “before marriage”, “during” and “after breakdown of marriage”. The narrative suggests a certain inevitability to these stages – despite the larger heading: “Marriage is important”.

That this depressing account welcomes all couples who are well and truly in the process of planning a wedding encapsulates the contradiction at the heart of federal attempts to define marriage in exclusionary terms. To put it simply: those who seek to protect marriage from external threats freely admit its precarity is internal. It is in the formal documentation! How else might we explain state-sanctioned campaigns that warn: “unless your marriage is carefully nurtured there is a high risk it will end in divorce”? The patronising tone that warns lovers that their actions “should not be taken lightly” (another line in the compulsory ceremony book) is the weakest form of moral guidance in a society that claims secularism but actively promotes ideology.

Last year I tried to shock my students with statistics to show them that, going on numbers, and the average length of marriages, staying married to one person for life was one of the more radical things they might accomplish. The wonder on their faces as they realised they may not have to give up on love to be political! So, whatever words we choose to say in July, it is this objective we will have in mind. It will be to demonstrate a binding union with our many friends who question the wisdom and power of self-appointed guardians protecting an institution that cannot win its own ideal recruits.

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 answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations. These are quite heterogeneous problems. If he asks further why he should not deal with both types of problems in the lecture-room, the answer is: because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform. – Max Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’

The irony of the Internet as Playground and Factory conference was that it involved so much more labour than usual: physical (getting to NYC), mental (writing the paper), administrative (scheduling video shoots, uploading slides), promotional (coercive tweeting, list-serve participation, appearing in videos), emotional (patience with long-winded theory boys…). So I want to avoid writing a report of what I saw. The summary gesture of the conference blogpost is something I’m feeling less inclined to write over time, since so much effort goes in to making big events like these happen. Trebor’s drive and ambition are evident forces to behold

A lot comes down to serendipity and the chemistry of participants. There was, and continues to be, amusing frisson between key stakeholders brought together by this event (epitomised in one complaint from the audience, after the very first panel, that the papers were too boring). I suppose my lingering questions are to do with whether the territory being claimed by the iDC project is for politics or scholarship, and whether this matters.

There are now at least four extensive takes on what happened. It’s a comprehensive overview, especially given that most presentations were archived in some digital form. This is the unequivocal advance IPF made: new media devices and crowd-sourcing can broaden the audience for conferences for those who are a) interested b) literate in digital platforms and c) able to access the massive broadband infrastructure that makes these technologies work. Of course, in combination, these three factors exclude significant numbers, even within the host nation of the event, so it is a specific kind of achievement to celebrate.

For me, the conference was less interesting for the amount of new research presented than for the overall climate of Theory that was taken to be the legitimate register of scholarly performance (and here I’m purposefully separating academic work from the contributions of artists and activists). Given the critical landscape I usually inhabit, this was a confronting, almost nostalgic experience, and one that seemed extremely revealing of the hierarchies within the present international division of academic labour.

At this conference I heard things said by professors from prestigious US and European knowledge institutions which I might applaud but correct in a promising undergraduate essay. In some cases this was a genuine and objective problem of disciplinary impasse and ignorance; in others it was an outrageous display of ex-nominated discursive privilege being traded like currency. It had nothing to do with the best political intentions of speakers, and the enthusiasm for new ideas shared by everyone I met. But passionate, overarching proclamations were unremarkable, even encouraged, via the metrics of Tweetability, and the rhetorical position adopted in pre-conference publicity.

In the lead-up to the conference, relevant disciplinary histories and alternative theoretical legacies were routinely discounted on the iDC list in preference for excruciatingly detailed debate about Marx’s writings. Anyone with the time to read these macho arguments – for pedagogical intent rather than sheer bewildered entertainment value – learned plenty about the consequences of theory fetishism, as well as the relative amounts of time different writers have at their disposal at the end of a working day.

In the absence of disciplinary focus then, the lack of self-reflexivity on the part of some participants was professionally unthinkable to those attending from interdisciplinary fields like cultural studies and gender studies (which precede the conference’s closest disciplinary neighbour, internet studies, and which trouble the possibility of any unified project for that field too). Once scholarly formations are abdicated, it’s almost inevitable that speakers become open to the charge of practicing politics from the security of a scholarly location. So while few academics today would agree with Weber’s distinction between science and politics quoted above, it is one instance of how this problem has been shown to occur throughout history. I don’t subscribe to easy distinctions between politics and scholarship either, as my next paragraph will show. But I want a more convincing rationale for why these lines are necessarily more blurred when it comes to studying the internet.

Much has been said about gender at the conference, whether publicly, privately, or in ‘counter-public’ online back-channels. The fact that organisers and delegates alike worried openly about ‘the problem’ during and after the event is certainly one way of appreciating the dynamics of the iDC list leading in. But perhaps what hasn’t been said is that in an academic context an awareness of gender politics is not advanced by quoting the number of women on the program and claiming superiority over conferences that are worse. It is certainly not illustrated in the actions of a prominent speaker who used part of his presentation to express relief that a female colleague was on his panel (to keep the boys in line?) and who was later feted for being the most ‘participatory’ of presenters.

We all share responsibility for creating the conditions for inclusiveness. But an awareness of gender politics in an academic context involves respecting epistemological difference. It means recognising there are stakes involved in the very act of defining what counts as intellectually valuable. In a scholarly setting, feminism is not a political insight that can be enacted simply through the incorporation of certain kinds of bodies. It is an actually existing intellectual field that speaks directly to the very tensions around labour value that this conference regularly claimed as novel.*

When disciplinary differences arise (eg. when the writings of a major postcolonial feminist scholar are openly dismissed on the iDC list by someone who has written perhaps three times the amount of posts of any other member) the performance of territorialisation reaches dizzying heights. A lack of distinction between scholarship and politics provides an avenue of ambiguity leading away from complex discussions. Such encounters between different intellectual lineages cannot be avoided if we are actually interested in improving our theoretical concepts. They are also necessary if we seek to promote a time-frame for critical thinking that can resist the manufactured urgency of new media studies generally (an urgency that clearly also relates to capitalist processes).

Given that my job is to write and teach about contemporary culture, some of the problems I’m most haunted by after the conference are those raised by the students in the final plenary (something that Trebor’s report also mentions). Their enthusiasm for the event and their anxiety about entering the conversation without credentials were matched only by their curiosity at the modes of intellectual performance inherited and perpetuated by delegates. I got the sense that the forms of interaction these students are familiar with online already offer a more accommodating environment for their passions and interests than the odd rituals of academic knowledge production. This may explain why they aren’t so bothered about whether Google or Facebook provides them this platform.

The challenge I took from the conference – and it is a significant one, in an international market for higher education – is to demonstrate and translate the value of scholarly work to present and future generations of digitally literate students. For they surely deserve to believe in a world that is more complex than the space between the monoliths of commerce and politics.

*I tried to sketch some of that history in my (short!) presentation.

IPF09 delegates rearrange chairs to form a circle for the closing plenary and facilitate the Web 2.0 mantra: participation

Remembering Eve Sedgwick: The beginnings, present and future of queer theory

A half-day symposium

featuring

Melissa Hardie
Anna Gibbs
Elizabeth Stephens
Elizabeth McMahon
Chair: Melissa Gregg

2-5pm, August 28, New Law School Seminar Room 442, University of Sydney

Supported by The Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney, The SOPHI Gender and Modernity Group, and the ARC Cultural Research Network.

Cultural theories of identity and subjectivity in the Humanities have been significantly influenced by critiques of binaristic thought, including those pioneered in Eve Sedgwick’s writing. This legacy provides the foundation for the work of a number of feminist and queer scholars featured in this workshop, which aims to reflect on Sedgwick’s intellectual contribution in the wake of her death in April 2009.

Despite the amount of cultural research now exploring issues of identity relating to gender, sexuality and the body—and the institutional contexts of women’s and gender studies departments in the academy today—young researchers are somewhat historically distant from the material and political conditions informing these theoretical interventions of previous decades. Additionally, young scholars pursuing these topics beyond major capital cities generally miss out on discussions with a critical mass of scholars with expertise and international interdisciplinary experience in the area. This seminar offers a valuable opportunity for an extended discussion of queer identity and scholarship for researchers in a range of fields.

The workshop will be held at The University of Sydney as part of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies’ regular seminar series. The event will extend beyond the usual timeslot for these seminars to a full day’s events.

In the morning session, postgrads and early career researchers will meet as a group and spend time introducing themselves and their research topics. The discussion, which will be led by Dr Melissa Gregg and Dr Anna Hickey-Moody from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, will also cover the impact of Sedgwick’s work, the ways in which queer theory is taught and understood in respective institutional settings, and the context for local queer politics and activism in various cities and states. This get-to-know you session will give ECRs a chance to develop links with each other and knowledge of key disciplinary and intellectual precedents heading in to the public seminar.

Lunch will be provided.

The afternoon session, from 2-5pm, will be a seminar featuring guests from a range of universities. Dr Melissa Hardie (USyd) will present a feature discussion paper, the “Extinction of the Closet”, analysing Sedgwick’s _Epistemology of the Closet_ and its subsequent impact. This will be followed by a series of shorter reflections from a range of invited scholars: Associate Professor Anna Gibbs (UWS), Dr Elizabeth McMahon (UNSW) and Dr Elizabeth Stephens (UQ). These will examine the different strands of Sedgwick’s thought, including personal reflections on the trajectory of queer theory and its prospects during the past decade.

To benefit from this collection of speakers and the morning introductory session, eight interstate ECRs and postgraduates will be selected for travel and accommodation support in Sydney for one night. Selection will be based on competitive application demonstrating the workshop’s relevance to current research. A one page justification and brief CV should be sent. Attendees will have the opportunity to meet speakers, ask questions and participate in general discussion during the event.

A networking drinks function following the seminar will offer further opportunities for ECRs and other guests to interact and build connections after the formal proceedings conclude. This event will also serve as the launch for the Gender and Modernity Research Group based in the Department.

For more information, inquiries and to submit an application for funding support, please contact me by email: mgregg at usyd dot edu dot au

Applications will be due by 5pm on August 12.

**Please feel very welcome to circulate this event to colleagues and students.**

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 impact of online technology on academic work.

The figures are stunning enough. Number of those surveyed who worked on weekends: 100%. UWS staff/student ratio: 1:23. And be sure to check out the pie chart comparing Level A appointments.

A sample of quotes:

- “It is now 5.15pm. I have been up since 4am marking assignments and I still haven’t finished”

- “I had to turn around 86 hours of marking in 10 days. 86 hours is what I actually get paid presuming I can mark 1,000 words every 20 minutes, which I can’t…”

- “In 2008 I have taught 7 different units none of which I have taught before”

- “This year I travelled to other campuses twice per week. I had a WLA for 7 return trips but had to undertake 13 return trips to see students and collect exams. $300 in tolls”

I came across this amazing research while trying to find out about the union’s recent campaigns – part of ongoing preparations for the State of the Industry conference happening in November. We may yet hear more about this, and hopefully one of the study’s research team will agree to speak on Day 1. But so far, in spite of numerous emails and phone calls, the NTEU President doesn’t seem available, or at least hasn’t told us one way or another over the past 3 months. I’m quite disappointed about this, since so much anecdotal evidence would suggest the NTEU’s profile could do with some boosting. I had thought the conference offered a timely opportunity for the industry’s peak representative body to prove its relevance to a significant part of its constituency.

Maybe I’ve just gone about asking the wrong way. If the report is any indication of the wider experience of contemporary worklife, our President is probably drowning in email and can’t imagine any way of handling the amount of communication requests she receives…

Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, a couple of fairy godmothers forwarded the proposal to some editors who have given me much more encouraging responses. From drought to flood… Now I am in a panic to send sample chapters since the amount of time I’ve wasted feeling depressed and unmotivated has left me behind schedule in writing.

It just goes to show that what I say in the column is pretty accurate/ depressingly obvious: it’s not what you know in this business. This is but one story that highlights the economies of circulation, status and value underpinning the notion of “quality” that systems like the ERA are designed to assess.

Oh, and that the answer to any career-related question is always: networks.

Since establishing itself in 1990, the CSAA has run an annual conference in various cities around the country, as well as Christchurch, New Zealand, since the official name change to incorporate “Australasia”. From my understanding, this makes the CSAA the longest running cultural studies association worldwide, so it’s a shame that the current scenario has emerged, although it does point to questions a number of prominent scholars are raising about the ongoing utility of the term.

Various justifications and explanations were given for the lack of volunteers for holding the conference this year, including

- administrative changes to institutional groupings at various universities (cultural studies departments, divisions and courses are on the decline almost everywhere except where I work)

- arguments about cultural studies and its connotations, particularly due to media coverage during the “culture wars”

- what cultural studies means in contrast to “cultural research” – and the impact of the ARC Cultural Research Network on conference attendance in recent years

There were also wider issues, such as how the economic climate affects university funding prospects, and a general lack of time and incentive for potential organisers.

Nothing was said that explicitly addressed whether the quality of the conference is an issue in whether people want to come, or what exactly the association stands for beyond the conference itself.

The Professors who attended agreed that it was a shame that the CSAA wouldn’t be held “because of what it offers postgrads” and junior scholars.

This made me wonder, has anyone actually asked postgrads and early career researchers whether they value this annual conference? What do postgraduates and recent PhD graduates of cultural studies think about the fate of the CSAA?

From talking to some of my peers in recent weeks–those who, even when they have graduated with cultural studies PhDs, face limited prospects of ongoing employment in their field of qualification–it seems little wonder that there is a lack of interest in the association, since it has done very little to prepare graduates for this reality.

But, since there wasn’t much opportunity to say this last night, and since the invitation was only extended to a small group of people, I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts on whether there are factors contributing to the CSAA’s current situation. If this blog is read by anyone, I figure it is people who have some opinions on cultural studies

So, do you think Australian cultural studies is obsolete as a movement? What should happen to the annual conference? And if you are an early career researcher, what should the CSAA do to make itself useful for you? Are there other conferences and disciplines that matter more?

We’ll be able to announce more specifics soon, but I already want to suggest that people plan to be in Hong Kong from June 17-21 next year. Apart from the speakers and spotlight sessions that are proposed – which is one of the strongest line-ups I’ve seen for a cultural studies event – one of the best practical things this time is the range of accommodation options. There are literally hundreds of student dorm rooms availabe on site at Lingnan at very cheap rates with free wifi, and even the 4/5 star hotels either side of the campus home at Tuen Mun will be relatively affordable for academics. The schedule planned will also give people a chance to look around the city in the middle of the conference so that we can all have a break and relax without being too worn out from back to back papers.

Hong Kong is such an interesting city, geographically, socially, politically; and its economic transformations are a great place to be witnessing and discussing wider issues. What continues to excite me about ACS is that it can provide the opportunity for cultural studies to see its relevance contextualized and revitalized in different geographical contexts. I think this conference will do that and more. Can’t wait!

The event also featured a number of speakers from the community (although admittedly not enough) including Ian Greenhalgh from the Country Public Libraries Association. His presentation was a passionate call for more assistance from the federal government and the general public in recognising the key role local libraries play as intermediaries for IT skills and training. He wondered whether librarians, many of whom remain committed to the public service ideals enshrined in the Library Act, were “too obliging to be effective” in generating support for better resources to cope with the changes to libraries’ role. He suggested this included a decline in the use of reference sections and book borrowing in the digital age and the increased need to provide multimedia items and IT access and support. This was a really sobering assessment of the strain on local libraries to remain viable in the wake of broadband’s impact precisely because they are such trusted institutions in the public’s imagination and are seen as the most obvious and safe place for public broadband access.

I’ve been really affected by this and hope that writing about it here can generate more interest in Ian’s concerns. What was so obvious in the workshop overall was the extent to which rural and regional communities’ use of broadband needs to be understood differently to the individualist and consumerist model that tends to prevail in big cities. This is not to suggest that country residents shouldn’t be entitled to the same access to broadband as city dwellers – my contribution to the workshop talked in detail about the feelings of melancholy and disappointment that develop in rural areas as a result of being so far from the celebrated norms of connectivity. Drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart, I argued that affect theory can help develop policy to better serve those who inhabit “the space on the side of the road” – those who live in the areas that city dwellers might enjoy as they drive past but only because they do not stop for very long.

As I have been arguing in work with Genevieve Bell (pdf), country areas already have strong investment in community and civic infrastructure. As Jerry Watkins’ presentation at the workshop also helped to show, someone doesn’t need an online social network if their social network is already constitutive of their daily life. Any plan to deliver better broadband must recognise that social and community spaces will be the terms of engagement for new technology in many cases. And this is an important example of resistance to the neoliberal imperative to atomise our experience to so many instances of consumer choice.

My research into the CWA and technology use has found schemes developing whereby state branches are applying for money from Telstra’s “Connected Seniors” program to train selected members in mobile and email use so that they can then train others in their local branch. This image from the NSW Country Woman Journal is a hopeful image for the future:

Another great example of regional and rural technology experiments happening right now is Genevieve Bell’s South Australian Thinker in Residence project. Genevieve is travelling around the state of South Australia this month collecting postcards, messages and blog posts from residents that give details of how they use new media. Watch her blog for some great insight into the way ordinary Australians are adapting to mobile and broadband technology beyond the city. And if you’re in SA, send in your story to help Genevieve’s typically ambitious goal.