The first piece, coming out in next month’s Fast Company, describes Generation Flux, or “GenFlux”. It profiles a crop of successful urban professionals apparently delirious from their encounter with the outlet’s styling and grooming team. These icons of new industries share thoughts on the future of business – though “There Are No Perfect Role Models” in this chaotic new landscape. Still, readers are encouraged to turn to these informants for guidance at a time when “our visibility about the future is declining”. In classic Who Moved My Cheese logic, the article announces:

The entire world of business is now in a constant state of agile development. New releases are constant; tweaks, upgrades, and course corrections take place on the fly. There is no status quo; there is only a process of change.

Successful fluxers are those prepared for constant impermanence, who embrace instability without fear:

The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort… with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you’ll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating.

This passage links to a further article on The Four Year Career, part of the issue’s broader showcase of admirable go-getters.

Adrenaline fuelled work worlds promising constant challenges for thrill-seekers are generically familiar to anyone who remembers No Collar – Andrew Ross’s study of the glamorised workaholism that fed the dot.com boom. In the latest vision however “government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we’ve lived” are now described as “legacy institutions… the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap”.

The message of the article is clear: individuals need to equip themselves with the skills and know-how to survive what is a Darwinian drama. Constant stimulus is “the new normal”. Hear how the story moralises against resistance:

Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we’ve learned and relying on what’s worked before. It’s also about as useful as an appendix right now. When times seem uncertain, we instinctively become more conservative; we look to the past, to times that seem simpler, and we have the urge to re-create them. This impulse is as true for businesses as for people. But when the past has been blown away by new technology, by the ubiquitous and always-on global hypernetwork, beloved past practices may well be useless.

The second piece from Dissent magazine takes as its subject the rise of the not-for-profit Freelancers’ Union in the US. Running out of Brooklyn, the organisation has seen considerable growth in its seven year lifespan, no doubt partly due to the unstable work conditions outlined above. But rather than flux, writer Atossa Araxia Abrahamian defines today’s work environment as one of “precariousness”:

The General Accounting Office estimates that 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is “contingent” — meaning freelance; temporary; and, most significantly, taxed differently from employees and not entitled to such benefits as health insurance, retirement, paid vacation, even weekends. Job turnover in the United States is also astoundingly high: according to some accounts, 45 percent of the American workforce will switch jobs within a year.

The article uses Guy Standing’s typology to explain how precarity affects workers differently according to education, income, class and cultural background. This welcome observation is crucial for gaining a handle on the complexity of compensation claims for contingent labour – especially in the creative economy.

The piece also gives a useful overview of the way “flexibility” has been used in recent organisational culture. The morphology this term has taken is a fantastic case study in the power of sliding signification chains. The article concludes that individual work styles (and the impossibility of imagining self-less solidarity?) lock employers and freelancers alike into a mutually beneficial, if simultaneously risky, “flexonomy”.

Taken together, we might read these articles as alternative takes on the same structural problem – the increasingly mainstream experience of non-permanent work. But one reads as a celebration, another a lament. Is this not one way of witnessing the difference between right and left wing economic views more generally? Does the performative effect of embracing change over nostalgia ultimately wield more power than the defeatist language of precarity? This is something I wonder at the moment, as I work on a chapter for a new collection called Theorising Cultural Work.

According to Safian, GenFlux “is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one”. Not all workers will join the movement, whose members are defined by “a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions”. The trouble is, avoiding the movement is likely to result in the very outcomes described so vividly in the Dissent piece: management forcing permanent staff out of work, only to re-advertise the same jobs without secure conditions. (If this can happen to journalists, I wonder how much longer we will wait for it to happen on a wide scale to academics).

I guess the intended audience for the two pieces also hints at the significant distinction between those who get to choose flux and those who don’t. Certainly the decision not to invest in workers for the long term is the one choice high-flying contract-based managers are increasingly willing to make. Of course, this is not the only way to respond to operational pressures. But it is likely to be an all too common response to reading hyped-up articles in publications like Fast Company.

[Thanks to Courtney and JW for original links to the articles]

The past few weeks I’ve been away from Sydney, my job and my computer, and now have some much needed new year energy as a result. I am (maybe?) joining the #pomodorojerk writing group when I am back at work, although I am a bit ambivalent about productivity as a value system. I mention it in case you might want to join too.

So far summer has involved about 2500kms of driving – from Sydney to Port Douglas – visiting relatives and friends. It has included a fairly average attempt to read whole books, including novels: Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot; Alexander Maksik’s You Deserve Nothing; Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (belatedly). These are all campus novels, in one way or another, so they weren’t an ideal way to tune out from academic life. Still. It helps sometimes to see your world as a genre.

I’m also most of the way through a biography of Elton Mayo which I think will be the source of a lot of writing and thinking plans in the coming year. I had no idea he was Australian and taught at the University of Queensland! This history opens up all kinds of interesting pathways and connections.

With the benefit of aircon, I’ve been catching up on Homeland as well. Read Jason Jacobs’ great take on it here. (And please, no spoilers; I’m still at ep 8).

This week’s topic is: What is a thesis? Why write one?
The readings are:
• Bob Hodge. “Monstrous Knowledge: Doing PhDs in the New Humanities.” Australian Universities Review 2 (1995): 35-39. Thanks to Bob for hosting this online – very fitting.
• Les Back (2002) “Dancing and Wrestling with Scholarship: Things to do and things to avoid in a PhD Career” Sociological Research Online, vol. 7, no. 4. Another online publication which is welcome given the genre of collegial advice.
• Joan Bolker. “Getting Started Writing.” in Writing Your Dissertation In Fifteen Minutes A Day: A Guide To Starting, Revising, And Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. New York: Henry Holt (1998): 32-48. I don’t have a link to this, but there is a website for the book.

Please feel free to read these and make comments below. Or offer your own relevant readings and thoughts on the topic. We will all be grateful.

From my own perspective, I’m wondering what to make of Hodge’s article now – 15 years after its publication. I was finishing Year 12 when this piece came out, and went on to do my BA, Honours year and PhD in the years after. The postmodern landscape has been the established territory for my experience of university study – even though I recognise and often support the qualities of modernist evaluation Hodge describes. So, what happened? To what extent did Hodge accurately anticipate the impact of the New Humanities?

For Back’s piece, which I adore – it seems to carry his ‘voice’ in spite of the unforgiving layout of the online journal – I was thinking about the different listening context for this piece when it is set both for the Australian students I teach and the international students who come to study in our Masters program.

One thing that seems to have developed significantly since both of these articles were written is the amount of postgraduate coursework offerings in humanities disciplines. Masters students write shorter theses, in countries that aren’t necessarily familiar, and often not for the purpose of academic careers. What can these articles offer them?

Crawford’s lament about the decline of skills training in school curricula is the basis for a serious critique of post-industrial labour – the white collar cubicle in particular. He worries that “the experience of individual agency has become elusive” in today’s office jobs:

The rise of “teamwork” has made it difficult to trace individual responsibility, and opened the way for new and uncanny modes of manipulation of workers by managers, who now appear in the guise of therapists or life coaches (8).

He doesn’t speak about skills training for girls in schools, and unfortunately this avoids crucial questions about the value of women’s physical – and often unpaid – labour. But I have to admit enjoying Crawford’s description of office life as a schoolgirl clique. With the dominant management mantra all about displaying “sensitivity to others”, he writes:

This sounds to me like being part of a clique of girls, where one can commit a serious misstep without knowing it; where one’s place in the hierarchy is made difficult to know because of the forms and manners of sisterhood. Under such proprieties, even one’s sense of being on probation may be difficult to bring to full awareness, taking instead the form of a dull and confusing anxiety. (158)

Of course unwritten rules also govern the performance of masculinity and the manners of mateship. But on a bad day, I’d say there are few better descriptions of working in a gender studies department than Crawford’s passage above.

Thankfully his concern isn’t academia so much as the wider world of knowledge work. The basic argument is that manual trades are useful because:

For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. (159)

Crawford’s “case for working with your hands” hinges on this further dimension: “when there is no concrete task that rules the job – an autonomous good that is visible to all – then there is no secure basis for social relations”. In office life: “Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells.” (157)

For some years now, I’ve been talking about the “compulsory friendship” of the modern workplace. “Teamwork” operates by hijacking the best elements of friendship and manipulating it for corporate profit. Crawford’s analysis of cubicle affect is similar:

Given our democratic sensibilities, authority cannot present itself straightforwardly, as authority, coming down from a superior, but must be understood as an impersonal thing that emanates vaguely from all of us. So authority becomes smarmy and passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest, in everyone’s best interest, as rationality itself. (152)

For Crawford: “The risk is of being deceived into thinking there is a common good where there is not one.” (152)

Chapter Four of Work’s Intimacy, “To CC: or not to CC: Teamwork in office culture”, talks about the function of mission statements in private sector organisations. I suggest that the solace of value statements is that they absolve workers of the need to generate intrinsic motivations for the job. Repeating corporate mantras that are extrinsically imposed and transparently common sense makes identifying with them low risk. The obvious contrivance of such HR strategies is one of their main benefits.

Crawford puts this more optimistically when he writes:

The corporation has to become in the eyes of its employees something with transcendent meaning: something that can sustain the kind of moral demands normally associated with culture. Some notion of the common good has to be actively posited, a higher principle that can give people a sense of purpose in their work life… But the absence of specific content to this higher purpose is its main feature. All the moral urgency surrounding it seems to boil down to an imperative to develop a disposition of teaminess. (153)

The rest of my book shows what happened to some of the study participants who were fantastic team players at work but still faced lay-offs as the financial crisis set in. The point is that loyalty to co-workers does not and can not translate to loyalty in the employment relation. A better vocabulary for labour politics would differentiate between loyalty and obligation, friendship and rights.

Crawford’s distinction between a “team” and a “crew” is useful, since it allows particular skills to be recognised without the fallacy of a level playing field. His book is important because it shows what is at stake for those entering the employment market today:

The college student interviews for a job as a knowledge worker, and finds that the corporate recruiter never asks him about his grades and doesn’t care what he majored in. He senses that what is demanded of him is not knowledge but rather that he project a certain kind of personality, an affable complaisance. (9)

Some years ago my colleague Mark McLelland faced scrutiny for suggesting the need for an “affable persona” to succeed in academic life. But Mark was stating a useful, if cynical fact. In academia we know that qualified PhD graduates don’t necessarily get jobs. And it’s because the terms for hiring are never limited to those that appear on paper. Being the right candidate involves mobilizing a range of ineffable as well as affable qualities, none more so than a feeling of confidence that one has “potential”. Is there a better way of explaining the relevance of affect theory for labour politics?

This leads to some bizarre outcomes, as Crawford explains:

Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensable to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reason given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representations and reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensable to survival in the contemporary office.

The implications of this argument are significant, since they reinforce how little pedagogy has changed to meet the requirements of the new, “flexible” workplace. Crawford’s view may be generalizing, but he is surely right to suggest that:

Once upon a time, the passing of examinations, the meeting of course deadlines, and disciplined study for the sake of mastering a body of knowledge broadcast a willingness to conform to organizational discipline, and displayed the dispositions needed to develop competence in a bureaucracy. But the new antibureaucratic ideal of the flexible organization puts quite different demands on people, requiring the cultivation of a different sort of self… one has to have certain personal qualities, more than a well-defined set of competencies tied to the fulfillment of specific organizational ends. What the recruiters are looking for is a manner of personal comportment, a collection of psychological and social aptitudes, that is difficult to codify. (This makes sense for a workplace that has little in the way of objective standards such as one finds in a machine shop.) (147-8)

For the moment, Crawford sees the credentialising role of higher education can only be useful:

if the official items appearing on a transcript are supplemented with extracurricular items that signal the possession of a complete personality package. Students and their parents understand this. An important part of the package is that one be a joiner, as this signals the possession of a self that is ready for “teamwork.” (148)

On things extra-curricular, in the past few weeks I started watching Glee, thinking that it would add some fluff and fun to my holiday. Little did I know it would prove to be such a handbook for the Type-A personalities that dominate Sydney Uni! Still, it’s a wonderfully queer antidote to Crawford’s concerns about the role of education in preparing kids for a lifetime of fulfilling work. The gender politics of the show are far from simple – I was in awe watching the football team’s Beyonce moves – but what’s notable in the story so far are the limited options available to the straight girls. In a schoolyard as diversity-friendly as the knowledge workplace, het ladies still rely on their bodies or the lottery of genetic talent to strut their way out of a dead-end town.

What does Crawford’s vision of manual labour offer them – and the thousands of girls that are bullied out of manual trades because of gendered workplace cultures? A return to home economics classes is no match for the boredom of routine jobs women perform in low-wage, pink-collar and white-collar sectors of the economy. Crawford’s ideas demand that we think deeply about the different forms of value placed on labour. This involves better attention to the “immaterial” contribution a range of talents and dispositions can make to a wider social good. It’s heartening to find another writer so unapologetically ambivalent about the rewards of professional, white-collar ambition. The book should is well worth reading if you also suspect “that the official story we’ve been telling ourselves about work is somehow false” (9).

Please do continue to add suggestions!

Week 1 – What is a thesis?
Readings:
• Bob Hodge. “Monstrous Knowledge: Doing PhDs in the New Humanities.” Australian Universities Review 2 (1995): 35-39.
• Les Back (2002) ‘Dancing and Wrestling with Scholarship: Things to do and things to avoid in a PhD Career’ Sociological Research Online, vol. 7, no. 4
• Joan Bolker. “Getting Started Writing.” in Writing Your Dissertation In Fifteen Minutes A Day: A Guide To Starting, Revising, And Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis. New York: Henry Holt (1998): 32-48.

Week 2 – The research process
Readings:
• Robert Dessaix. “Showing your Colours.” (and so forth). Sydney: Pan Macmillan/Picador (1998): 121-133.
• Ann Game & Andrew Metcalfe. “Managing.” Passionate Sociology. London: Sage Publications (1996): 26-42.
• Elspeth Probyn. “Writing Shame” [extract]. Blush: Faces of Shame. Sydney: University of New South Wales (2005): 129-43.

In class:
• Marking criteria for your thesis
• Code of conduct for students and supervisors

Week 3 – What is a field?
Readings:
• Catherine Driscoll. “Introduction: The Critical Attitude.” Modernist Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida (2010): 1-18.
• Vicky Mayer, Miranda J. Banks and John T. Calwell. “Introduction. Production Studies: Roots and Routes.” Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge (2009): 1-12.
• Ruth Barcan. “Fraudulence, Expertise and the Academic Persona in the Contemporary Australian University.” Unpublished paper. Presented at Disciplining Innovation colloquium, Macquarie University, Nov. 2008.

Week 4 – Writing, arguing and the limits of critique
Readings:
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP (2003): 123-151.
• Lauren Berlant. “Affect is the New Trauma.” The Minnesota Review. nos. 71-2. Spring (2009).
• Paul Du Gay. “Introduction: ‘Identity’ After ‘The Moment of Theory.’” Organizing Identity: Persons and Organizations ‘After Theory’. Los Angeles: Sage (2007): 1-17.

Week 5 – Coffee date: What is my thesis? Why am I writing it?
Reading:
• Article suggested by your coffee partner

Week 6 – GCS Methods I: Ethnography
Readings:
• Gobo, Giampietro. Doing Ethnography. Trans. Adrian Belton. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2008. 2-14, 18-21, 22-27.
• Valerie Hey. “‘Not as Nice as She was Supposed to be’: Schoolgirls’ Friendships.” Ethnographic research: A Reader. Ed. Stephanie Taylor. London: Sage Publications/Open University, 2002. 67-90.
• Robert Emerson, et al. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1995. Ch. 1.

Week 7 – GCS Methods II: Textual analysis
Readings:
• Charlotte Brunsdon. “The Role of Soap Opera in the Development of Feminist Television Criticism”. in Screen Tastes: Soap Opera to Satellite Dishes. London: Routledge (1997). 29-43.
• Jason Jacobs. “Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. vol. 4, no. 4 (2001): 427–447.

Week 8 – GCS Methods III: Experience and anecdotes
Readings:
• Melissa Gregg. “A Mundane Voice.” Cultural Studies. 18. 2 (2004): 363-83.
• Liz Bondi. “The Place of Emotions in Research: From Partitioning Emotion and Reason to the Emotional Dynamics of Research Relationships.” Emotional Geographies. Ed. Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate (2005). 231-246.
• bell hooks. “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance.” Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1995.

Week 9 – Research ethics
Readings:
• Beverley Skeggs. “Theorising, Ethics & Representation in Feminist Ethnography.” Feminist Cultural Theory: Process and Production. Ed. Beverley Skeggs. Manchester: Manchester UP, (1995): 190-206.
• Angela McRobbie. “The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action.” Feminist Review 12.Oct. (1982): 46-57.
• Download and read a copy of the university’s ethics form, Available at: http://sydney.edu.au/research_support/ethics/human/apply.shtml

Week 10 – Research careers and professions
Readings:
• Genevieve Bell. “Be Naked as Often as Possible: Anthropological Advice.” Commencement address, School of Information, University of California, Berkley, 2008.
• William James. “The PhD Octopus.” (originally published 1903).
• Melissa Gregg. “Why Academia is No Longer a Smart Choice.” New Matilda. 24 November, 2009.

Week 11 – Road to submission
Readings:
• Chris Fleming. “Diseases of the Thesis.” Australian Universities Review. vol. 48, no. 2, (2006): 30-31.
• 1000 word section of a classmate’s work-in-progress (swap online)

Week 12 – Consultation week – no readings.

Further useful books and references:
• Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. New York: W. W. Norton. (2006)
• Frank L Cioffi. The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2005)
• Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribner. (2000)
• H. Ramsey Fowler and Jane E. Aaron. The Little, Brown Handbook (Online companion)
• Lucy Russell. Dr Dr I feel like… Doing a PhD. Continuum. (2008)

A lot of hot air surrounds the support of online initiatives, and the work that goes in to providing independent research, opinion and analysis is rarely rewarded in full. So if you have ever written, read or linked to a New Matilda article… show your appreciation and be part of a great Australian experiment.

Finishing the piece the other week, I had the great fortune to read Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine, which will definitely be adding to our revised version. Kane’s fascinating and inspiring book is full of ideas, and I want to share just a couple of them here.

The clear resonance with the story of Underbelly, in its scripted and real life forms, is the centrality of drugs. In each case, to borrow Kane’s words, “drugs are fit for incorporation within an amoral consumer logic, as commodities par excellence” (11).

Kane suggests that “one way to grasp the responsibility of drugs” is to “consider them as necessarily re-creational. When all drugs are cast on the plane of re-creation, the agonistic nature of pharmaceutical production and consumption becomes explicit: we expose what is specific, partial, and consequential about our biochemical techniques of the self” (9).

Among Kane’s wider arguments is the claim that: “At the moment that consumption becomes the normative mode of social participation and citizenship, medical authority becomes available in these discourses to fulfil the role of the moral curb on the self-administering consumer. As a result, these discourses become especially prone to political and authoritarian investment—precisely because they produce the self as the moral locus of consumption” (15).

The book provides a series of case studies to show how this plays out, whether at the local level in Sydney or through transnational media texts and health disciplines.

Kane also highlights the experiences of queer communities touched by HIV/AIDS, and how this context continues to affect drug consumption in the present. One point of this is to trouble the legal distinctions and moralising judgements that adhere to some kinds of drug consumption, and therefore some populations, more than others. But an even more forceful dimension of this project is the way that it reveals drug consumption to be symptomatic of a culture that fails to recognise or advance enough models to express desire, intimacy, care and community (see especially the final chapter, “Exceptional Sex: How drugs have come to mediate sex in gay discourse”).

Of the many poetic and powerful passages, the section describing ‘the auratic value of queer dance parties’ is among my favourite. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Kane shows how ecstasy use and the mass dance party event, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, produced a set of singular experiences that lost their poignant “aura” with the commercialisation of queer lifestyles, and – as our Underbelly paper describes – the mainstreaming of club culture and ecstasy consumption. Linking this to the fortunes of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, Kane notes that: “If the large-scale queer dance party is a form in decline, this is not simply because it bcame more commercial, but because one of the primary conditions within which it came to accrue meaning and value has altered – and thankfully so” (29).

This is the bit that stuck:

What if we were to understand the dance party not as the transparent radiation of community, but as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated? The massed bodies, decorations, lights, drugs, costumes, and music combined to produce a powerful and widely accessed perception of presence, belonging, shared circumstance, and vitality at a time when the image of the gay man, dying alone, ostracized from family, was the publicly proffered alternative. To describe this experince as hallucination is not to say that it was false or untrue, for this would be to imply, incorrectly, that there is some pure, unmediated reality which it is possible to access transparently. I want to take seriously the importance of pleasure, imagination, and fantasy in the construction of new materialities. This sense of community that was animated at dance parties was real with real effects. It was realized in the affirmative apprehension of thousands of bodies presumed affected in similar ways by the accidents of history and the exclusions of heterosexual society. It was worked out in the minutiae of caring practices, the forging of dependable relations outside the family form, the inventive expression of memory and grief, the commitment to a safe-sex ethic. It was tapped into by agencies seeking to advance the public rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS, as well as to deliver health programming and to conduct research. It helped sustain a collective sense of predicament, power, care, and commitment – a shared ethos enabling wide-ranging cooperation and transformative activity. (22)

The true power of any great work of queer theory is that its insights advance our understanding of the culture at large, not merely the agendas of those seeking respite from the categories of gender or sexual identity currently favoured. Kane’s work sits among that precious group of writers and thinkers who translate experience in such a way that our ideas and hopes for another world are energised to take shape sooner. I hope a lot of people read this book!

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 to Mark and Legal Eagle for the background that helped get some of that message across.

Next week I’m presenting some research from the Working From Home study at the AMSRS conference in Sydney. This will be a sketch of the pros and cons of working from home for those in industry. It will particularly focus on how this trend affects women more than men – and from my understanding this is why it will be topical for a fairly feminised industry like market research.

The general argument is that women like working from home because office cultures haven’t changed enough to be welcoming, in spite of the new rhetoric of “flexibility” and “diversity” in the workplace. In addition, if companies are seeing “home-shoring” as comparable to “off-shoring” in the drive to cut infrastructure expenses, they should be aware of the amount of hidden labour that goes on once work leaves the office. Surveillance technologies may be able to tell when workers log on and log off, but are they likely to care if women work longer hours than they should?

This talk is based on a chapter from my book, Work’s Intimacy, which I’m very happy to say has been contracted to Polity Press. Obviously there is a longer story to tell about this decision, given the public statements I’ve made about the need for domestic publishing industry support for young scholars. But for now I’m focusing on getting the rest of the manuscript done, motivated by some very encouraging readers’ reports.

Thursday I’m also heading to Melbourne for a fun event at ACMI, where I will be interviewing Andrew Rule about Underbelly. I have some door passes if you’re in Melbourne and would like to come. I am very excited about this! And have really enjoyed preparing for it.

Things feel good work-wise at the moment. I think the move to Sydney is definitely giving the research I’ve been doing a bit more traction than it might have. But in a much more significant way I’m really enjoying having some company during the long hours at the office. The department at Sydney seems uniquely blessed at the moment with with lots of young scholars who are all working on amazing things. Fiona Allon recently won a Future Fellowship to work in the department on her project “The Wealth Effect: A cultural analysis of prosperity, financialisation and everyday life in contemporary Australia”. So great to see a cultural studies project on such an important topic getting support from the ARC. Tonight we are celebrating Anna Hickey-Moody’s book launch for Unimaginable Bodies, just a couple of weeks after Kane Race’s launch of Pleasure Consuming Medicine.

It’s a joy to be sharing the corridor with colleagues doing such important work – and who also know how to party!

Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

And this:

Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

I’m looking for more provocative readings like this for my course on Intimacy, Love and Friendship next semester. This course was previously taught using classic readings in philosophy, but I’ve decided there’s little point me trying to replicate that version. Instead, I’ll be encouraging students to reflect on the ways intimacy, love and friendship are enabled and performed in media they use – particularly online media.

This the first course I’ll be teaching with my own content, so I’m slightly more excited than daunted at the moment. My aim is to create a cultural studies course that is sensitive to gender normativity and that makes use of online material as much as offline – any suggestions towards this end would be very welcome.

Of course I’ll post the outline here when it’s ready.