Following last year’s launch and initial MACS meetings I’m keen to hear thoughts on what events/ activities you would like to see continue in 2012.

For instance, the Melbourne model has decentralised the organisation of MACS events to different individuals and campuses. To adopt this approach, it might be worth setting up a steering committee of people from all of the different Sydney unis to take charge of hosting particular meet ups, talks or events across the course of the year. This could involve staff, students and graduates – anyone who is interested.

In Brisbane, where MACS began, we would take turns to host an event so that those on campus in each location had a chance to attend more regularly. This was a good way to make use of the momentum of the group and the benefits of cross-institutional meet ups while also servicing the needs of local staff and students.

(And in case it’s not clear, the benefits of cross-institutional meet ups include: socialising, getting feedback on your experience, comparing notes on your working conditions, advice on PhD tactics, sharing knowledge about opportunities and expectations in the industry/profession, finding jobs, finding a date!)

Lots of you will already be inundated with requirements and commitments based on your own enrolment, work schedule or program. So rather than make an arbitrary time to try to accommodate everyone, we might instead focus on fewer but more targetted meetings. We might also think about sponsoring particular sessions of local campuses’ and departments’ existing research seminars. That way we don’t double up on work or time commitments. 

These are just suggestions though. If MACS is to continue it will need to respond to your needs, rather than those imagined for you. This seems to be one of the classic mistakes of corporate mentoring models applied to the university context. Star professors in the midst of career victory laps are not always best placed to offer advice to students who face a radically different university experience and employment market. Still, wisdom and perspective are valuable qualities in any industry. Access to profs and other academic staff can be one of the many things MACS can deliver if you collectively ask for it.

Alternatively, or in addition, you might also want to maintain this as a space to talk together about routine, material or affective dimensions that accompany research life. Or an excuse for beers at the pub! These are not mutually exclusive… The online aspect to this blog and the facebook group does however suit a lot of people – to keep it going though, I need more people helping. You can become an administrator of both sites easily.

I am more than happy to contribute in all kinds of ways, e.g. suggesting relevant speakers or visitors to Sydney who might be able to address the group. I could also give talks or suggest friends, colleagues and/or students to do so if that would be good. But this is just a warning, I suppose, that I can’t see the group as sustainable without others taking an active lead.

Part of the reason I want to check in with you all now is that I’m heading to Brisbane to give a talk to “early career researchers” this week – a talk that will cover issues to do with publishing, grant applications, collaborations, and so on. If this might be the kind of thing that you want to hear, let me know – and have a think about where you might want to host it. MACS can be on campus or off, or a mixture of both. It’s really up to you

We can set the ball rolling with comments and suggestions for MACS’ future below. By way of inspiration, here’s a link to the preparations that went in to the grad student manifesto delivered at the State of the Industry Conference back in 2009. Do these priorities still matter? What support do you need that you aren’t currently getting? Ask and you may be surprised what can happen.

And as always, please forward this information and knowledge of the group to new students and staff in media and cultural studies in Sydney. There are plenty of us!

Preparing for a talk later this week, I have just been reading this article by Kieryn McKay and Kylie Brass published in the September 2011 issue of Cultural Studies Review. The authors, both graduates from PhD programs in Sydney, draw ‘a parallel between the appropriation of podcasting technology into the university and the current system of casual academic employment’. Their argument is that ‘the podcast and the casual academic represent “new” interfaces of outsourced academic labour’ (141), and that this poses a similar problem of isolation for academics and students.

The article is a textured and mobilising account of the material pressures on sessional staff, who share ‘an overarching experience of disenfranchisement’ (148). It highlights the consequences of a university sector that is apparently content to allow what is effectively a ‘simulacrum’ of both the traditional academic employment relation and the student experience – all in the name of flexibility.

What is all the more fantastic about the piece is that the authors use a mix of foundational cultural theory (Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), higher education research and current industrial campaign material to make their point. It is just the kind of activism fitting an increasingly professionalised discipline.

One of the reasons I started MACS was to provide a space for these kinds of debates to gain traction. Current working conditions in academia rely on the isolation of students and sessionals to continue. So if you have thoughts to share in response to the article, please do so here, or get in touch.

There are some changes to the content this time around, although not as many as I was going to make. The feedback was too good!

Additions include:

- Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. A great book for teaching – her writing is clear and motivated, and has the benefit of long term observation across different studies. While her arguments aren’t popular with some of the digerati (please send me more reviews if you know of them), she makes use of cultural theories I use in other parts of the course, e.g. Goffman and some classic psychoanalysis. Having this applied so directly to intimacy is a gift.

- Password intimacy: This story broke at the right time. I’ve decided to teach with it instead of The Social Network for another year. Although the assignment last term was fun, I don’t think I can expect students to get their head around film analysis as well as the critical content of the course. Too many variables.

- To talk about privacy, I’ve taught Emily Nussbaum’s article for several years now, but it’s not quite helping students move beyond generational stereotypes… or tech-determinist approaches to history. This can be a bad combination and I worry that the article leads them to both, even though in my view it remains a brilliant, sympathetic piece of journalism.

Christina Nippert Eng wrote a fabulous and influential book, Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life back in 1996. Her new book, Islands of Privacy: Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life, is just as exciting as a complement to some of danah’s work.

“When you are breaking up, the medium is part of the message”, writes Illana Gershon, in The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media. One of her strongest insights is that all the emphasis on connection in new media commentary overlooks how technologies facilitate “new forms of disconnection”. While her sample demographic is limited – like many scholars in this field, she writes about her own students – in a teaching context this presents an opportunity for self-reflexivity (one hopes).

Amidst a range of interesting observations about Facebook, Gershon notes how broken-hearted girls use their profiles to perform resilience. (This adds momentum to some of the things we were highlighting in our Facebook paper, I think). Following a break-up, students feign happiness in their status updates, post staged photos of going out and having fun, and ask male friends to fake flirt on their wall – all for the ex to witness. An example:

The worst part is having to make all my statuses so darn happy. Even though I’m glad this is over, I’m still a little sad, you know? Hurt… angry… the typical post-breakup emotions. But instead of saying “Kathy is sad and hurt and sick of assholes,” I have to be all, “Kathy can’t wait for the weekend!” or some lie like that because he’s probably looking. And he probably wants me to be sad and hurt and angry and he probably wants to take great satisfaction in knowing that he’s the one who caused all that. And I absolutely refuse to give him that satisfaction. The next part of my master Facebook plan is to have friends take a ton of pictures of me this weekend looking like I’m having an absolutely wonderful time doing whatever we’re doing. Then I’ll make a new album with some random name that implies an inside joke he isn’t part of, and it’ll be great except for the fact that I’ll probably still feel like crap. However, my Facebook page will portray me as a bundle of happiness and joy, and that is all that matters. (186)

I’ve added Gershon to a new week on intimate media, mourning and death. Heavy! More on the rest of the course soon.

Other than publishing as much as possible, what kinds of things should you be doing to become an academic after your PhD?

How does having a PhD/ academic ‘success’ change your sense of self?

If you’re pretty sure academia is not the appropriate long term path/ career goal, and you KNOW corporate life is also not quite right for you, where does that leave a postgrad with an MA in Cultural Studies? What other options might there be for a creatively-minded, passionate idealist?

Is it possible to be a ‘partial’ academic? (not just ‘part-time’, but in the academic realm as well as another professional area and still successful)

What are the best institutions (anywhere) for a PhD in the discipline of gender and cultural studies? (other than /as well as Sydney Uni )

How do you know if you’re well-suited to further tertiary study (PhD)? How likely are you to be employed with one?

I want to teach at university, not in high schools or primary schools. But I also want to be able to do research. How can you enter this realm without doing a PhD? (And how the hell do you actually do a PhD?!)

The class was also an attempt to introduce some frank discussion about life in academia, since I worry that a lot of students have little idea as to what the job actually entails. I certainly had no concept as an Honours or PhD student just how much things change on the other side of the fence. So we had a look at some of these clips to see the funny and the serious sides to the situation:

Both of these representations skew to a US audience, of course. I always try to urge the students to contextualise the issues and find out if they are the same in countries like Australia. Next week, I’ll be on a panel at ICA discussing ‘The University in Crisis’ where I imagine some of these problems will be raised. It will be interesting to compare notes with academics in other parts of the world to get some perspective on the activism that is focusing attention here.

One of the challenges in my current teaching context is the diversity of students’ aspirations. On one end, there are those who dream of being an academic (including some who think they already are one!). On the other, there are those who can’t even articulate what kind of career they might want – except to say that being an academic seems completely crazy.

Given some of the statistics I came across in preparation for the discussion last week, you’d have to see the logic of the latter group. In a number of fields the number of PhD graduates relative to jobs is simply untenable. But of course we’ve been through this before – and the situation is subject to change over time.

So rather than offering blanket prescriptions that endorse one path over another, or lose hope in the profession(s) entirely, what seems useful pedagogically is to offer as much advice as possible to students with their own specific tensions and questions facing the future. In the last half an hour I answered questions about research pathways that students submitted anonymously at the start of the class. I also offered to answer questions that they hadn’t found a satisfactory answer for in other classes so far in their degree.

In the following few posts, I’m going to share some of the questions here, in the hope that others might also like to help answering. This way we can create an archive and perhaps also a demonstration of the online communities of support that are available when we feel like we are facing big questions alone.

In each case, care needs to be taken in determining the field of research a given project enters. The first assignment for Arguing the Point was designed with this in mind. Students wrote a 250 word abstract, with 4-5 keywords. The keywords were integral to the task, encouraging the articulation of specific debates and terminology relevant to each topic. Doing this at an early stage in the semester has meant that we can start to think about tactics for refining topics to a manageable size – and I can direct students in their reading.

The class on interdisciplinarity hinged on an analysis of the following 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.

The first two illustrate how to define the terms of a discussion. Driscoll’s introduction is a great example of what to do when when the ‘keywords’ for a project contain an intimidating number of stakeholders. By contrast, Mayer, Banks and Caldwell seek to piece together an embryonic field, one that further research can help to expand.

The final reading (Barcan) is a draft from a conference presentation some years ago now. A moving and honest account of teaching and research in the post-humanities, post-Dawkins university, Ruth’s paper stays on the syllabus in draft form to highlight the stages of writing and thinking that all academics go through.

I’m lucky that I was able to get this kind of help from my supervisor – there are few people better than she is at writing zippy prose on demand. But it seems odd that we don’t think more about these things in our teaching. Writing an abstract is the first thing most scholars do when they are being considered for something crucial to their work – presenting a conference paper, writing a book chapter or publishing an article. So how do we learn how to write them?

The first assignment for Arguing the Point is to write a thesis abstract. I realise this is tough starting out: it’s early in semester and most students feel very unsure about their topic. But the task is designed to allow them to explain their thesis idea, give an outline of their influences and methods, and get some feedback on the scope of the topic. This actually helps to get big ideas moving towards a more defined set of interests and problems.

It isn’t the only abstract students will write this year. It will be revised and adjusted as the research develops, and this is to be encouraged. Abstracts adapt to the stages of a process that is forever in progress. It is a mistake to think that an abstract is a final synopsis, that it spells the end of your thinking on a topic. In its context, the art of writing a good abstract is to simultaneously open up a reader’s curiosity at the same time as you close down a bunch of potentially critical and unhelpful questions. In this, it is much like the art of flirtation.

Writing an abstract at this stage of the year is intended to help students get in the habit of crafting their thinking to suit a task, a genre and an audience. I also want them to learn the value of brevity. Writing to a word limit is a vital skill that higher education teaches. It is a form of discipline that so many jobs require in an age of information.

I continue to be surprised by students who don’t see the purpose behind word counts for essays and theses, or students who think they can include a running set of speculations and imagined conversations in their footnotes, for example (as if such flights of fancy don’t count in the final consideration of words submitted… you know who you are ).

They do. Writing a thesis, every word matters. You should never allow your reader to wonder whether something is relevant.

An abstract has the function and the benefit of letting you begin a discussion having set the terms in your favour. It is what Stuart Hall might have called a “conjunctural intervention”: a statement that holds certain truths together, for a time, under particular conditions, in order to make sense of the world for a moment.

But that’s my take. What characterises a good abstract in your eyes?

(PS: if any of the people to whom I currently owe abstracts happen to be reading this, please ignore/forgive… clearly I take this task seriously!)