home cooked theory

Tutors for Semester 2

Anyone looking for tutoring work in Cultural Studies at UQ next semester?

Mobile Sex Ed

Get your attention with that header? Next week I’m going to Sydney for a planning workshop about transmitting safer sex messages through mobile and online media:
The objectives of this workshop are to brainstorm ideas, plans and a project focused on how to better communicate to young people the necessity of safer sex in the context [...]

Understanding others’ splendour

This semester I’m tutoring ‘New Media: Ideas and Uses’. Catchy huh? In today’s lecture Joan Leach was talking about how we might study new media in three ways: using the ’symmetry principle’ (maintaining a balance between claims that technology responds to, as much as it determines culture) in terms of ‘prosthetics’ (new media as extensions [...]

End of semester MACS

In ‘The Mental Labour Problem’, Andrew Ross argues that ‘two generations of scholars now form a semipermanent cadre of independent contractors, with little or no prospect of advancement into regular, full-time employment’ in academic positions. For these scholars, a doctoral qualification has marked ‘not the beginning, but the end of their teaching career; they are [...]

Drought

I haven’t even given the first lecture yet, but the first year course is getting off to a great start. Apparently there are no available tutors for cultural studies in Brisbane, and the ones that want to tutor aren’t allowed to for their own good. What kind of work is this, that supervisors actively prevent [...]

Young people

Rowan writes:
Mel, I’m curious about your statement… ‘it helps to be The Young Person when giving guest lectures like these…’ I am assuming from the capitalisation that you see this is as a stereotype of some sort or a construction, and one you obviously feel keenly when you give a guest lecture. When you have [...]

Put another way…

Re-reading the amazing Roland Barthes collection, Image Music Text, I stumble upon a passage which seems to encapsulate so much of what I was trying to express in the last post. This is a section called ‘The Teaching Relationship’ and it begins by saying, ‘Imagine I am a teacher’:
I speak, endlessly, in front of and [...]

What makes a good lecture(r)?

This week I gave my first ever lecture on blogging. I’m not sure how it came about, really, aside from the equation: can lecture + has blog = the blogging lecturer. To me there’s something a bit wrong with this formulation. Then again, for time reasons I actually asked to give my lecture on blogging [...]

Theory in the classroom and in the plural

The past week I’ve been steeped in the theory and practice of pedagogy. I’m working on a paper about teaching cultural theory at the same time as I wade through end of semester assignments. Sounds like a symbiotic exercise, doesn’t it? But I’ve been struggling to funnel my many thoughts. I’m writing the paper in [...]

Tricks of the trade

Today I get to do something I’ve always wanted, and I’m sure will always want to do: give a seminar on writing. Oooh and I get to teach a night class for the first time, so I’m feeling all Workers’ Education vibe-y (alas yes, I know it’s really just another way for universities to make [...]

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