home cooked theory

Teaching or research?

My unfortunate lack of blogging lately is partly due to travel and the impact this has on other deadlines: I have three articles/chapters due this month and more presentations in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as a graduate course to convene and an engagement party to organise! This workload was partly designed to fill in [...]

Looking ahead

Without wanting to read too much into this, it is becoming clear that if I can’t find some assistance soon, I’m going to have to think about moving elsewhere to continue my research. One of the downsides of being a ‘research intensive’ staff member is that access to a pool of students looking for work [...]

Blog readers research

Yesterday I met with an Honours student who wants to write her thesis on non-commenting blog readers. Specifically, she’s trying to explore and understand whether long-term blog readers develop a ‘para-social’ relationship to their favoured blogger, even when they may not participate on the blog itself – how readers form attachments to particular writers and [...]

London calling, #2

Update: Judith Halberstam’s title has changed, see below…. In just over a week, I’m heading over to the UK again for the Cultural Studies Now conference at the University of East London. Before the event, Angela McRobbie has kindly offered to host a seminar for those of us coming such a long way where we [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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