Communication studies seminar
VU City campus Flinders Street
Level 11, room 11.05

30 May 2012
2pm – 3.30pm

PANEL TITLE: LIFE, LABOUR, AND INFORMATION

PANEL OVERVIEW:
There is a key conjuncture of bodies and technology which underlies all three papers: our unprecedented ability to process and circulate vast amounts of data related to life and labour. At issue are shared questions of spatial/temporal measure, wherein the body is more intensely scrutinized by capital which seeks ever-more productive and profitable calibrations. This plays out on the scale of global enterprises where new logistical regimes seek increasing control of labour and life under protocological power; on new temporal scales where information labourers are permanently on call regardless of their location; and, in new mediated cultural practices of mobile connectivity in which we collectively generate ‘big social data.’ What possibilities for new forms of self-organization does this conjuncture afford? Is there liberatory potential in the autonomous movement of social data? In short, is there a crisis of measure that can engender radically new forms of labour and life?

1) DR. MELISSA GREGG (UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY)

PRESENCE BLEED: KNOWLEDGE WORK AND THE CRISIS OF MEASURE
This paper draws on empirical evidence and theories of affect to make sense of the online landscape for information labour. My aim is to unpack notions of workplace subjectivity and agency premised on ‘separate spheres’ and ‘clock time’ ­ questioning their usefulness in biomediated work worlds (Adkins 2009, Clough 2010). While the evidence used is based on a small study of professionals in Brisbane, Australia, the discussion bears relevance for workers in a range of industries, due to the so-called ‘ubiquity’ of mobile computing (Dourish and Bell 2011). If modernist notions of labour hinged on a set number of hours for work, often conducted at a set physical location, the fact that labour now escapes spatial and temporal measure poses obvious problems for defining work limits.

Melissa Gregg works in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney. She is author of Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011), Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave 2006) and co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader (with Greg Seigworth, Duke UP 2010).

2) DR. NED ROSSITER (UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY)

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARES: SOFTWARE, INFRASTRUCTURE, LABOUR
Logistical nightmares are everywhere. The unruly worker, the software glitch, wilful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal, traffic gridlock, inventory blowouts, customs zealots, protocological conflicts and proliferating standards. Inefficiencies abound and logistics is forever frantic in its attempt to close the gap between labour and life in order to register productivity in real-time. The industry term here is ‘fault tolerance’. And this is when logistics becomes our collective nightmare. How does informatized labour go about self-organizing when situated in logistical regimes of protocological power? Where does subjectivity belong in the machinic production of value? What is the role of imagination and wild fantasies of other possible worlds when contingency equals closure? What becomes of life itself? Moving across Shanghai, Kolkata, Sydney and Athens, this paper sketches out a new theory of global logistics industries and their informational systems as the dominant architecture of control for contemporary labour and life.

Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006). He was based in Perth, Melbourne, Ulster, Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo before taking up an appointment as Professor of Communication in 2011 in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney where he is also a member of the Institute for Culture and Society. Ned is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Creative Industries, Peking University. He is a researcher on Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, http://transitlabour.asia

3) DR. MARK COTÉ (VICTORIA UNIVERSITY)

MOBILE BODIES AND MOTILE DATA IN THE AGE OF ‘BIG SOCIAL DATA’
My paper situates what Gregg calls information labour and Rossiter informatized labour in new mediated cultural practices engendered by ubiquitous connectivity and the rise of the smart phone. In the past I have examined this conflation of work and play via the concept of immaterial labour 2.0; here I will consider its extension and intensification via mobile access. In part, I will do so by previewing an innovative method under development here at VU which will utilise smart phones to gather data on mobility, location and information. In turn, I will suggest using ‘new materialist’ media theory to help us analyse such components of ‘big social data’ and the ramifications for labour and life, particularly in a new media ecology which affords a differential mobility of the body and ‘data motility.’

Mark Coté is a Canadian media theorist currently teaching at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia and previously held positions at McMaster University and Trent University in Canada. He has published widely on new media, social networks and the relationship between the human and technology in Theory & Event, ephemera, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Journal of Cultural Economy among other scholarly journals. He is also co-editor of Utopian Pedagogy (University of Toronto Press, 2006).

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).

As part of this, I am trying to expand the idea of professional technologies to include psychological processes as much as externally imposed devices (and here I’m influenced by Dom Pettman’s work, in Love and Other Technologies, as much as by Foucault and his successors). I’m really keen to get some feedback on these ideas, so please take a look if you’re interested.

The proposal includes an extended period in the US some time after July 2012 and I’m currently looking for hosts and schemes that might support a trip of about 4 months’ length. If anyone would like me to do a talk or visit during the second half of next year to help with this, please get in touch!

Between marking and closing off the semester’s grades I’ve been working full time on the Willunga research. The final report was actually due last month but I’ve reconfigured the scope of the project slightly and the timeframe too. Essentially this is to capture more data by way of the local primary and high schools. Right now every Willunga student from grade 3 upwards is taking an online survey about their technology use and their thoughts (if any!) on the NBN. This will offer some better and more extensive comparative material to analyse in relation to the established older residents that were the focus of the first version of the survey. I’m looking forward to sharing the results soon.

In the meantime, I’m heading to Paris and Leeds this week to speak at some more conferences. The American University of Paris is hosting a two-day event premised on the longstanding influence of Stuart Hall’s essay, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’. The lineup looks terrific. I wasn’t sure of the best way to tackle “the popular” in my work right now, until I thought more generally about the politics that have surrounded the NBN roll-out in Australia. So that will be the basis for my talk.

The Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference also features a great selection of speakers. It’s so great to see this field developing strongly now, and the work of the conference organisers in continuing to generate energy through these gatherings is a considerable part of that.

For me, it is a big moment because this will be the last conference I speak at before my book is finally (!) published next month. The abstract for my presentation is below.

Labour Politics and the State of Exception

In State of Exception (2005), Giorgio Agamben describes how nations temporarily suspend the usual rule of law under conditions of sovereign threat. When the state is in danger, strategies are developed to justify heightened and/or extended powers for the period of presumed risk. Adapting this notion to the workplace, this paper draws on a three year study of information and communication workers to discuss the “state of exception” affecting labour claims in the technologically mediated workplace. It shows how employees learn to cope with a growing number of job related communication requirements, including email, instant messaging and social media, to maintain the viability and relevance of their positions. For these workers, the “normal” working day is suspended in order to maintain the outputs of the organization, just as attempts to quantify or articulate labour claims are suspended in the face of technology’s unique properties. This is despite the fact that communicating via technology can only ever be a structural feature of these jobs. The paper analyses the shared rhetorical strategies of workers who justify the extent of their labour given their exceptional status in privileged professions. This leads to a broader set of questions about the morality of academics who draw on similar discourses to justify their location in careers that enable them to study such circumstances.

Anyone who has been paying attention lately will be aware of the various crises and challenges facing universities around the world. From the fallout of the ongoing economic crisis, to political interference, to externally imposed regimes of assessment and evaluation, it seems that the Ivory Tower is no longer a sanctuary from the harsh realities of the “real world” – if it ever was. Some of these problems are common to all disciplines and fields, but some are likely to be felt in particular ways by communication studies programs and scholars. In this panel representatives from a variety of academic backgrounds and institutions, in the U.S., the UK, the EU, and Australia, will discuss the current crises they have experienced and observed, and offer their views on how we – as individuals, and as a collective – might best respond to protect and enhance our mission as teachers and scholars of communication.

I’m not big on crisis narratives, but I do welcome the opportunity to have a grounded conversation about the challenges colleagues are facing in an international frame. The Euro/Anglophone makeup for the panel is obviously a limitation but it’s a start. (Organising Crossroads and participating on the ACS Board over many years has made me appreciate the difficult logistics of creating international dialogue… just as it has broadened my understanding of ‘the university’ and its various ‘crises’.)

One of the articles that’s been circulated widely in recent weeks is William Deresiewicz’ ‘Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education’. Starting as it does with anecdotes from Yale and Columbia, and diagnosing the PhD oversupply problem as ‘universally’ acknowledged, this opening context made me wonder whether the current ‘crisis’ is only gaining recognition now that it is evident in locations that have the most academic privilege to lose – in the same way that the ‘precarity’ movements have revealed how very few workers ever had the benefits of ongoing salaries and jobs for life.

Of course the situation is more complicated than this analogy would admit. Many academics do face genuine threats to their livelihoods, and the overwhelming reliance on sessional staff in many locations besides Australia is a clear and pressing concern. In Work’s Intimacy, I address some of this in a chapter called ‘Part time Precarity: Discount labour and contract careers’. Interviews with sessionals, students and full time academic staff provide points of comparison across the campus hierarchy. Noting the pressure felt by tenured academics as much as the system’s aspirants, the chapter questions the grounds upon which the sacrificial labour of white collar apprenticeships can be said to be justified.

At the same time however I do think it’s important to turn the crisis narrative around, to see the benefits of a wider and more international constituency for higher education (in staff cohorts as much as student ones). Sometimes it seems impossible for those on the Left to imagine a future for universities beyond a rhetoric of loss, even though there are clear examples of initiatives underway that can drive activist pedagogy where it is needed.

In preparation for the panel I’ve been looking back to other ‘crisis’ moments: for instance, the period marked by Stuart Hall’s ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’. This essay offers a useful reminder that ‘cultural studies in Britain emerged precisely from a crisis in the humanities’ and that ‘most of us had to leave the humanities in order to do serious work in it’ (11-12). None of the founding figures of early British cultural studies mentioned – Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, or Hall – held faculty jobs in the beginning. They taught workers in adult education classes, often at night and on contracts. The stress and political commitment involved in this practice (often revealed if you read interviews with Williams and Hall in particular) bears relevance to the drive and resolve of ‘the precariat’ of untenured labour today.

Based on his experience of Oxford, Hall had ‘always planned never to return to the university, indeed, never to darken its doors again. But, then, one always has to make pragmatic adjustments to where real work, important work, can be done’ (12).

He further writes:

When cultural studies began its work in the 1960s and ’70s, it had, therefore, to undertake the task of unmasking what it considered to be the unstated presuppositions of the humanist tradition itself. It had to try to bring to light the ideological assumptions underpinning the practice, to expose the educational program (which was the unnamed part of its project), and to try to conduct an ideological critique of the way the humanities and the arts presented themselves as parts of disinterested knowledge.

Reading these words today, I can’t help but think that part of the work cultural studies has to do is to continue this project of questioning the assumptions underpinning the practice of the humanities – and that such work also includes questioning the privileges (and morality) of the tenure system.

But before taking off on Wednesday I wanted to ask what you all think. Is there a crisis in Australian academia? Does it matter? There is certainly a history of talking about ‘the state of the industry’ on this blog – but I’m keen to hear whether people feel much has really changed in the past few years. We’ve seen the introduction of new schemes, such as DECRAs, though the word on campus is that literally thousands of applications have been submitted for just a couple of hundred grants across the entire sector. And this small window of opportunity has come amidst other developments, like the ERA and journal ranking debate.

Of course these are just the big ticket items. I also think it’s important to talk anecdotally and empirically about the quality of life young academics maintain. I was out with a colleague the other night who teaches 900 students in a first year course and spends every weekend working – especially since he feels obligated to answer all of his students’ emails. Imagine! And this is supposed to mark some kind of graduation from a succession of short-term positions in universities overseas where he wrote the necessary books and articles to develop a profile post-PhD. Most professors I know didn’t have a monograph until they were already well established on a permanent teaching payroll. In those jobs, class sizes were smaller, they were not ‘enhanced’ by online delivery, and students could not send questions about their assignments to you on the weekend, via Twitter.

So: apart from the difficulty of listening to senior colleagues who feign empathy with the job market, what are the biggest issues facing young scholars in Australia? Please leave a comment below or drop me a line before the panel on Friday. And if you’re heading to ICA – do come along to the session – it’s on Friday at 1.30pm.

Affective Labor and its Limitations.

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of feminist writings on the question of labour that clearly inform both the Italian tradition lately dominant (eg in the work of Hardt & Negri, Lazzarato), the fan tradition of affective labour highlighted by Henry Jenkins, among others, and a new wave of research investigating the forms of emotion work (Hochschild) that professional life involves. This context will be used to question whether current discussions of affective labour succeed in overcoming the problematic gendered assumptions at its heart, or indeed meet the challenges of measuring labour in a digital, biopolitical era (Clough).

The uniqueness of digital affective labour in its typically mediated forms will be shown to lie in its anticipatory, prospective dimensions. These provide an extremely effective disciplinary regime for corporate capital: in the networked office, workers perform professionalism online and off, as so-called social networking becomes a mandatory measure of employability (Boltanski & Chiapello). The accompanying shifts in public and private sphere narratives imagined by nominally white-collar professionals seem to require a labour politics organised around “event” as opposed to “clock” time (Adkins). But for to be appropriate to the present global division of labour, such political endeavours must also find ways to revive an effective language of materiality.

The lecture will build on the paper (rant?) I gave at The New School in 2009 and some of the discussions that took place during the Technologies of Gender and Labour roundtable last December. I am really keen to use the occasion to think about different feminist legacies from the 70s, 80s and 90s and would love to hear from anyone with thoughts on gender and labour as I put it all together.

The other exciting news is that there will be a US launch for The Affect Theory Reader at Bluestockings Bookstore on March 31. Greg and I will be talking and Patricia Clough will also join us on the night. Yay NYC!

Every time I go home to Tasmania I tend to become very introspective about where I’m at in life. Taking holidays in Hobart and on Bruny Island – where I spent a lot of my childhood – inevitably involves trying to make sense of the physical and metaphorical distance that separates me from many of the people and principles I was brought up with. It is something I find extremely difficult to reconcile, and it often means I don’t feel particularly relaxed on holiday. But I do think it is vital to go through this experience regularly and to keep close to my (growing!) family.

Among the old friends I caught up with this year were E, an ex-banker who hadn’t visited since being convicted as a rogue trader; T, a registered nurse who has moved to Hobart after living for years as a tattoo artist on Venice Beach and the Cayman Islands; and B, probably my oldest friend, a superstar commerce graduate in town for just a few days.

For the past ten years B has been working all over the world for a major investment bank she joined at the same time that I started my Phd. Like me, lately she’s been wondering if she might be better off doing something else with her life, having worked so hard all through her twenties. Christmas morning had us comparing notes about the rhetorical strategies of cultish workplaces faced with employees thinking of leaving: “But you’re working with the best!” “What else would you do?” “This is as good as it gets!” And the classic: “But you’re so good at your job!”

These thirty-something dilemmas and the usual feelings of uprootedness were even more complicated this year, after six months of commuting between Sydney and Canberra. William & I have been in a long distance relationship of one kind or another for years now, and we should be used to it. But for some reason, being away from home this time round made me newly susceptible to asking what, precisely, it’s all for.

Evidence suggests I have always been the kind of child people describe as “bookish”. My dad was a farmer, my mum a teacher. Almost all of the women in my family have been teachers – but more on this later. Bruny isn’t the kind of place that can provide much support at the early stages of a writing career. The main industries are farming, fishing, logging and tourism (the latter to a much greater exent these days).

Now, when acquaintances from “the mainland” visit Bruny on a gastronomical adventure, I often feel a deep sense of melancholy. I have no right to do so, having left home 11 years ago this week. I suppose it’s an accentuation of what feels like my own personal conflict of cultures. Sensitivity to the process of class mobility – occasioned by the fact that I was sent away from home to “get an education” – plays out when I witness the leisure tastes of peers. It is perhaps a classic case of nostalgia: mourning for a home that has irrevocably gone; one that I felt the need to leave anyway.

In retrospect this has to be one of the reasons I was attracted to the writings of cultural studies pioneers like Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams in the first few years I was away from home. It is certainly no accident that, as a “scholarship girl”, I chose to dwell on their feelings of loss and mourning for the cultures of their upbringing. In those years I was not only feeling an extreme sense of culture shock. I was also grieving my mother, who died the year after I moved to Sydney. These comings and goings are always likely to be tied.

Tasmania has an extensive community of ex-pats. Bruny I’m less sure about. Taking the famous adventure cruise this past New Years Day, the boat was captained by F, the daughter of one of our nearest neighbours on Cloudy Bay Road. (There “neighbour” means someone who is only a 10 minute drive away). F is a mad surfer and it made me so happy to see her taking command of the vessel, showing her home to the world with such pride.

It was different for me. Like a lot of Bruny kids, I was sent to school in the city at a certain age. I would have been about 7 when it started. On Sunday afternoons Mum drove my brother and I up to “town” (Hobart) and we would stay with my grandparents during the week. Mum taught at the same school we went to. When I wasn’t avoiding her I was spending interminably long afternoons in the car waiting for her to finish work.

By the time I reached high school my parents were able to buy a home in the city, with some help from Nanna, I think. These were the days of record interest rates and the wool stockpile. Dad was reminding us just the other day: oversupply in the livestock industry was so bad that the federal government was subsidising farmers for shooting sheep.

My dad is from a farming family. Some of my favourite photos are those that seem to glamorise the glory days of Tasmanian country life in the middle of last century. Football and horse-racing were major sources of investment, pride and fulfilment; social occasions hovered around religious and farming festivals, such as the Apple Queen.

On my mum’s side, Grandpa worked on the docks, for a fish shop and in the jam factory. The old IXL building is now a 5 star hotel on the waterfront – little wonder I feel conflicted about the tourism business! Before moving to Warrane on a housing commission scheme, mum’s family lived in a tiny place in Salamanca, almost next door to Knopwoods. I would make jokes about this in my twenties when mum dropped me off at the pub: “I’m communing with my roots”, etc.

Having been raised somewhere isolated, maybe it’s inevitable that I would be attracted by city lights. It’s not really that simple though. My brother has never wanted to leave Hobart, for instance. And I’ve never loved Sydney the way some people are prone to. I do like that it gives me options – like any big city. But a) options come with price tags and b) options aren’t so great for a Libran anyway.

For the past year I have been struggling with the idea of Sydney, with the role of teacher; exacerbated, no doubt, by the fact that I was a student in the very same corridors I now work. Given my family history, and the personal connection I’ve been forced to have with schools throughout my life, teaching seems an unimaginative endpoint – an intimate, almost masochistic discipline I continue to subject myself to. What others call a “vocation” full of autonomy and freedom feels to me at times like a prison or a conveyor-belt. I’ve never had any significant period away from school; I never left or took time off from the semester cycle. That said, marking lambs, herding cattle, pumping petrol and weeding baronia probably gives me a more diverse CV than most. And I wouldn’t do any of those things again by choice.

Of course the machinic imagery of the factory also describes the tendencies of an industry that seems determined to set a commercially profitable pace for writing, learning and thinking. And that’s probably enough motivation for me to stick around: it would be good to make sure some decent space continues to exist for “bookish” kids, whether it’s here or another city. A benefit of working at a big university is that it allows me to help a few of those without a foot in the door, just as it gives me a chance to offer some perspective to those who aren’t quite aware of their privilege.

While she worked at the Bruny school, my mum was a home economics teacher. Another of her roles was to teach “social skills” to girls who would hardly have thought to catch the ferry to town to have dinner in a nice restaurant for fun. I’m grateful that she took me with her to explore the world of education. But I wonder what she thinks of me now, teaching the latest forms of etiquette to the white collar apprentices vying to enter a new global elite.

I can’t ever be sure it’s what she had in mind.

Me & baby nephew, Noah. Christmas Day 2010.

Anyway, this a phatic post. I’m excited because today is my first ever keynote. Hope I don’t stuff it up; it’s going to be recorded and podcast. See, this proves my point – digital technologies exacerbate the already manifold anxieties of the white collar worker.

Wish me luck!

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

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!