Another book I picked up last month in Yungaburra was Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise’s Wired Women collection from 1996. Subtitled “Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace”, it gives an insight into the imaginaries and experiences of women heading online when Usenet and IRC were at a peak. Having come to the internet — and internet studies — much later than this (I was starting university in 1996), this almost counts as an historical document for me. From a genealogical point of view, it reflects a time before the knowledges we now take for granted, post-Google, post-blog, post web 2.0, post Yahoo!(?).

In our book, Catherine and I are writing a genealogy — rather than a history — of online culture in order to account for the specific forms of intimacy and community different platforms have enabled. But because of this, combined with our preference for ethnographic methods, our examples will be necessarily limited. For instance, Usenet has never been part of my experience of what the internet offers, and I don’t know anyone who uses newsgroups, or even Google groups, really. [Is this true? Please tell me if you do! I’d love to hear… or about why/why not.]

Yet from what I can tell, for people just a few years older than me, especially people working in cultural studies in different parts of the world, Usenet was one of the most formative and intense online experiences they’ve had, with particular groups migrating or splintering into subsequent alliances that continue today (this can be seen quite clearly in the way that Henry Jenkins’ fan/gender studies debate took place in a blog forum and on LJ; as well as in the ways that discussion took place outside of these “formal” channels).

Like e-bay, newsgroups are a major aspect of online life that exist but that I don’t “do” — as opposed to email lists, which I’ve “done”, even though I think the debate about whether they’re actually dead remains to be had. I can’t help but think that the people that dominated many previously active email lists and now diagnose them as “over” fail to acknowledge the accumulation of cultural and symbolic capital that ensued as a result of their previous activity, and which now affects their personal decision to participate (or not).

With LiveJournal, I’ve always felt like I’ve turned up to the party too late, and the fact that most of the people I know who did have one moved firstly to MySpace and then to Facebook tends to suggest this moment is gone, too. For whatever reason, something fundamental was missed or has changed; there’s been a “conjunctural shift”, perhaps (as Graeme Turner suggested in our conference panel back in December, cultural studies methods like conjunctural analysis have a lot to offer a field as apparently fluid and ephemeral as internet studies).

I’ll have more to say about this in the book of course. For the moment I wanted to share some quotes from Cherny and Weise’s collection. Is it the newness of the platforms at the time that allows some of the writers to capture so simply and beautifully the wonder and the warmth of online community? Or is it the fact that this sense of intimacy is now so obvious that we don’t bother to express it — unless it’s with some sort of further nifty application in mind? Here is Laurel Sutton:

Communication through computers can bring people together, regardless of their distance or location. For once in your life, you can be sure that people are paying attention to what you’re saying, and not the way you look or how nicely you dress. You contribute to a newsgroup from your quiet little room (or big, fluorescent-lighted work space) and within hours, or in minutes, you have responses from people you’ve never met but who are interested in what you have said. You sent out a message in a bottle, and you got an answer. Your voice was heard! (171)

A passage like this does much to explain the attractions of online life for women (particularly the notion of being listened to), just as this description from Weise paints a familiar — and curiously domestic — picture:

I slept days, worked nights, became so pale as to look sickly and barely saw another soul, but each night at the bureau, surrounded by empty desks and the velvet darkness outside, I logged in to WOW to read the stories of these women’s daily lives. Their words, written perhaps in the middle of the day, were waiting for me like a letter on the kitchen table.
[…]
In a way, the WELL, and WOW in particular, was like being given the gift of an extended family, something I had never experienced. Suddenly every night I had family dinner, I could sit back and nibble at my food while aunts and uncles and cousins argued and told stories about people I had never met, but whose experiences enriched me… Alone in a new city, I felt surrounded by a thousand aunts—a thousand aunts with modems (xii)

Other chapters, particularly those that tackle the male-dominance of hacker culture or software engineering, offer insider accounts of how or why women do or don’t survive. The following quote sheds light on so many things I’ve been thinking about, including those I’ve tried to articulate to Mark Deuze about gender in the gaming industry. Read today, Ellen Ullman’s chapter reinforces how much there is still to be written about the interplay between gender identity, communication and professional performance in online working environments (which are only increasing):

For an engineer, gaining comfort and skill in using these various aliases—and creating the right online persona for each—is a prerequisite for surviving in the profession. Everything happens there: design, technical argument, news, professional visibility; in short, one’s working life. Someone who can’t survive by email has to find another way to earn a living. If an engineer begins to insist on too many meetings or too many phone calls (womanish, interrupting sort of interactions), he or she will soon be seen as a nuisance and a “bad programmer.” Early in an engineer’s life, one learns to send mail (8).

But towards the end of the collection, Sutton’s take on the politics of online interaction left me feeling a bit flat. Quite rightly refusing the adolescent mentality of flaming, her advice for women marginalised by it is to “continue to carry on conversations with like-minded folks and have fun. I’m not going to let some stupid jerk spoil my cocktail party, especially when I can make him go away with one push of a button: The all-powerful Delete key”. (185)

This solution avoids some of the more complicated issues of harassment and uninvited intimacy that the rest of the collection clearly demonstrates affect women more than men. The retreat to conversations “with like-minded folks” also hints at the difficulties that internet studies, and its attendant politics, has faced from the outset.

For perhaps the wider issue here (as I would say) is one of class rather than etiquette, although Sutton does highlight the overlap between the two. What remains striking about the group of essays chosen for the collection is how much they reflect the white, Anglophone and educational bias that persists in publishing about frontier online communities, in spite of gender (and there is a recurring allusion to cyberspace as ‘the wild west’ in several of the chapters). It’s also the modesty of the pleasures and politics described that linger after reading the book. These are highly literate, highly educated and well networked women — the book itself is the result of existing connections in publishing — for whom being able to press “delete” to avoid a problem is as much a demonstration of agency as joining a Facebook group to promote a cause might be for women today.

In this sense, acknowledging their real historical value, I’m still hoping to find stories beyond the radius of these middle class on- and off-line communities to contextualize “the new realities” of cyberspace and gender — including judgments about what really is new, and what should be accepted as intractable in a world that need not manifest itself in quite the same ways on screen, or over time.

Whether it’s a sign of the writers’ strike biting or just the serendipity of summer programming, for the past month or two Channel 10 has been screening Friends re-runs at 7pm. This is right about the time that William orders me out of the kitchen, I won’t let myself on the laptop anymore and I’m looking for something non book-like to do.

For a while, the novelty of being a bit older than the characters turned into a pleasant enough holiday pastime given that the first time around I was quite a bit younger. It was also nice to have the chance to feel a bit reassured contrasting my own twenty-something progress — career wise, at least — with each of the uniquely goofy/ lovable/ annoying members of this claustrophobic clique.

But I can’t take it any more. Knowing what I know now, at the end of my twenties, the narrowness of their lives proves unbearably contrived. As another famous 90s Manhattan sit-com lady might write, “it makes me wonder”: was this show the greatest ideological ruse of the decade?

Leaving aside the complete disconnect between the theme song (your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A…) and the perky lifestyle of adjoining lofts and lattes that enabled the narrative, I guess it never really rang true to me how this group of friends could plausibly be content to keep seeing each other so often. Especially at a period in their lives when so many people I’ve known have seemed variously broken, disappointed or emboldened to finally leave the constraints of a formative friendship group and move on, already.

Trouble is, for many of us moving on has literally meant leaving those one or two amazing and perfect friends we did want to keep with us for the rest of the life we were looking for. And now, the struggle to keep hoping for something somewhere better has left some of us exhausted and wanting to retreat to a place that feels safe — all the while knowing that we have changed, maybe just slightly, but still fundamentally.

For me this change has come from living my twenties surrounded by the kinds of people that would pose significant scripting challenges for a sit-com. Of course by this I mean that the vast majority of my ‘friends’ and colleagues are gay — or at least not straight, and even this distinction is still hard to discern on TV without an accompanying joke or pathology. For all its historical significance, The L Word is moving even further away from any credible relation to its theme song ( ‘this is the way that we live…’ ); meanwhile watching The Line of Beauty this month* has been a confronting reminder of the conditions faced by those a little older than these liberated lipstick ladies. As such important alternative stories emerge (thinking of two other powerful portrayals of AIDS in recent mainstream visual culture) I find it hard to even imagine the magnitude of the trauma that still lingers from that time — just a few years before Friends started screening (although Eric Michaels and Eve Sedgwick are just two of the writers who have helped me understand a little, and from a distance).

I was also forever changed in my twenties by my first long-term relationship, which was with an indigenous partner. This partly explains why I have found the last few days in Australian politics immensely exciting. But along with the usual challenges of monogamy and cohabitation, these were some major issues to reckon with, and once I’d moved state, there weren’t many people around to help.

Thinking back, I seem to remember this TV show being credited by pop-sociologists as marking the shift to ‘friends as the new family’ for a generation who had little choice but to move away from home to cash in on their parents’ investment in their future. It captured the prospects for mobility in our prosperous times, or whatever. But no matter how insistently positive those 22 minutes of content, they were never any match for the momentous amount of solitude that is still so constitutive of modern metropolitan life. Certainly after 2001, they would never compensate for the feelings summoned by the Manhattan landscape once it became associated with terror.

Watching Friends in Australia 2008, the ad breaks are dedicated to health insurance, STD prevention and skin cancer awareness. Ever stop to wonder why? Maybe it’s because the next generation need to be taught to look after themselves; maybe it’s because they are smart enough to see through the utopian promise, ‘I’ll be there for you’.

*My own half-cooked theory is that the ABC could only screen gay male sex on a Sunday night because the Australian Open was on at the same time.

I am shifting to Google Reader today after years of Bloglines. Am I making the right decision? Do I care? I’m not overjoyed that Google will have even more information about me because of this - they already have all of my most intimate email. But Bloglines is just slow and it started to bore me. How can a RSS reader bore someone? you may ask. Well, this is why we need more aesthetics theory in internet studies.

So far I have resisted the integration potential that Google or Facebook offer (I still use MySpace, Flickr, AllConsuming, de.licio.us and Adium, for instance). I want to support diversity, I want to resist fashion, and these programs still do things that are uniquely useful for my interests (unlike Twitter, as I mentioned before). Plus no level of personal convenience outweighs the amount to be lost by having only a few superpowers ruling over the new media landscape.

Since reading this Guardian article I’ve been feeling slightly condemned as an internet researcher. But whatever conspiracy theories I might entertain or believe - and hence whatever impulses I have to leave some websites - go against my methodological preference for participant observation and producing sympathetic accounts of online culture. As Christine Hine wrote, in a quote Catherine and I are using in an article we’re writing for MIA:

As the Internet becomes more and more embedded into everyday life, social research will have to come to terms with it in order to achieve its goals of effectively researching and portraying everyday life. If the people you study move some aspects of their life onto the Internet, then so must you.

What this means is if we are in the middle of the biggest personal security heist in history - or if my heart rate and iris size will be used to persecute me in my job in future - that’s the deal. There will be millions of us doing pilates together in US jails, or potentially unemployable because of our Facebook profiles… and surely that can’t be good for the economy.

My stars warned me it would be a week for feeling agitated; I managed to channel most of it into work-related causes. After throwing caution to the wind on fibreculture, I’m now bored stiff to think that I might have to wade through even more talk about young people and social networking to finish our riposte to the ‘digital literacy for a knowledge economy’ agenda. Sigh.

On a brighter note, summertime wanderings in bookshops and the Lifeline Bookfest have inspired me to start a new side project on management self-help (as you can see from the ‘currently reading’ section of the side bar). I want to write a history of the social networking and ‘getting things done’ movements online but trace them back to their pre-web origins; going beyond net-centrism and 2.0 mantras to connect to a longer lineage of sociological writing on white-collar labour and subject formation. Not only will it contextualise some of the cybertariat/cognitariat/precariat stuff that’s so prevalent right now, I also suspect there is an unspoken gender distinction going on in the growth of stress management literature. Blokes read Who Moved My Cheese because their boss does while women read ’self-help’ or marie claire: both are the same personalised mode of learning to accept structural constraints.

The breathlessness and utilitarianism of business discourse makes this kind of work especially difficult to produce now, but I figure I have at least two years left on this contract…

2008 marks my fifth year in Brisbane, and by the end of February I will have been here longer than I lived in Sydney. Given how much I have struggled to embrace Brisbane as a long-term location, that’s quite a psychological turning point for me to wrestle with. A few things have conspired recently that make me quite sure that going back to Sydney isn’t likely any time soon. I’m having too much fun on my current research project for a start, but I’m also starting to find a happy balance of things to keep me off the laptop at night and on weekends (have you noticed?). Right now it’s nice to know things are solid and secure for two more years, at which point there could be even more happening in Brisbane than there is already.

Over the break I’ve been reading a lot of material that helps me understand some of my ongoing feelings of rootlessness in a wider context. Richard Sennett’s Corrosion of Character (which I picked up in an unlikely place: a tiny but great bookshop in Yungaburra, just around the corner from where I stayed on my amazing monsoonal holiday) puts a name to the ‘fradulent sense of community’ I’ve experienced as a career migrant in each of the neighbourhoods I’ve lived in Sydney and Brisbane. I’ve also finished William Whyte’s The Organization Man, which has been really enlightening while sifting through the interviews for my ARC project, and in contrast to a lot of the more recent literature I’ve been reading on white-collar, so-called precarious labour. Ursula Huws’ The Making of a Cybertariat was incredibly prescient in parts, even though some of the pieces in the collection have to be appreciated in retrospect. That this weekend’s Courier Mail had yet another generic puff piece spruiking the benefits of working from home ‘for employers and employees’ convinced me that she was right to warn that this is a wonderful convenience, if not entirely a conspiracy on the part of corporate interests to offload the overheads of paid work onto us (and my interviews will reveal a lot more about this, I can tell).

Getting involved in all of these quite dated texts has been a salve for my frustrations about the temporality of new media and blogging discourse — which also explains why I’ve been a bit silent lately I guess. But then Lauren Berlant started a blog over the holiday and Anne wrote such lovely things that it made me want to invest in the potential of this space all over again.

In the end of year rush I didn’t get around to mentioning that I got a promotion in December. Basically this means I am now paid almost as much as everyone else I know who has worked in academia as long as me! But what I have lost in dollars I have gained in independence, I think — and in the current environment, that suits me. After submitting a heap of documentation and sitting a half hour interview months later, I found out I’d been promoted via a Word attachment in an email. Given my current research, this seemed entirely apt. We are a long way from The Organization era, that’s for sure.

Feminist Media Studies is asking for work in progress and short debate pieces inspired by researching Web 2.0. In particular, the editors ask:

How do we theorize gender in the context of the rise of participatory, interactive internet interfaces, such as social networking sites, blogs and even e-governance? What implications does the rise of social networks on the internet, such as Facebook, Orkut, Myspace etc have on feminist approaches to media and the internet starting from Donna Haraway’s cyborg? How empowering are these new media “architectures of participation” that enable new forms of many-to-many publishing? Are web-based communities truly different because, as Manuel Castells suggests, they operate in a new “space of flows”?

Because the articles only need to be 1500 words I’m wondering what to focus on with my submission. Something that’s struck me lately that I mentioned last week at our roundtable is how the techno-fix obsessions of gadget bloggers and Getting Things Done gurus seem so oblivious to the structural forces affecting experience beyond the priorities of the cubicle. Treated as relics of popular culture, these sites operate in a realm far removed from the critiques many feminist or cultural studies theorists take for granted.

For example, I Want Sandy is just one of a range of productivity innovations promoted on these blogs designed to make highly employable men even more ‘free’ to focus on being ‘creative’, while women - virtual or actual - take care of the administrative and immaterial labour in the work and home spaces around them. Of course women can make use of these applications as well, but if this is the case, why employ aesthetics that harness some kind of nostalgia for a 1950s division of labour?

The concern here isn’t simply that the figure of the willing assistant is female by default, it is that there is an implicit hierarchy created around what is a trivial and what is a serious use of one’s time. This hierarchy then returns in assessments of the worth of various forms of online community: when the ‘wealth of networks’ quite literally cannot be translated into a pay rise or a better job. But by excising these maintenance aspects of one’s life to the background in order to focus on work, what kind of functioning human - of whichever gender - are we advocating? How to understand this desire for pure efficiency as anything other than a mimetic response to the capacities of computing technologies themselves?

Writing the ‘gender’ chapter for Uses of Blogs I found that the loudest versions of feminism in the blogosphere came from those that profess a white, liberal, middle-class, college-educated politics. It was as if feminism only had one RSS feed, and the issues to mobilise around - abortion, better media representation, more women keynote speakers on the high-tech conference circuit - had quickly reached an appropriately radical consensus.

All of these issues are of course important, but my interest in social networking sites is how they allow us to start a conversation about the complexity of the power relations that currently shape identity, especially in the workplace. These include:

- the flattening of hierarchies
- the ‘presence bleed’ (my sound-bite for the day) from the office to elsewhere
- more openness and more surveillance, from friends as well as people you just happen to know
- improvised etiquette for a system that rewards addition but provides no script for subtraction (leading to)
- peer pressure beyond the schoolyard age bracket
- identity maintenance and mood broadcasting
- productivity and popularity auditing, etc. etc.

They also let us speculate about the character traits that flourish or flounder in contexts of compulsory sociality*: the lurker vs. the butterfly, the sceptic vs. the joiner, the private vs. the public profile… and all the awkward and thwarted gestures in between.

Thinking this through I’ve also started to wonder whether blogger-pundits’ regular derision of Facebook - including knowing predictions of its demise - has something to do with the fact that the default affect of the site has proven so cloyingly positive. This challenges the more negative modes of narcissism, nihilism, cynicism or bombast that have been the hallmarks of many an A-List blog, and perhaps too easily became the only way of credentialing appropriate participation in Web 2.0.

Though you wouldn’t know it from much of the commentary, the rise of social networking is at least in part an overdue form of recognition for the affirmative, relationship-building skills that women have developed over time, often through media consumption and technology use. Feminist scholars need to determine whether this shift brings any accompanying changes in institutional empowerment, or social networks instead help to assuage the position of the many who still remain outside the circuits of privilege that continue unabated in the off-line, Old Boys’ network of so many professions.

How this fits in relation to histories of net politics is interesting to consider, too. It seems little coincidence in retrospect that one of my most significant Australian feminist heroes describes Facebook as a fabulously utopian space, when her work did so much to voice womens’ struggle against relegation to the realm of everyday life, whereas some of Web 2.0’s greatest scholarly enthusiasts cannot stand Facebook because of its conformist corporatism.

I certainly welcome comments on this before I commit anything to print…

* Wow, didn’t I see some of those at the Staff Club at lunchtime today! Next year I will have to be better prepared to document all the end of year functions around town so that I can write the great Australian riposte to The Office Christmas Special. Take it easy out there, people.

What might appear as an in-joke on the previous post is alluding to one of the sessions at the Sustaining Cultural Research day last week in Adelaide. Unfortunately due to a series of conspiring factors there was quite a bit of repetition in the advice and the preoccupations of the speakers on the day, with the media training workshop feeling a little bit like an encounter with a Channel Seven footy commentator, and the speaker from the ABC managing to avoid talking about how he got his job or what he actually does in favour of defending television as showbusiness. This last point is something cultural studies graduates don’t really need to be told - but what we could all still benefit from finding out is whether a postgraduate qualification actually assists in working outside the university industry. Tell us more Jeremy, if you’re out there!

Having expected some of this emphasis on communicating to the media, I thought it was important in the final session to present something that viewed theory and university affiliation in a positive way. This feeling was bolstered when I heard the metaphor used by the PR consultant in the media training session. The saying went something like: “When academics see a flower, they want to know where it was grown, what seeds were used, and the weather conditions while it was growing to get a real understanding of it. Journalists - they just want the flower.” So, okay, that’s the difference. But do academics risk losing the skills and conviction of their own profession in the increasing demands to present their ideas in soundbites for journalists? What happens when all cultural institutions - from public broadcasters to art galleries, libraries to universities - start taking on the same role of entertaining customers/ consumers?

My talk - which the rest of this post draws on - tried to offer some other possibilities for public intellectual practice and examples of work that has a different form of impact than that currently encouraged by assessment exercises. This is because to me it is still necessary for scholarship to develop at a pace that can at times resist some of the institutionalised temporalities of mainstream politics, the news cycle, even the academy itself. I explained this (drawing on Jean’s current obsession) in terms of the scale of one’s intellectual practice: whether your work is really aimed at ‘The Public’ (i.e. you want to lead Jeff McMullen or Tracy Grimshaw or Fran Kelly in debate) or whether it is perhaps better suited to the formation of what Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have termed a ‘counter-public’: ‘an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation’ … ‘that constitutes itself in many ways other than through the official publics of opinion culture and the state’.

Lauren Berlant is a bit of a hero of mine. And for me, a big part of intellectual life has been to hold on to heroes whose style you want to work towards emulating over time. But time is key: I think we need to be cautious of demands for younger scholars to make their research public when they are still developing the skills and expertise to do this (a well-known incident at QUT this year shows that universities aren’t necessarily well set up to provide support or protection for you when something goes wrong). Clearly there are issues of knowing when to go public – if at all. Public intellectual practice is a particular skill that requires a certain entrepreneurial impulse, but that is above all dependent on confidence. These are things that can be distinctly lacking if you’re at the start of a PhD, somewhere in the middle, or even a long time after.

In the book I wrote based on my PhD, Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices, I spent a lot of time reading and working out the quite different styles of intervention adopted by cultural studies scholars throughout history and the way they formulated a ‘voice’ appropriate for the political objective they were seeking. I tried to isolate the signature mode of public intellectual practice for five scholars – Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Larry Grossberg, Andrew Ross and Meaghan Morris – to show the variety of different styles of academic engagement cultural studies encompasses. Part of my aim in describing these tactics was to make them available for ongoing use. That’s because sometimes I think ‘the way forward’ for intellectual practice is to stop, take a look around and see how far we’ve come – there are a range of already existing models established for us that as a discipline we can draw on.

Bearing in mind that role models can be flawed, I find it useful to find other public intellectuals whose work you might use as a model because you think it is right, not because you are going to be rewarded for it in sound-bite or CV boosting opportunities. This is to take the priorities of other public intellectuals to heart and test them out in new context - to try them on for size as an experiment.

An example from my own current work is to draw on the labour activism of Andrew Ross, whose No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers garnered further attention for the anti-sweatshop movements that took place on US campuses throughout the 1990s. More recently, Ross’s Low Pay, High Profile and Fast Boat to China put a human face to the growing entertainment, service and information economies of the West, describing the lives of those working for huge multinational companies and whose voices risk going unheard.

As a form of public intellectual practice, Ross’s work:

-Draws on his skills as scholar to provide research in the service of activist claims,
-Uses the resources of the university to involve students in campaigns and hold public events,
-Uses his contacts in publishing to produce an outcome that will spread ideas beyond the university.

To me, this blurs any easy distinction between ‘in’ and ‘outside’ the academy and the politics such a formulation implies.

At the moment I am adapting some of Ross’s ideas in my postdoctoral study of technology habits among workers in information jobs across Brisbane. The project aims to develop policies that will ensure realistic work hours can be maintained against the dotcom era glamorisation of long hours culture and the compulsive tendencies of new media devices.

A second example I have used recently is from Judith Halberstam’s writing on queer subcultures, where she describes the importance of developing an archive for vulnerable communities. Halberstam sees the possibility for alliances between what she calls the minority academic and the minority subcultural producer:

… academics can play a big role in the construction of queer archives and queer memory, and, furthermore, queer academics can, and some should, participate in the ongoing project of recording and interpreting queer culture and circulating a sense of its multiplicity and sophistication.

As I am seeing with my graduate students, this archiving function seems an increasingly useful way to see the mutually constituitive roles of academic and other subcultures, and to understand the traffic between them. Testing some of these ideas in an article this year, I wrote “Normal Homes” at a time of upheaval for indigenous communities in an effort to mark a shared sense of outrage at that event within a history of earlier solidarities between marginalised groups in a changing Brisbane. For me, this kind of writing can help to challenge stereotypes about place and build counter-histories to show that official records are always partial.

Publishing my piece in M/C Journal, which uses online and open access, was another way to attempt a form of public intellectual practice. In the rush to produce ‘outcomes’ based research, I think this is one way we can also maintain ‘outreach’ to an interested readership.

So they are just two examples aimed at providing a more varied register for discussing public intellectual practice. While the APD project tries to address issues of some national significance (work/life balance, technology roll out, changing relations to work and home), the “Normal Homes” paper is a one-off, local contribution of a kind that I intend to continue wherever I may be in future.

Notions of ‘the intellectual’ - public, organic, specific – have a long history in cultural studies theory, but somehow seem to come across as quite grandiose in an Australian context. Maybe it is cultural cringe that often leads me to search for heroes elsewhere? In any case, I will finish by quoting from someone who has been a bit of a hero for lots of people in cultural studies, and who some of you might be interested to know is turning 60 this week. In We Gotta Get Out Of This Place Larry Grossberg wrote:

Cultural studies refuses to let political pressures erase the necessity of theoretical work. Yet it is always frustrated by its apparent inability to actually effect change. Still, it has to resist the temptation to measure itself against other more direct forms of activism (which are available to us as people anyway). In its effort to realize the possible political role of the intellectual, cultural studies has to avoid the temptation to demand of its own discourse what it does not, and cannot, demand of other discourses: that it have a direct, immediate and visible impact. Culture does not work that way, but it does work; it does make a difference.

“We Gotta Get Out of This Place” certainly summed up the feelings of a lot of my friends during the past 11 years of John Howard’s government. Events of the last few weeks may reiterate how slowly change seemed to come; but when it did, it was emphatic. I was writing about this on my blog last week, and I’m conscious that some of you might have expected me to have said that blogging is the way forward given that in many ways it is my most public form of intellectual practice. Instead, what I have tried to highlight here is that we all do and should respond differently to the affordances and constraints of our times; the many different levels of public engagement we’ve heard about today are the range of conversations necessary to make wider change occur.

I’m looking forward to hearing about yours.

Think outside the square

A picture paints a thousand words

You’re not getting any love

You have to be your own self-promoter

The man out front

Taking one for the team

What flies and what dies

Piggy-backing

Gate-crashing

Presser

Snapper

Have to keep putting yourself out there!

Television in Transition: Crime and Cookery

a Masterclass with Professor Charlotte Brunsdon

When and where:
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies,
University of Queensland, Brisbane
Monday 18 & Tuesday 19 February 2008

The ARC Cultural Research Network is seeking applications from postgraduates and early career researchers who wish to take part in one of a Masterclass with Professor Charlotte Brunsdon. The class will be limited to 18 participants who are engaged in research relating to the broad theme of the Masterclass. Participants will be chosen based on a competitive application process. The Masterclass will include a discussion of the work of Professor Brunsdon and short presentations from participants.

For further details and to apply, download the application form. Closing date is December 10.

Mediations: Demographies, Geographies and Technologies

a Masterclass with Professor David Morley
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths College, University of London

When and where:
Centre for Cultural Research,
University of Western Sydney, Parramatta
13 & 14 February 2008

The ARC Cultural Research Network is seeking applications from postgraduates and early career researchers who wish to take part in one of a Masterclass with Professor David Morley. The class will be limited to 18 participants who are engaged in research relating to the broad theme of the Masterclass. Participants will be chosen based on a competitive application process. The Masterclass will include a discussion of the work of Professor Morley and short presentations from participants.

For further details and to apply, download the application form. Closing date is December 10.

Below and here is the program for Wednesday’s professional development day - the pre-conference being held the day before CSAA. I am on last! So my thoughts on ‘the way forward’ for public intellectualism will probably be ‘in the direction of the pub’. I am still gathering my notes together and feel quite conscious that the last event like this left some people feeling overwhelmed. But I think we will all learn a lot, and it will be nice to get lots of bright young people together in one place!

If you’re coming, why not let us know below?

9.00-9.30 Registration and Welcome.
- Graeme Turner [re: RQF & other issues]
- Susan Luckman
- Emily Potter

9.30-11.00 Sustaining Cultural Research
- Catharine Lumby [Cultural Research in the Mainstream Media]
- Graeme Turner [Intervening in Policy Debates/Curricula]
- Stuart Cunningham [CHASS; Impact Vs Quality re: RQF]

11.00-11.30 Morning Tea

11.30-13.30 Media Team Australia Workshop (with Annie O’Rourke) covering:
- Ensuring you have the basics right - developing contacts, writing effective media releases and pitching stories to the right journalists
- Understanding the national media cycle
- What stage of the research process is the most effective time to develop your media relations strategy
- Why some issues run while others drop
- Choosing the right outlet and timing for your research to be released
- Developing a profile
- Generating follow up stories and op/ed pieces
- How to engage in issues already running in the national media

13.30-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Employment and Communication beyond the Academy
Kate Darian-Smith
Jeremy MacKinnon
Nicole Anderson
Elspeth Probyn
Carol Williams

16.00-17.30 Public Intellectualism: The Way Forward?
- Catharine Lumby
- Maria Tumarkin
- Mel Gregg

17.30 on Function at Aroma