Women in research

Posted on | October 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

A new report shows that women’s progress in science has stalled over the past 15 years. While this won’t sound like news to many, I was shocked to read the statistic on how many women are Federation Fellows (8.5%). When you add that to other recent news stories, particularly with regard to the ongoing pay gap, the picture is quite bleak.

Perhaps the only thing more upsetting than this is the explanation of yesterday’s research findings:

SHARON BELL: The metaphor that we use is that women’s career is like a labyrinth, and you need to actually be able to negotiate that complex labyrinth. There is a number of pressures that come to apply.

A labyrinth! Apparently this is the preferred term over the “glass ceiling” and “leaking pipeline” metaphors of previous studies. In any case, they are all attempts to explain this diagram, which will be familiar to many “mid-career” academics.

The report itself is fantastic, but many people may not bother to read it when it comes packaged in Management 101. This was the case on ABC’s PM last night:

DAVID MARK: What are the ramifications for the under-representation of women in science?

SHARON BELL: Well, I think the main ramifications are the fact that if we don’t have a diverse workforce, we’re not actually maximising our productivity through diversity and that will impact on innovation.

Sharon, how about this for your next presser:

“At least half the population faces implicit or explicit obstacles to following the so-called formal career path. This is the case in universities as well as other jobs. The singular career path is a fiction based on the experience of a minority. It is a premise that should be dispelled at every level of leadership and management if the word diversity means anything at all.”

Category: Academia, Gender, Work
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Consuming drugs, books, tele

Posted on | October 13, 2009 | No Comments

I’ve just uploaded our co-authored article, “Underbelly, true crime and the cultural economy of infamy” on the Other Writing page. We would welcome any feedback while it’s under peer review, especially since there will likely be more to this project than just one paper. Thanks to Tim Laurie for so much help with the background coverage.

Finishing the piece the other week, I had the great fortune to read Kane Race’s Pleasure Consuming Medicine, which will definitely be adding to our revised version. Kane’s fascinating and inspiring book is full of ideas, and I want to share just a couple of them here.

The clear resonance with the story of Underbelly, in its scripted and real life forms, is the centrality of drugs. In each case, to borrow Kane’s words, “drugs are fit for incorporation within an amoral consumer logic, as commodities par excellence” (11).

Kane suggests that “one way to grasp the responsibility of drugs” is to “consider them as necessarily re-creational. When all drugs are cast on the plane of re-creation, the agonistic nature of pharmaceutical production and consumption becomes explicit: we expose what is specific, partial, and consequential about our biochemical techniques of the self” (9).

Among Kane’s wider arguments is the claim that: “At the moment that consumption becomes the normative mode of social participation and citizenship, medical authority becomes available in these discourses to fulfil the role of the moral curb on the self-administering consumer. As a result, these discourses become especially prone to political and authoritarian investment—precisely because they produce the self as the moral locus of consumption” (15).

The book provides a series of case studies to show how this plays out, whether at the local level in Sydney or through transnational media texts and health disciplines.

Kane also highlights the experiences of queer communities touched by HIV/AIDS, and how this context continues to affect drug consumption in the present. One point of this is to trouble the legal distinctions and moralising judgements that adhere to some kinds of drug consumption, and therefore some populations, more than others. But an even more forceful dimension of this project is the way that it reveals drug consumption to be symptomatic of a culture that fails to recognise or advance enough models to express desire, intimacy, care and community (see especially the final chapter, “Exceptional Sex: How drugs have come to mediate sex in gay discourse”).

Of the many poetic and powerful passages, the section describing ‘the auratic value of queer dance parties’ is among my favourite. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Kane shows how ecstasy use and the mass dance party event, set against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, produced a set of singular experiences that lost their poignant “aura” with the commercialisation of queer lifestyles, and – as our Underbelly paper describes – the mainstreaming of club culture and ecstasy consumption. Linking this to the fortunes of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, Kane notes that: “If the large-scale queer dance party is a form in decline, this is not simply because it bcame more commercial, but because one of the primary conditions within which it came to accrue meaning and value has altered – and thankfully so” (29).

This is the bit that stuck:

What if we were to understand the dance party not as the transparent radiation of community, but as a mediated event through which a sense of community was hallucinated? The massed bodies, decorations, lights, drugs, costumes, and music combined to produce a powerful and widely accessed perception of presence, belonging, shared circumstance, and vitality at a time when the image of the gay man, dying alone, ostracized from family, was the publicly proffered alternative. To describe this experince as hallucination is not to say that it was false or untrue, for this would be to imply, incorrectly, that there is some pure, unmediated reality which it is possible to access transparently. I want to take seriously the importance of pleasure, imagination, and fantasy in the construction of new materialities. This sense of community that was animated at dance parties was real with real effects. It was realized in the affirmative apprehension of thousands of bodies presumed affected in similar ways by the accidents of history and the exclusions of heterosexual society. It was worked out in the minutiae of caring practices, the forging of dependable relations outside the family form, the inventive expression of memory and grief, the commitment to a safe-sex ethic. It was tapped into by agencies seeking to advance the public rights of gay men, lesbians, and people with HIV/AIDS, as well as to deliver health programming and to conduct research. It helped sustain a collective sense of predicament, power, care, and commitment – a shared ethos enabling wide-ranging cooperation and transformative activity. (22)

The true power of any great work of queer theory is that its insights advance our understanding of the culture at large, not merely the agendas of those seeking respite from the categories of gender or sexual identity currently favoured. Kane’s work sits among that precious group of writers and thinkers who translate experience in such a way that our ideas and hopes for another world are energised to take shape sooner. I hope a lot of people read this book!

Category: Reading
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In unity

Posted on | October 7, 2009 | 2 Comments

**We urgently need billets for the State of the Industry conference. There has been an amazing response from young interstate scholars wanting to come, and we’ve funded airfares for everyone we could, but some people won’t attend if they can’t get accommodation. Please let me know if you can offer a bed or a couch.**

Taking account of the number of registrations already on hand, we’ve had to move the State of the Industry conference to a bigger venue. We’re basically at capacity before our main advertising campaign has started. If you haven’t checked the line up for a while, we now have four plenaries, Simon Marginson (Melb), Genevieve Kelly (NTEU NSW State Secretary), Margaret Shiel (ARC) and Genevieve Bell (Intel). On top of this, some of the biggest names in Australian cultural research will be speaking in a way that will be unfamiliar to many – no power point, no papers, just honest insights on things they’ve noticed working in academia. Open discussion is the main focus.

If you haven’t registered and plan to come, please help us out by going to the website and downloading the form (which goes to Alison Huber). This is really vital for planning. There is also a Facebook page if you are into that sort of thing. It has the draft of the promo poster we’ll be sending out soon. Let me know if you want one for your workplace.

The response to the event so far is really encouraging. I still regret coming up with the idea, in the sense that it has meant more work on top of everything else. Starting a new job this semester has been busy enough. But it has been fun (and unusual) to work collectively on a project that is bigger than the regular – read insular – academic concerns. It’s given me the chance to get in touch with a range of people working in various roles around the country, and to learn from different age groups how much has changed (or not) in academic employment.

To that end, I should probably report that when I met with Genevieve Kelly last month to outline the conference mandate, it was clear that the union has yet to really catch on to the problem of casualisation as a lived reality. In saying that, I certainly appreciate that the present bargaining campaigns are featuring limits on casualisation as a core objective, and that’s absolutely appropriate. My concern is that “casualisation” doesn’t begin to convey the difficulties that young scholars in particular are facing.

Casual teaching on contracts has happened for a long time. What seems genuinely new now is the amount of people doing this and other forms of work without much pretense of supervision. I’m talking about those who are employed across several campuses in a range of teaching and admin roles. These multiple jobs, and the forms of institutional negotiation involved in keeping them, don’t register on the radar of fellow staff, who are stressed out enough with their own workloads. They are given out as if they are a privilege to people who don’t even get a place to hang up their coat, let alone make a cup of tea or dock their laptop. Well, they can’t afford a laptop that works anyway.

Union membership presumes a steady relationship with a single employer. Genevieve mentioned her experience showing up to meetings on campuses where members were present but not on file. The idea that there could be several unis employing them simultaneously was foreign. But this happens regularly.

Then there’s the casual research assistant or postgrad who also doubles as general staff. Do they join the same union? Maybe not, if the NTEU can’t recognise their chameleon status. The industry as a whole fails to account for these workers who don’t fully occupy a coherent employee identity – as if this situation were only temporary, and not deeply structural.

There’s no one in particular to blame here: in fact, it’s the constant management and administrative flux internal to organisations that allows these tiny incidents of casualised labour to go missing. Who notices when casuals don’t come to work? Who cares if there are dozens of RAs working in the library rather than having offices? Surely postgrads should be able to pay for home broadband to mark 100 online assignments in a week? So what if a student has to miss class if their tutor falls ill?

I’m all for a Kafkaesque attitude to bureaucracy, but some of these things can be fixed. When a government promises an education revolution, it needs to provide a frontline. And in the shift to flexible work cultures, it is too convenient for organisations to pretend not to know, let alone take responsibility for what’s going on.

This is particularly in light of the number of PhD graduates whose challenge to pay the rent is the first priority that detracts from their ability to “plan” “careers”… starting in their mid-30s or older… by publishing articles, writing books or applying for grants that position them for ongoing employment. These “casual” workers cope with crap from both ends – they do the teaching that tenured staff don’t want to do, and in some places the co-ordinating too. As research support or “professional” staff they also get to implement the increasingly horrible corporate jargon and branding initiatives of management.

If they are trained in critical disciplines, that is, the humanities and many of the social sciences, this sort of experience can only feel like the worst kind of schizophrenia or hypocrisy.

Last week’s LH Martin Institute briefing concluded that without better efforts to create long term strategy, good people will simply leave the academic profession. Oh, but *so many* already have. If your experience had been routinely dismissed as passing by management cultures perpetuating a permanent state of exception, would you really wait around for Baby Boomers to retire, just to be invited to fix such ingrained indignities?

The sense of invisibility many young scholars know so well is precisely the structure of feeling unions are designed to address. What I’m hoping is that the State of the Industry conference can bring the NTEU’s work and cultural research into better dialogue, to reawaken a labourist project for a very different academic workplace. These are also some of the thoughts I’ll be taking with me to Canberra this month as an NTEU delegate to the HASS on the Hill meeting. I’d be happy to take more – and to hear others’ ideas both here and elsewhere…

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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Mid-semester break

Posted on | September 25, 2009 | 3 Comments

I have a little break from teaching now and will be a) catching up on a few ongoing projects b) having a birthday holiday!

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!

Category: Academia, Events, Reading, Travel

Dust day

Posted on | September 23, 2009 | No Comments

Dust day

Category: Randoms

Active campuses

Posted on | September 2, 2009 | 2 Comments

It’s great to see two big campaigns hitting campuses at the moment. Today’s rally for international students is a great initiative that deserves serious attention. We hear a lot about the value of the international student market to the national economy, which is why Julia Gillard is overseas right now at her most eloquent. But we rarely talk about the value of having international students in our cities in and of themselves. Their presence brings to life not only the biggest but also some of the smallest cities in our country. They are the ones that often keep things running – far from their own family and friends – while we are enjoying a weekend or sleeping soundly in our beds.

I remember years ago working as an enrolment officer at Sydney Uni in the summer breaks between semesters, trying to explain to international students why they don’t qualify for travel concessions. It’s time to admit this rule is actually bullshit. Students are students. The sacrifices foreign students make to come to our classes should be rewarded with all this and more. Often they are the only point of contrast for local kids to appreciate the extent of their own privilege in a global, English-speaking, knowledge economy. International students teach us as much as we teach them. If you can’t make the rally, at least sign this petition and pass it on: http://www.petitiononline.com/nswcccc/

Meanwhile, the NTEU is mobilising members for strike action next week. For the details behind Sydney’s deliberations, there’s a YouTube video here that explains what’s at stake.

The workloads campaign is nationwide, however, and they really nail it with this one:

Genevieve Kelly, the NSW Rep shown in the video, will also be a plenary speaker on Day One of the State of the Industry conference. Register your attendance now! And get involved in this refreshing new wave of campus activism. It’s sure been a while coming.

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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Remembering Eve

Posted on | August 28, 2009 | No Comments

In honour of our Sedgwick event today, here’s a link to an old essay I wrote a few years ago when I was asked to review Touching Feeling. It’s called “How to Avoid Being Paranoid” and it’s this general directive and its ongoing relevance for those working in the corporate academy that will form the basis of my introduction to the seminar.

Here are the abstracts for rest of the papers that are on this afternoon. Late attendees very welcome.

Remembering Eve Sedgwick: The beginnings, present and future of queer theory

Melissa Hardie
‘Extinction of the Closet: Inside Lindsay Lohan’

For Eve Sedgwick, the work of Epistemology of the Closet was “inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely non-algorithmic.” This paper suggests that the conditioning influence of the closet has fundamentally shifted, and frames that shift as a form of extinction. I will suggest that closet epistemologies, though still resonant, ramify less and their citation exposes purposeful redundancy. I canvas the ways in which technological and cultural shifts effected that change over the two decades that followed publication of Sedgwick’s book, focusing on the case of Lindsay Lohan. Is what we now know about and through the closet that the closet is obsolete?

Melissa Hardie teaches in the English Department, University of Sydney, and is completing a book called Shame Became Famous: Evolution of the Closet 1989-2009.

Anna Gibbs
‘At the Time of Writing’

My paper will focus on the possibilities for writing (and the distinction between critical and creative writing) that open up in the face of Sedgwick’s exposure of exposure itself as a method – that is, of the paranoid approach to thought which attempts to anticipate surprise and forestall its own imagined future. The paper explores what happens to the relationship between writing and politics if we break the nexus between political engagement and the negative affects that drive paranoid critique, and in the process assesses what Sedgwick makes possible by an affect theory drawn from Tomkins rather than Deleuze.

Anna Gibbs is Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. She has published numerous papers on affect theory, most recently in Cultural Studies Review and Emotion Space and Society.

Elizabeth Stephens
‘The Masturbating Girl: Public Confession and/as Sexual Practice’

This paper aims to interrogate the critical reception of Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love as a confessional text, a revealing and intimate account of Sedgwick’s own sexuality and sexual practice. Drawing on the argument that subtends Epistemology of the Closet – that the idea of sexuality as a private aspect of subjectivity is a product of the new public spaces emergent in the nineteenth-century – this paper will read A Dialogue on Love as a critical interrogation of the idea that the practices of confession and sex are “private”: “I know I want to talk about sex,” Sedgwick acknowledges near the beginning of this text, “it’s what I do for a living and I’m good at that. But my own sexuality – do I even have one?” Like Derrida’s earlier Circumfession, I argue, A Dialogue on Love invokes readerly assumptions about privacy and disclosure primarily in order to examine and to problematise them.

Elizabeth Stephens is a Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland. She is author of Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1750 to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming).

Elizabeth McMahon
‘The Proximate Pleasure of Eve Sedgwick’

In her introduction to Novel Gazing Sedgwick writes that “pleasure, grief, excitement, boredom, satisfaction are the substance of politics rather than their antithesis”. Further, she advises that we attend “intimately to literary texts” because their “transformative energies” are “the stuff of ordinary being” (1). This paper speculates on the ways Sedgwick remapped the relationship between affect, intimacy and politics as a queer critical practice. The paper will consider the the dynamism of this relationship in terms of the new spatialities of reading it enables, focusing on the pleasures of juxtaposition and proximity that her writing enacts.

Elizabeth McMahon teaches in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW, where she previously co-convened the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She edited, with Brigitta Olubas, Women Making Time: Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis (Perth, UWA Press, 2006) and is co-editor of Australia’s oldest literary journal Southerly. In 2009 she received an ARC Discovery grant for her project titled Our Island Home: The Shifting Map of Australian Literature, an examination of Australia’s colonial geographical imaginary.

Category: Events, Gender
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RIP

Posted on | August 24, 2009 | 4 Comments

After the Magic Dirt show at the Doghouse in Hobart some time in ‘95 or ‘96 my friends and I stole tour posters from the power poles all the way home. Dean played Fairy Park and I asked Miles to teach me bass guitar. Puppyfat must have covered every track of Life Was Better that year, with Jenna stepping in to sing on He-Man and Ice. Magic Dirt made sense when a lot of things didn’t. RIP Dean. Thanks for showing that real men can stand alongside ladies in rock.

Category: Saturn Returns

Attunements

Posted on | August 23, 2009 | 6 Comments

A friend hurts her back in the middle of a work event she’s been planning for months. Rather than miss the Saturday workshop she Skypes in from bed.

Someone can’t RSVP for an event later in the year because she might need to have an operation. Someone who was going to come can’t anymore: the chemo is taking longer than expected.

A colleague gets her hair done before a seminar and wears a suit to feel more professional. She is the second person in a few weeks to tell me that most of her hair is already grey.

Now she has tenure all she wants to do is catch up on all the TV she’s missed.

A lover is attached to a football team and to cigarettes. Both break his heart.

A fellow researcher returns from fieldwork with a new interest in affect theory. She can’t get the memories from the sex change clinic out of her head and wants to know how to write about it ethically.

Old friends meet for lunch and before anything happens a pregnancy is announced. She wonders whether she should have known sooner if she really was a friend.

A visiting academic gives a lecture that talks about a homeless step-son. People want to know what is actual and what is virtual.

A former co-worker loves her job but misses the place she used to work. She says she can still get everything done each week if she just stays awake one night out of seven. We joke about the ordinariness of jet-lag.

Someone inspiring leaves for an indefinite amount of time. People improvise strategies of mourning based on their preferred visions of the past or the future – and what may or may not happen if she returns.

The contract worker we all feel protective about has given up coffee to stop writing emails so quickly. Another contract worker we all find endearing drinks coffee to stay writing into the night.

A neighbour’s partner banishes him from the house on Saturday to get an essay done. He can’t find anyone who will drink the afternoon away.

A collaborator isn’t showing enough signs of commitment, but she doesn’t want to raise the issue in case it means the project might die. It is one of the few things still linking them.

My best friends want to be able do things that aren’t as boring and disciplined, but they have mortgages, travel plans, renovations, responsibilities.

The number of people writing emails on Sundays.

The fetishisation of cooking on Twitter (as if food can forgive everything).

I will wake up on my birthday in Melbourne on my own.

My niece might not be coming to my wedding.

Category: Saturn Returns

Privacy and work

Posted on | August 17, 2009 | 12 Comments

Today’s class was about intimacy and privacy, and it drew on the work of Michael Warner and Michel Foucault to talk about publics, discourse, power and confession. We read Emily Nussbaum’s article, “Kids, the Internet and the end of Privacy” which argues that the generation gap between those who up with the internet and those who didn’t is the greatest generation gap since rock n roll. Kinda great timing to be talking about this the week of the Woodstock anniversary.

I was asking the students what they understood by the term privacy and what they do to protect it… we looked at ads for internet protection software and their use of peodophile stereotypes… we read a range of websites that operate through the confessional mode, from Post Secret to Passive-Aggressive Notes. I even sang a version of a song from my childhood that was part of a series of “stranger danger” campaigns (My Body, which Google tells me was written by Peter Alsop): “My body’s nobody’s body but mine; You run your own body, let me run mine”.

But for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.

What struck me about this was that even though students were incredibly articulate about protecting their reputation from the perceptions of others in their peer group, they seemed less capable of arguing how to respond to these other kinds of privacy invasion coming from the workplace. This brings together a range of concerns I’ve been writing about in recent years, and I’d be keen to hear from those who know more about it to reassure me that this is definitely illegal. And, if you have any tips as to which companies engage in this profiling practice please get in touch, publicly or privately :-)

Category: Research, Web(log) Stuff, Work
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