The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

That is, things you really don’t want to find written on your draft chapter when you get it back from your supervisor. A potentially continuing series.

Number one: “cliché-a-rama”.

Ouch!

Public transport ticket inspectors with police powers. What could possibly go wrong? (more)

Clay Shirkey’s talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus from the 2008 Web 2.0 conference is being linked to from basically everywhere right now — so I’d be remiss in not sharing it too.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

I think he overstates his case: in drawing an equivalence between consuming television and the excesses of gin consumption at the start of the industrial age, he’s glossing over the ways that media consumption itself has always had creative and meaningful outcomes — but it’s a provocative piece all the same.

Everyone, but everyone, in and around universities needs to sit up and take notice of the debate around Marc Bousquet’s work on academia and employment. Listservs have been going crazy about it, following a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (‘How the University Works’: Required Reading for Higher Education – try here or here (last link for subscribers only).)

What I find profoundly challenging, and to be honest, shocking, about Bousquet’s work is that he presents a spirited attack on what, for want of a better term, we can call the ‘market discourse’ around jobs for PhDs. He is particularly critical of the (fairly ubiquitous) suggestion that the problems of the academic job market can be solved by restricting or reducing the ‘supply’ of incoming graduate/PhD students.

Sample paragraph: “Ultimately, the notion that the employment system can be controlled by the administration of graduate programs (that is, by reducing PhD ‘production’) has to be seen as profoundly ideological. Even where there is a vigorous effort to diagnose the nature of the labour system, the ideology of the market returns to frame the solution, blocking the transformative potential of analysis that otherwise demonstrates the necessity of nonmarket responses.” (p. 209)

Bousquet’s point is that the ‘market’ for assistant professors / teaching staff shows no sign of vanishing. Students need to be taught; papers and exams need to be marked. There is a pressing and real demand for teaching staff in institutions. His solution is that the wages of all adjuncts and assistant teaching staff should be raised to the level of faculty. Unions may yet have a role to play.

Strong stuff.

Meanwhile, Leslie Madsen Brooks offers a round-up of recent blogging on the concept and reality of academic tenure.

Reference:

‘The Rhetoric of “Job Market” and the Reality of the Academic Labor System’
Author(s): Marc Bousquet
Source: College English, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Nov., 2003), pp. 207-228
Publisher: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3594266

A little spam attack (since fixed, I hope) brought the blog back to mind, and I realised that no one has posted for over a month (inexcusable!) In our defence, we’ve all been really busy…

I’m back studying full-time for three months, courtesy of a completion scholarship, and I hope to state posting parts of the thesis here, looking for comments and advice (which was part of the purpose for the blog in the first place), so watch this space. In the meantime, it seems I’ve found Lisa’s room of my own: I’ve got the run of the house, iTunes is on overload, and I can spread across the table (even if I do have to move everything back before I can start getting dinner on!)

But anyway, back to the problematics of a touristic construction of a temporary and contingent community…

Reports on the summer conference season—by those who were there!

As is traditional for the first MACS of the year, we will hear about some people’s experiences at a variety of conferences over summer. The discussion, as always, will continue at the UQ Staff and Graduates Club after 5:00pm. All welcome.

Speakers
Sal Humphreys: AoIR (Assoc of Internet Researchers) Vancouver; New York Law School conference; CSAA (Adelaide)
Jinna Tay: Asian Media Festival 2007 (Singapore)
Zala Volčič: New Zealand Discourse Conference (Auckland)
John Gunders: Sustaining Cultural Research (Adelaide)

Friday, March 14, 2008
3:30pm – 5:00pm
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, Seminar Room
Level 4 Forgan Smith Tower,
The University of Queensland

Just lately I’ve been reading Mel Gregg’s Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices. She recounts Richard Hoggart’s description of the working class living room and his points about the obstacles to academic activity faced by the working classes when they are unable even to find a private space to read quietly. Mel associates this with the transitional phase after the Second World War when scholarships and more universal education opened the universities to the working classes for the first time and many students were the first in their family to have the opportunity.

This part of the book came back to me as I was reading an article this evening in preparation for a tutorial tomorrow . . .

I have nothing substantive to say at this point, but thought I should keep the old thing ticking over.

I was going to post something about the lack of women at Kevin’s 2020 love-in, but the entire blogosphere beat me to it. For what it’s worth, “Women on Boards”, a “national program to improve the gender balance on Australian company boards” has distributed a press-release with some interesting points. My favourite was a quotation from Albert Einstein insisting that “you can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it.” See the presser here.

On another note, Paul Keating, with nothing left to prove and rapidly approaching the elder-statesman phase of life (and with his own musical to boot!), apparently just doesn’t care what he says anymore. Of fellow Oz opinion writer, Janet Albrechtsen, he says: “Albrechtsen is a no-talent proselytiser for causes overtaken by history and events”. Link here.

It’s fun when you find yourself back in the cool kids team.

Further evidence that when you change the government, you change the country.

According to Crikey yesterday (behind the pay-wall, unfortunately), Immigration Minister Chris Evans in a Senate Estimates Committee confessed that he was uncomfortable with the amount of power that he could exercise over individual immigration cases:

“I have formed the view that I have too much power … in terms of the power given to the minister to make decisions about individual cases,” Evans said. “I’m uncomfortable with that, not just because of concern about playing God, but also because of the lack of transparency and accountability for those decisions.”

Evans has apparently ordered a review of his own position. Crikey mentioned the cases of Robert Jovicic, and of course, Dr Mohamed Haneef, two examples of ministerial intervention into specific cases.

Of course, it remains to be seen what Evans’ review of the role of the Minister will bring, and whether, when it comes to crunch-time, he will be able to bring himself to limit his own powers.

But it is a refreshing change from the days of centralisation and big government.

A list of shame: the MPs who avoided Parliament yesterday when the Prime Minister formally apologised to the Stolen Generation. May their names ever be blighted.

Lib MP denies Stolen Generations exist | The Australian

(Via Larvatus Prodeo.)