In 2013, Kembrew McLeod asked me to pinch-hit for him on a roundtable panel — “Open Access Publishing and the Future of Scholarship: A Conversation Between Stakeholders” — at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. On the downside, this was because Kembrew wasn’t able to attend the conference, and so I didn’t get […]
. . . of Surveillance of the University of Surveillance of the . . .
Dipping back into the archive once more, this time to the “Media in Transition 8” conference held at MIT in 2013. I began this talk with a “joke” intro that (shamelessly) I have used more than once. Partly, because it almost always gets a good laugh. But mostly because, in this case, it was definitely […]
Video(s) of the week
Anyone who’s used the internet in the past decade or so knows Christopher Walken can dance rings around pretty much anything, if only because they’ve seen this gem of a video: Less virally shared, though, is this stunning scene from 1981’s Pennies From Heaven, where Walken’s character, with some help from Cole Porter, tries to […]
Back in the saddle
The “spring” semester starts up for us again on Tuesday, though spring itself is still a long way away. And, if recent years are any indication, the weather won’t feel like proper spring until somewhere close to finals week. Maybe not even then. Still. It’s a new semester. There are updated syllabi (“Freedom of Speech” […]
Whose education is it?
As has often been the case when I’ve dived into my digital archives for purposes of this blog, I’d forgotten almost everything about the paper below (presented at the 2012 “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference in Paris). If you’d asked me 24 hours ago, I suspect the only thing I would have remembered about it […]
Full circle
Let’s end 2022 more or less where it began, shall we? Back then, I offered a tease of a podcast in the making (co-created with Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer). At the time, that podcast was more virtual than real. A few hours of unedited audio. A website with a mostly unpopulated WordPress template. And some loose ideas […]
Sweet dreams
One of my favorite ever conference “presentations” was something that began as a joke. Greg Seigworth (and old friend from grad school) was organizing a conference on affect, and had included a specific request in the call for papers to “Wreck The Format” (WTF) with non-traditional ways of engaging with the conference and its theme. […]
Video of the week
…or, perhaps, the year. Even if it’s evidently been online for more than a decade. Somehow, though, this did not cross my path until this past week. A Japanese orchestra playing German music with a boogie woogie beat on Russian instruments (embedded in Russian nesting dolls, no less)? I have sooooo many questions. But also: […]
Oakland 2006
One of the recurring quirks of (and gripes about) academic conferences has to do with scheduling. To be sure, conference organizers have it rough in this regard, since they’re pretty much guaranteed to make someone unhappy with whatever they do. No one, after all, wants to be on the first morning panel on the final […]
(Old) New Words
Returning to my semi-regular march through the archives of old conference papers, here’s an untitled presentation from the 2005 National Communication Association conference in Boston, where I was on a panel dedicated to honoring the 2004 recipient of the Woolbert Award (which, if I recall correctly, is given to the author of an essay published […]