Last month, I got to experience — briefly, but enjoyably — my first WorldCon in Glasgow. This opportunity came my way courtesy of a kick-ass panel organized by Rachel van der Merwe, where she, Barbara Postema, and Greg Fuller provided the kick-ass bits, and I provided the short riff on Mrs., Davis I’ve shared below. […]
Another semester, another syllabus…
. . . or two. Fresh editions of “Media, Race, and Identity” and “New Telecommunication Media” (no, I haven’t done anything to get that outmoded title officially changed since last semester). As ever, there are some changes from previous iterations, though most of those are minor. My biggest regret is that I couldn’t quite find […]
Advice for graduate students
I’m a digital pack rat. The odds are good that, if I wrote something of even minimal significance on a computer since the first one I owned back in 1988 (a dual-floppy disk system running MS-DOS with an amber-screen monitor), I still have a copy tucked away in some folder on my hard drive. And […]
Asking better questions
Recently, I found myself responding to one of those semi-regular “campus climate” surveys that universities (sometimes) like to do in order to take the proverbial temperature of the community with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s a task that I routinely approach with a jumbled sense of necessity and cynicism. The necessity, of course, […]
Inside/outside
In 2008, some graduate students at the University of Minnesota organized a small conference on campus called, “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value.” Part of that conference was a roundtable on “The University and the Public Intellectual,” and somehow I got invited to be a part of the group on the podium for that session. […]
Open access
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 […]
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 […]