Telling You What You Don’t Want to Hear

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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, …

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. . . 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 …

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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 …

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