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. […]
Unfixing the race
Twenty years or so ago, I tried to write a book about multiracial identity and media called Mixed Messages. For a variety of reasons, the book never happened. But one piece of the project did wind up in print as a journal article on Eminem . . . and there was a lecture that went […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Found in Translation
Last week, I said I’d share the other thing I did at the shoulda-been-2020-but-there-was-a-pandemic-so-it-was-2022-instead “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference. And so here it is. The “Giulia” who gets mentioned is my co-panelist, Giulia Pelillo-Hestermeyer, who only lacks a full name in my talk because she had spoken immediately before me, and the live audience presumably […]