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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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 …

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(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 …

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Suspicious Minds

1997 was the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. It was also the year after Elvis After Elvis was published. And so I found myself talking about Elvis a lot that year. In August, I gave one version of the talk below in Memphis, at the third (and also, I …

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Achieving Critical Mass

Another dip into the archive of old conference papers. This time, reaching back to the National Communication Association conference in Seattle in November 2000. There are some early versions of arguments here that eventually found there way into Why Cultural Studies? There’s a brief reference to a book project with …

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