There are two ways of being an academic. One is to burrow ever deeper into the little field one cultivates, to become a master of it, all the while propping up the fenceposts around that field to ensure that one’s terrain is left undisturbed by poachers, wild boars or raccoons, dissonant ideas, and so on. […]
Archive for the ‘Academe’ Category
in praise of unfaithful thinking
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged Deleuze, great scenes, intellectual promiscuity on March 28, 2010 | 4 Comments »
readings
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, tagged affect, geophilosophy, theory on February 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »
I’m reading, and being very impressed by, John Protevi’s recent book Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic. The book brings together a lot of recent work on affect with the best of the cognitive sciences (embodied/embedded/distributive/enactive cognition), complexity and nonlinear dynamical systems theories, and a strong grounding in philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant […]
knowledge wants to be free (doesn’t it?)
Posted in Academe, tagged AAAAARG, open access, open-source, publishing on February 8, 2010 | 9 Comments »
Publishers are starting to catch up to AAAARG.org, the rapidly growing file-sharing megalibrary for cultural theory and philosophy books, which currently makes available PDF files of hundreds of books that I would love to have but couldn’t realistically afford to buy. [. . .]
As with media, music, and everything else these days — witness the recent agreement between Google and publishers, libraries, and authors’ guilds, which has advanced things somehow, but no one seems to agree exactly how — we are (pace Yeats) struggling toward Bethlehem to be born… into a new model of digitally accessed texts with flexible copyrights, scalable pricing, incentive, and availability structures, and other things we couldn’t have dreamed of just a few years ago. Part of the pressure for a new model is coming from publishers (and record producers, et al.) who don’t want to see their profits continue falling — or their losses escalating. But part of it comes from those who are setting the data free by opening up one space after another where it can be freely exchanged. This is good, because it shows us that the baseline assumptions about access and availability have changed and that we need to address the new assumptions — about information’s “wanting to be” free — directly. And if a few dinosaurs like the music industry giants end up collapsing of their own weight in the process, then so it goes. What’s important here is the flow of knowledge and creativity and the possibility of making a living at it, but not necessarily every single way to profit from others’ knowledge and creativity. The latter constitutes a second layer built atop the first, a layer that in some respects might be expendable at the end of the day.
a year of immanence
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff, tagged Academe on December 23, 2009 | 4 Comments »
The first anniversary of the launch of this blog passed quietly a couple of weeks ago. Since it’s coming around to the end of December and I’m about to take a holiday for a couple of weeks, I thought it appropriate to provide some reflections on its first year, accompanied by some statistics about its growth and a thought or two about its future. […]
One of the risks of electronic communication is that it can mislead you into thinking that you’re having an impact — because a smattering of people agree with you — when the only thing that’s happened is that you’ve found that smattering of people, spread around the world, who agree with you. But so has everyone else, including those who would disagree with you violently — and their opinions are probably multiplying at the same speed as yours. […]
Bourdieu wins academic Olympics
Posted in Academe, tagged Academe on December 20, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The interactive citation analysis tool Tenurometer has taken the measure of academics around the world and, according to their calculations, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu comes out on top, edging out Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, who pick up the silver and the bronze. Well, not quite… That’s what appears in the “g-index” ratings, which give […]
Stuart Kauffman coming to Vermont
Posted in Academe, tagged complexity, Kauffman on November 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
I’m happy to share the news (a little belatedly) that complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman will be leaving his position as director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics to take a position here with the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center, which, according to Grad College dean Dom Grasso, aims to become […]
Heidegger smash-up as live web philosophy
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Philosophy, tagged Continental philosophy, Heidegger on October 25, 2009 | 3 Comments »
There’s something about the flare-up over Carlin Romano’s Chronicle of Higher Ed article “Heil Heidegger!” that manages to crystallize both the virtues and the potential utter barrenness of the web as a site for direct philosophical action (i.e., constructive debate that contributes, however marginally, to philosophy). Romano’s article takes advantage of the forthcoming publication of […]
blog time
Posted in Academe, Blog stuff on September 25, 2009 | 7 Comments »
In response to a few people’s queries about how I find the time to blog…
case for online publishing
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged digital humanities on June 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Mount Holyoke College political science professor Douglas Amy makes a good case for publishing online in this piece in today’s Inside Higher Ed. Amy is the author of three previous books, The Politics of Environmental Mediation (Columbia University Press, 1987), Behind the Ballot Box (Greenwood, 2000), and Real Choices/New Voices (Columbia U. Press, 2002). His […]
interdisciplinarity & academic restructuring
Posted in Academe, tagged academic politics, interdisciplinarity on May 15, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Philosopher of religion and Derridean “atheologian” Mark Taylor’s recent NY Times op-ed End the University as We Know It has generated a lot of discussion in academic circles and blogs. Reading the article reminded me of a situation my institution, the University of Vermont, went through recently, after being approached by a foundation interested in […]
Lessig on the ecology of culture
Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, tagged Creative Commons, cultural environmentalism, ecology of culture, ecomedia, Lessig, media ecology on April 16, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Thanks to Mediacology for sharing this presentation on “Green Culture” by Lawrence Lessig from the recent Green Festival in Seattle. Lessig is the guru of the creative commons movement, and his talk, on what he calls “cultural environmentalism,” is really on media ecology, i.e. the “ecology” of cultural production and creativity, and especially on the […]
Green cultural studies
Posted in Academe, Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, tagged cultural studies, ecology, ecomedia on February 26, 2009 | 2 Comments »
“Cultural studies” refers to the study of cultural objects, meanings, and processes, and their production and use in contemporary society. It is an interdisciplinary field with a twin commitment to intellectual rigor and social relevance. While the “rigor” piece sometimes means “objectivity,” often it involves a questioning of the assumption that objectivity and subjectivity can […]
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