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The state of academic publishing (RIP, Aaron Swartz)

January 16, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

A few days after Aaron Swartz’s suicide — in part triggered by the prospect of a 35-year prison sentence for making a big stash of scholarly journal articles available to the public for free (!) — it is appropriate to think about what is wrong with the state of academic publishing today.

Here’s a for instance: I got an email today about a new issue of the journal Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture. It’s a special issue on “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.” It looks great: 16 articles, totaling 170 pages, of theoretical writing, analysis, and conversations between artists, scholars, and activists from around the world. I’d love to read it and to recommend it to my students, who are studying the intersections between art, ecology, politics, and activism.

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Posted in Academe | Tagged , , | 3 Comments »

Immanence goes to Scoop.it

January 7, 2013 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The Immanence Shadow Blog — that space where I scoop up little things of interest found on the internet — has been reinvented and reloaded as scoop.it/t/immanence. You can subscribe to it here.

The latest piece I’ve added is the following bit of prescient (or perhaps eternally relevant) American humor:

H/t to Jon Cogburn at APPS. And thanks to Antonio for the scoop on Scoop.it.

Posted in Blog stuff, Media ecology | 1 Comment »

WLU Press catalog out

December 30, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The Wilfrid Laurier University Press page for Ecologies of the Moving Image is up, here. Their Spring catalogue, which can be downloaded here, includes two new books on Jean-Luc Godard (adding to an impressive back catalog of film titles), as well as Gary Genosko’s When Technocultures Collide, Kamboureli and Verduyn’s Critical Collaborations: Indigenity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, and other good titles.

The Environmental Humanities series continues to grow, with books on Sustaining the West and Avatar and Nature Spirituality. (I had to excuse myself from the latter, since my Avatar material was already appearing in two other books, though I had co-written the introduction to the journal issue from which this volume grew. The book is an impressive volume, which Bron Taylor poured a lot of hard work into.)

You can already pre-order EMI from Amazon, but Amazon.ca has it priced more reasonably. It won’t be out till May, and this web site will tell you about good deals as they arise. (It’s 435 pages, which accounts for the high price.)

I’ll be adding video clips to go with the book, either here or on a separate web page for the book.

Posted in Media ecology | Tagged | 3 Comments »

The human cost of neoliberalism

December 17, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

A new study in The Lancet has determined that mass privatization in former Communist Eastern Europe — what was once called “shock therapy,” but is more usefully considered a form of “shock neoliberalization” — resulted in an excess of about a million deaths in that part of the world.

A few quotes from the Oxford University summary:

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Posted in Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

On the subject(s) of experience

December 14, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This continues the consideration of subjectivity begun in the last post (on Zizek and Buddhism). It also continues the series on process-relational ecosophy-G, or pre-G.

 

 

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

Zizek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?

December 11, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

This started out as a response to Slavoj Zizek’s recent talk here at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.

 

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Posted in Philosophy, Process-relational thought, Spirit matter | Tagged , , | 15 Comments »

Thinking out loud…

November 9, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

As I prepare to teach a course in the spring called “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics,” I’m weighing out the benefits and risks of opening the course to an online audience.

This would involve sharing the syllabus online (though not the readings themselves, which would have to be purchased or “found” elsewhere) and moving some of our discussions to a public blog, as opposed to using the password-protected, registered-students-only Blackboard software (which many courses at this university now use).

It’s not an online course, and much of the class would still take place in a formal classroom setting. But my hope is that the public dimension could enrich class discussions both by allowing others (around the world) to participate to some extent, and by making our public conversation more accountable and potentially more meaningful. Seems to me that a commitment to open-access education calls for this sort of thing.

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Posted in Academe | Tagged | 3 Comments »

Latour on Gaia & Natural Religion

October 30, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Bruno Latour’s upcoming Gifford Lectures sound remarkable. See ANTHEM for the details.

There could be no better theme for a lecture series on natural religion than that of Gaia, this puzzling figure that has emerged recently in public discourse from Earth science as well as from many activist and spiritual movements. The problem is that the expression of “natural religion” is somewhat of a pleonasm, since Western definitions of nature borrow so much from theology. The set of lectures attempts to decipher the face of Gaia in order to redistribute the notions that have been packed too tightly into the composite notion of ‘’natural religion’’.

[. . .]

A search for collective rituals should begin with works of art and experiments able to explore in sufficient detail the scientific and political composition of the common world.

more

Perhaps the promise of Latour’s work — aside from its sociological and science-studies import — is reaching a new culmination as the religious and ecological threads he’s been toying with for so long come to their mutual fruition.

 

Thanks to Adam for the head’s-up.

 

Posted in Eco-culture, Spirit matter | Tagged , | 5 Comments »

2 or 3 things about the cinema book

October 22, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

Ecologies of the Moving Image is a book of ecophilosophy that happens to be about cinema, and about the 12-decade history of cinema at that.

What makes it ecophilosophy? It is philosophy that is deeply informed both by an understanding of ecological science and an interdisciplinary appreciation for today’s ecological crisis.

Why cinema?

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Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Visual culture | Tagged , | 7 Comments »

Take-home message

October 13, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

… from Bill McKibben and 350.org’s new roadshow, “Do The Math,” previewed tonight here at the University of Vermont:

If climate scientists (and climate change modelers) are correct that the burning of more than a small fraction of the world’s available fossil fuel reserves will trigger changes that will induce paroxysms of preventable suffering, then prudence, honor, and justice dictate that we should act to prevent that from happening.

 

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Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture | Tagged , | 1 Comment »

Tenure/promotion tip: Counting citations & impact factors

October 8, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

When applying for a promotion — which generally means applying for Associate Professor status “with tenure,” or applying for Full Professor (the top of the heap) — an academic must use any tactics available to make a case for the value of his or her scholarly work.

In the good old days, at most institutions, this might not have taken much. In the humanities, a fairly common bar for getting tenure was having published a scholarly book; for full professor, a second one. But academic book publication is in transition and no longer as simple as it used to be. And peer-reviewed journal articles, still the standard in the “hard” sciences, are not going away; publish-or-perish remains the rule. Continue Reading »

Posted in Academe | Tagged | 1 Comment »

CFP: Thinking & Acting Ecologically

September 18, 2012 by Adrian J Ivakhiv

The International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) presents the Tenth Annual Meeting on Environmental Philosophy, to be held 12-14th of June 2013 at The University of East Anglia, UK.

“Thinking and Acting Ecologically”

The ISEE invites submissions on any topic in environmental philosophy / ecophilosophy broadly conceived. The focus of the tenth annual meeting will be on developing ideas and concepts that are not only thematically concerned with the environment but are themselves contributions to ecological action.

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Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy | Tagged | 3 Comments »

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