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Posts Tagged ‘Academe’

As a humanistic scholar within an interdisciplinary school, I’m often put in a position to distinguish how the humanities differ from the social and natural sciences. There is a long tradition of distinguishing between these “two cultures,” with the most frequent point of focus, for humanists, being that they concern themselves with human meaning and […]

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Janet Walker, Alenda Chang, and I talk about the open-access model we’ve chosen for Media+Environment journal, here on the University of California Press blog. “OA is a bit like ‘the cloud.’ It may seem ethereal and free, but in reality it’s tangible and the subsidies have got to come from somewhere! We’re trying to figure […]

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Thinking out loud…

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 […]

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What makes an -ologist, -osopher, -ographer? What, for instance, makes one an anthropologist? A geographer? A philosopher? A scientist? Scene 1: As chair of a search committee looking to hire a political ecologist, a tenure-track position to be shared between a Geography department and an Environmental Studies program, I’ve been involved in intensive discussion of […]

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I owe regular readers an explanation for the lengthy hiatus on this blog. As I had predicted would happen back in the summer, this semester turned into an extremely busy one for me. Directing the Environmental Studies program at the University of Vermont is a large part of that busyness: it’s a large, interdisciplinary and […]

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The state of higher ed

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a good article by Tom Lutz on the state of declining education in this country. While the University of California system is being hit particularly hard, the trends are the same at public institutions everywhere, including here at the University of Vermont (class sizes increasing, faculty positions not being […]

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Ian Bogost throws out a challenge to us (bloggers) all: How should blogs evolve? What kinds of media do we want for our thinking, writing, debating, communicating? In other words, rather than celebrating what blogs allow us to do, or lament the knee-jerk negativity they still elicit in some (notably, academic) circles, and rather than […]

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Levi has an interesting post on how the internet is changing the way philosophy gets done. [. . . ]

Still, it’s nice to dream of a world in which philosophy and the liberal arts aren’t seen as unprofitable appendages left over from an era of bloated welfare states (a neoliberal narrative that is deeply problematic), but where they are vital nodes within a culture of social and ecological transformation — not because philosophy feeds social change in some direct, instrumental way, but because of a shared recognition between philosophers and activists of how and why it is that we have come to live in a world of oil spills and economic crises, and how and why it could be all different.

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a year of immanence

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. […]

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Bourdieu wins academic Olympics

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 […]

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