Category Archives: academia

And I had my paper approved for the CSAA conference (read about it here). I didn’t unfortunately, score the bursary/grant thingy. Which means that it’ll be next to impossible for me to get to the conference to give the paper. Got no money for airfares, no money for conference registration, no money, no money, o.
The scholarship ends on the 19th, which is ok, as the thesis is totally done (did I mention that? I’d like to say there’s been some quiet triumph in our house ever since, but The Squeeze says it’s more the fact that there’s been a significant increase in shouting, carousing and declarative one-stanze (one-line) songs about how great the Ham is). But it does mean that I now, officially, have no income.
Oh, no, wait. I’m tutoring like total tutoring stooge instead. I am taking sixty million classes in a media studies subject (best not to name it, as the little darlings are a wee bit internet savvy, and google will get me in trouble… note to self: do not mention thesis topic ever again in class), so I almost have enough money to cover my PT tickets.
There are some good bits of this, and some crap.
Good:
I love teaching. I think it’s a power thing. I goddamn LOVE being in front of an audience, and I LOVE to talk, so it’s all good. But I have been practicing Shutting Up this semester, which is hard, but rewarding: we have dialogues rather than monologues.
I love teaching media stuff: who doesn’t have something to say about telly or books or magazines or the internet?
I learn a lot. Ask me about CD next time we meet. Your brain will be blown.
It gets me out of the house.
Bad
It costs a lot to get there.
I can’t ride my bike and I miss it.
I’m overworked and exploited.
I’m really really tired.
Anyway, I’d like to go to the conference, but can’t afford it. Looks like academia is for rich kids, huh?

Is this headline more than a comment on Emma Dawson feeling excluded, or the Left’s irrelevence to public discourse?
In recent days there’s been an ongoing discussion about this article in the Australian by Emma Dawson. My responses to both the original article and the responding discussion on the CSAA list have been mixed. In that article, Dawson discusses her personal response to a notice for the Everyday Multiculturalism conference to be held at Macquarie Uni in Sydney in September.
First, my response to Dawson’s article was a little different to some of the comments on the CSAA list. While I did feel a little uncomfortable with the way Dawson’s critique of academic terminology, in the context of the Australian served as a critique of ‘the left’, I’m not sure this was how she intended her words be read. My first instinct was ‘oh, she’s not comfortable with acka talk.’ That she positioned herself as a Phd candidate encouraged me to sympathise with her, reading her feelings of exclusion as a result, perhaps of her inexperience with academia.
Listening to this ABC podcast on media ownership legislation in Canada today, my memory was jogged in regards to where I’d heard of Dawson before. I remembered this story on the ABC’s Media Report on the introduction of advertising on public broadcasters, featuring Dawson as a special guest discussing SBS in light of her Phd reseach and experience with the station. I remember thinking that Dawson was one of the ‘good guys’.
I decided to follow up some of my feelings about her article and CSAA discussion by reading up on Dawson a little further. I discovered that she’s written for the New Matilda, a lefty online magazine, and that she’s doing work on SBS, and had worked at SBS as a journalist.
With this in mind, I’m leaning towards the suspicion that Dawson’s article on lefty academic talk was perhaps read in context, by many on the CSAA list (and beyond), taken as one point in a series of critiques of lefty ideology and discourse, rather than as a distinct piece discussing the intimidating and off-putting nature of academic talk. This is not an unlikely response – the Australian opinion pages are rife with lefty/academic bashing these days.
This fascinates me as an example of the ways in which we take context – the newspaper in which an article is positioned, the recent articles on a similar topic, using similar terms and ‘buzz words’ (or making similar selections from a shared interpretive repertoire, to reference Potter and Wetherall), even the placement of an article on a page (or screen), in relation to other pieces – in our readings of meaning and ideological ‘intention’. In fact, this stuff fascinated me so much I wrote my MA on similar stuff.
Setting aside those issues of form and text and context which appeal to my critical discourse analysis side, perhaps it’s worth engaging with the issues Dawson actually raises in her piece – her opinion piece?
Perhaps Dawson was encouraging lefty academics to engage more thoroughly with everyday discourse by using everyday discourse?
As some posters to the CSAA list noted, that’s not such a bad idea. And yet, on the other hand, as others responded (and I myself feel), sometimes we need to use big words. Sometimes we need to get together and use big words. And academic conferences seem the most appropriate place for this sort of talk. After all, we wouldn’t expect a doctor to abandon the technical terms of their profession to discuss medical matters with their peers at a conference, would we?
Dawson, however, seems justified in expecting a conference on ‘everyday multiculturalisms’ to use everyday language. It’s unfortunate that the ‘everyday language’ of academia can be so impenetrable. Speaking as a (just about to submit) Phd candidate with quite a few years as a postgraduate researcher under my belt, I do actually think that it is a little naïve for a postgrad to expect an academic conference to use un-academic discourse. I mean, these are complex issues that we are dealing with, and at times we need complex language and conceptual tools to put them together or take them apart.
I wonder, though, if Dawson is a journalism student, rather than a cultural studies student, and has perhaps run into one of the most irritating stumbling blocks in world of ‘media studies’? I remember a one-day conference I attended in Brisbane in the early days of my MA (1998? 1999?) called Media Wars where I first ran into Keith Windshuttle, and was infuriated by his nasty attacks on my (then and now) hero Graybags Turner – it wasn’t the nicest introduction to the tensions between journalism and cultural studies. Though my impression that journalism (as the old kid on the block) seemed particularly threatened by media and cultural studies remains (or perhaps that was just Windshuttle’s problem with Turner… threatened by his gentle manner? His friendliness? Or perhaps his stone-washed jeans?*). It seems to me that there are many journalists and journalism academics who have a great deal of trouble with the methods and language of cultural studies. Not trouble in that they don’t understand it or aren’t capable of understanding it, but trouble in that it signifies a profound deviation from traditional quantifiable approaches to the media that sits so uneasily with many workers in the field.
So perhaps Dawson was thinking that a conference titled ‘Everyday multiculturalism’, would be using the everyday language of an academic discipline with which she was familiar? And when she read the call for papers, felt uncertain of her ability to participate in the discourse (though I do think she has a great deal to offer the discussions, particularly in regards to multicultural television). She wrote:

The call for papers started like this: “Papers … will engage with the quotidian dimensions of living with diversity. Quotidian diversity has variously been described as togetherness-in-difference (Ang 2000), and inhabiting difference (Hage 1998). We take the term to mean those perspectives on cultural diversity which recognise the embodied or inhabited nature of living with cultural difference.”
The elite intellectual language discouraged me from proposing a paper, and the very idea was firmly quashed by the suggestion that: “Papers which take an embodied approach, such as through frameworks such as affect or Bourdieu’s habitus are also particularly welcome.”
I am a PhD student in the field and have published several (admittedly non-academic) articles on cultural diversity. However, this sort of gobbledygook leaves me cold.

And then she wrote:

Lest I be sternly rebuked by fellow students and researchers, let me make it clear that I fully support rigorous scholarship and will vigorously defend the right of academics to contribute to the intellectual development of the human race at the most theoretical level. The apparently abstract and often obscure work by researchers in social sciences and cultural studies is essential to the development of ideas.

Followed by:

But this is a conference entitled Everyday Multiculturalisms, and one of its stated aims is to reflect on last December’s riots in Sydney’s Cronulla shire. There’s nothing particularly “everyday” about the language used to invite participation. Nor is there much focus on creating work that resonates beyond intellectual circles.

(all quotes from the article referenced above).
I think Dawson makes a point. The sort of hard-core academic language in the call for papers is hardly in the vernacular of the un-university world.
But I do suspect that Dawson wrote with very little knowledge of the planning behind the conference, and that she wrote quickly without exploring the conference in any great detail (understandable for a journalist writing to a deadline).
Take this comment from Ien Ang in her post to the CSAA list:

It is a pity that Emma Dawson had chosen to single out Amanda Wise’s call-for-papers text to make her points. Ironically, Amanda is one of the few people amongst us who has consistently engaged beyond academia in her work, either through public discussion or through collaborations with government or community groups. I therefore completely understand that she is upset.

(Ien Ang, email to CSAA list RE: Another attack on CS, sent: 29 July 2006 2:58:38 PM)
To explain, Wise raised the issue on the list with this email:

Any CSAA-ers want to write a letter defending us?
Another anti-left, anti-theory attack in today’s Australian, attacking the ‘Everyday Multiculturalism’ conference we are holding here at Macquarie University which a number of you are presenting at.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19933096-7583,00.html
Cheers
Amanda

(Wise, to the CSAA list, Another attack on CS in the Oz, sent: 28 July 2006 11:11:28 AM)
I can imagine Wise’s frustration and upsetness, reading Dawson’s critique in the paper. As someone who’s in the middle of organising a massive event for my peers, there’s nothing as frustrating as mis-informed, negative criticism of your efforts when you’re working as hard as you can, not only to plan an excellent event, but to make that event as accessible and inclusive as you can. I can imagine it’s particularly trying for Wise, who’s working to produce a conference that will bring people together to discuss and workshop ideas to reduce injustice and exclusion and so on. Her email to the list was, I think, not only an interesting poke to a fairly quiet group of readers, but more importantly, a “Goddamn! Surely I don’t suck that much?” call for emotional and professional support from her peers.
Indeed, she writes:

Thanks for all this input. I was furious this morning, but have calmed down substantially! Softly, softly, I promise.
I think Greg (and others) make important points. I’ll synthesise these arguments and write to her and something for the oz. Indeed; I might just invite her to give her a paper!
Its always the problem writing about the ‘everyday’ as you’ve all pointed out.
Another point to be made is that ED is quite patronising towards non-academics. We have lots of non-academics coming to this conference. They come in droves because they enjoy the stimulation of hearing fresh ideas which are theoretically informed. They are quite capable of understanding the work we present. Indeed, we deliberately pitched the conference CFP at attracting ‘grounded’ work; esp based on ethnographic and/or interview based approaches – so it’s a conference full of accessible work.
But as Greg says; theory or otherwise, we have a perfect right as academics to congregate and discuss academic ideas in an academic forum. It is quite a separate question as to whether and how we subsequently communicate those ideas to the wider public.
Many of the speakers at our conference (including myself) are engaged in public debate through the media; through consulting with local, state and federal govt; through working community groups. We are quite capable of working at different registers. Ien Ang and Greg Nobles work (who are keynotes at the conf) is a case in point.
Thanks for the input. Lets see if the oz publishes my rebuttal op ed. I Hope you’re all ok if I quote some of your emails
Cheers
Amanda

(RE: [csaa-forum] Another attack on CS in the Oz Sent: 28 July 2006 2:27:08 PM)
That Wise did respond so defensively is not only an indication of her own feelings as the event organiser, but of cultural studies’ researchers’ familiarity with such comments from the main stream media – “God, why don’t they understand how important my work is?” And while that might sound like a fairly snarky comment on my part, it’s a feeling that I sometimes have to stifle: why is it that we have to continually justify our work in terms that feel so limited and simplistic, when we’re working on ideas and relations that are so complex, and really do require such big words and ideas?
That’s the sort of question that various academics in our field continue to ask ourselves. Laknath Jayasinghe pointed out in their email:

In fact, this is something that Graeme Turner alluded to in a paper he delivered in 1999, arguing that–apart from the academic stuff we do–we should be doing more work in the ‘public sphere’, the broad public sphere, that is. I take my cue from him. I believe that we should build academic bridges, not remain on separate islands. The mass media here in Oz, from both my professional and academic experience, are open to articles and letters that take new and exciting ideas to the public–from all political positions. Of course, language must be modified and the ideas recrafted and tailored to the audience; very few allusions to Bhabha, Butler or Bourdieu here!

(Re: [csaa-forum] Another attack on CS in the Oz, sent: 28 July 2006 1:07:37 PM)
Graybags himself wrote, only minutes later:

For what it’s worth, I share Mark’s reading of it. There are real differences between attacks such as this one and that provided by Windschuttle. I think this person genuinely wanted to be informed by the conference and found that its language was alienating – and therefore suggested that maybe this is something we should think about if we want our work to have a social function. Given the topic of the conference, and its objectives, that’s not an unreasonable position. It is damaging to have it published in the Australian, and it may well be the case that its inclusion is motivated by rather less sympathetic considerations than its author’s, but we need to think carefully about this kind of stuff, take it one piece at a time, avoid characterising it as motivated by a particular pathology or orientation, and be alert to the possibility that they may actually have a genuine point with which we can engage.
A response could well admit the distance created by such language, while nonetheless defending the need for people to work through these issues in their own way and at the highest level, and suggest that while the context of the topic might be the everyday, the capacity to deal with these problems so as to fully understand them is quite clearly not something that is part of the everyday life of most people. That is where academics come in.
It might also be useful to take the lead from this piece and consider if there could be some more publicly accessible outcome from the conference that even a columnist for the Australian would not find alienating, but would find informative.
And, finally, given the regularity with which this kind of issue is raised – particularly by those writing in the Australian—it is probably helpful to be reconciled to the fact this comes with the territory of working in a critical discipline and we are always going to be called to account by those outside it. I think we can wear that responsibility.
Cheers
Graeme

(RE: [csaa-forum] Another attack on CS in the Oz. Sent: 28 July 2006 1:08:57 PM)
I won’t quote the emails sent by ‘Mark’ and ‘Greg’ (and others), but you get the point.
So, I think, at the end of a couple of days posting, I’m left with the following conclusions:

• It’s crap to have your hard (community-focused) work slagged off in a very public and influential forum by someone who doesn’t appeared to have researched it properly
• Cultural studies talk is fairly exclusive, and makes the uninitiated or unfamiliar feel dumb and excluded
• While the previous might be the case, complex ideas need complex language tools, and then forums for their practice
• Perhaps cultural studies researchers and writers need to do a bit of work on producing accessible descriptions of their work and ideas for the general public?

I’m not really sure how I feel about that last point. On the one hand, I do feel, very strongly, that there’s no point doing all this research if we can’t share it with everyone – not just other cultural studies stooges. Nancy Fraser has said most of the things I’d like to say about public discourse and access and exclusiory practices. She’s also made a point about feminism and theory – that we need pragmatic feminist theory to make positive feminist change in the world. I personally feel, that if we are to see more of the work and ideas of cultural studies represented in the mainstream media beyond those of a few (somewhat scary and not terribly representative) voices, we need to get scribbling.
Yet I can’t help but think: Dawson herself sounds like she’s doing the sort of work we should dig. But when she wrote what was, in itself, a fairly ‘harmless’ comment on the terms of discursive participation, she earned a serve from the Gang. Really, how useful or possible is the ‘accurate’ representation of the diversity and depth of ideas and research in cultural studies in the mainstream media?
*This was in the days before stone wash made a comeback – in that interim period between fashions.
==EDIT: Here’s the first bloggage on the topic that I could find (even after scanning the CS stooge network): Tseen comments on Ivory Towers and the Everyday. I have a great deal of respect for Tseen and her work, so I might change me mind on this some time soon…==

No area was so associated with bullshit as cultural studies, where sociology and anthropology met literary criticism and produced prose that repelled the lay reader like a mouthful of Mace (Haigh The Nelson Touch: The New Censorship)

And while I find the thought of a mouthful of mace kind of interesting (I’m thinking of the Christmasy spice I use in Indian cooking and interesting baking), I can see Haigh’s point.
This is a quote from an interesting article by Gideon Haigh in The Monthly – you can read it here. The article discusses the recent ARC funding fisticuffs, something I remember mostly as a fairly painful moment in academic funding where the then-Education minister Brendan Nelson apparently crossed a few applications off the funding list for having the words ‘feminism’, ‘gay’ or ‘postmodern’ in the title. Haigh’s article The Nelson Touch The New Censorship adds a tad more detail to my memory and is well worth a read. One of the most interesting comments in the article is this one:

McCalman observes that the ripple effects are still to be reckoned with: “What this has done and will do for a long time to come will bring about self-censorship. You watch: young academics will sheer away from gender, because of the perception that it’s being monitored. The fact is that in this country we have no other form of research advancement apart from the government. And it gives them a power like no other country.”

A point which is certainly true in my case – I consciously chose not to position myself as a ‘feminist researcher’, despite the fact that my thesis is riddled with the words ‘gender’, ‘sexuality’, ‘power’, ‘resistance’ and so on. It simply seemed a sensible move to position myself within a different discourse. And perhaps to get all subterfuge-ey, exploiting the notion held by some male cultural studies academics, that if it’s got woman in the title, it should be in women’s studies rather than cultural studies.* It’s actually far more exciting to think of myself as sneaking a little illicit Sisterhood into the mix.
I’m not really clued in enough to comment critically on the article, but if it quotes Gray-bags, it’s worth a glance:

College of Experts member Professor Graeme Turner recalls:

At the end of 2004, there’d been a bit of an attitude from the other disciplines of: “Well, humanities people are wankers, Nelson was probably right.” But the second time, when the social sciences as well as the humanities were questioned, there were rumours that science would be scrutinised as well. Other people started saying: “What’s going on?” In fact, the position I took with people in science was to say: “What’s the position going to be in a few years on stem cell research? All you need’s a shift in the politics to be in the same position.”

*Is that bitterness you sense? Oh no. Not at all. Not one bit.

hellooooo HECs debt. Smaller than I thought, larger than I’d like, and with nasty added on bits they call ‘indexation’ but that I call CRAP.
Hello 189 pages of thesis for editing. Oh yes – it’s back, and the supes is off, out of the country tonight so I can’t get her back for all the annoying editing jobs she’s give me. It’s not her fault, though I don’t think I could cope with any more it’s-my-fault guilt.
Yeah, so anyway, she thinks it rocks, and this is the penultimate draft (penultimate draft #5 or so). Basically, I’m going to ditch the intro she got me to write a couple of weeks ago, revert to the earlier version of chapter one (pre-reccommended changes), fix up my crap intros and conclusions on each chapter, and sort out the gross conclusion to the whole thing. I’m obviously terrible at beginnings and endings. Despite all that, there are dozens of pages without any scribbles on them at all.
Basically, I’m looking at about 3 weeks of work (as predicted), then the ‘final’ copy will go back to her.
Thankfully, I’m a quick writer, and I’m now kicking arse at producing new stuff that’s decent quickly.
We each know every word off by heart now, and are heartily sick of the whole thing. Every now and then we remind ourselves that I rock, and so we’re not wasting our time. I say we, because neither of us could continue without the other to bolster our flagging spirits. Even calling each other a cocksucker didn’t help.
Meanwhile, MLX6 planning continues (drupal sucks dogs’ balls btw – avoid that piece of shit. we are exploring other options (including a wiki and plone), so any suggestions for easy-to-use document management/threadable discussiony type things would be appreciated).
It’s cold as fuck, I haven’t slept enough lately, owing to mild thesis anxiety, and I need a nap.
I’m also waiting for a cd to arrive from amazon. I can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s a 2 or 3 cd set of remastered ellington stuf. I’m quite excited. Not that I’ve listened to ANY music AT ALL in at least a week. I simply haven’t had time. What with all that Buffy to be watched.
On other fronts, I’ve lined up some tutoring for next semester, which is neat, as the scholarship ends in August, but also means a bit of work coming my way. Right when I’m ready to just Stop. But I’m very happy to be keeping in the game.
I’m also DJing Friday night, which is nice, as there’s been very little of it about lately. Seems a bunch of new young guns have cottoned on to the caper. Sigh. Best be getting on with pimping myself about before I lose all of the few skills I’ve gained this last few months. It’s kind of annoying, as I’ve not had a chance to test out my new headphones situation. And I’m not sure I will for a while. Oh well.
Man, I have to lie down. Even Lionel Hampton isn’t keeping me alert.

Yesterday my latest copies of Continuum came yesterday. They’re part of my CSAA (or is it ANZCA?) membership deal. I tend to be slack keeping up with latest journals, but this whole posting-of-journals to me has meant I’m a little bit more up to date than I usually would be.
BUT
Last night I was reading through the tables of contents, and came across the article Social Capital Theory, Television, and Participation by Steven Maras. Now I’ve only skimmed the abstract and first couple of pages (and I must go back to it), but my attention was caught by this text quoted in the article:

Viewing and reading are themselves uncorrelated – some people do lots of both, some do little of either – but ‘pure readers’ (that is, people who watch less TV than average and read more newspapers than average) belong to 76 percent more civic organizations than ‘pure watchers’ (controlling for education, as always). Precisely the same pattern applies to other indicators of civic engagement, including social trust and voting turnout. ‘Pure readers,’ for example, are 55 percent more trusting than ‘pure viewers’.
In other words, each hour spent viewing television is associated with less social trust and less group membership, while each hour reading a newspaper is associated with more. (Putnam, 1996)

Provocative, no? Now, before you fly off and rumble out a counter/supporting argument, keep in mind the fact that Maras’ article actually begins with a bit of talk about Alan McKee and his reponse to ‘turn off a TV week’:

But why only television, and not books? When I first heard about the campaign to ‘turn off TV’, I tried to work out the logic behind it – but any reason you come up with for encouraging people to turn off TV works just as well for books, or many other parts of our everyday cultural lives. (McKee, 2002)

Now, I actually have more problems with McKee’s points than Putnam’s. Firstly, I think that the idea of ‘turning off the TV’ for a week is not so much an argument (in my mind, as I’d use it) for literally saying ‘no!’ to telly or to a particular cultural practice, but an argument for encouraging us to think more creatively about the things we a) do for fun, and b) do, cultural practice-wise.
There are many arguments which support this sort of reading of the phrase, from ‘get some exercise’ to ‘read a book’ or ‘quit consuming, stooge!’. I agree, turning off the TV isn’t such a great end in itself (I’m all for telly and its social and cultural uses), particularly when I think of all the dancers I know who spend their time either in front of a screen (watching telly or playing on the computer) or on the dance floor. In my opinion, neither is particularly conducive to excellent interpersonal skills in immediate, embodied social interaction. Nor are either in themselves bad. I think my point is that we need to get diversity up us.
But Putnam’s comment is kind of problematic as well. ‘Reading’ is kind of a blanket term, as is ‘viewer’, let alone pure (in either case). No one is a ‘pure’ reader or viewer – we are totally into diversity in our media consumption. Again, I think Putnam’s point (working just from this initial quote) should perhaps be countered with a bunch of questions about ‘what sorts of newspapers did they read?’ and ‘did they read them online, or are you just talking paper?’ (to be fair – his article does predate the internet thingy) and ‘what sorts of telly do they watch?’ and ‘do they watch alone – what is the context for their viewing?’. The latter is particularly imporant, especially when you keep in mind people like Galaxy, who is both a prodigous reader and viewer.
But I’m running on ahead of myself. I haven’t read the article yet, nor do I proof-read my blog entries or work on them for ages before publishing. I’m just pointing out the article, noting the bits in the first 2 pages (literally) that caught my eye. I will, however, be reading this very soon. After (my increasingly late) lunch, perhaps.
But this article caught my eye because I’d just been thinking about doing television studies as an academic. Frankly, I’d be crap at it, simply because I don’t watch enough telly. My previous post on my media consumption kind of points that out – that I’m writing about my sudden increase in telly -viewing points that out (I think I was also trying to say something about cross-media ideology and patterns of consumption in reference to the ABC, but I didn’t quite manage to articulate it). Mostly because I spend a lot of time doing other stuff.
But then, this argument also applies to dance. If I spent more time practicing and working on dancing, I’m sure I’d be much ‘better’. I’d certainly be fitter, which helps. But, you know, there are these other things to do. Television to be watched and all. I wonder if, to be truly good at something, you need to totally submerge yourself in it?
And then, of course, there comes the issue of whether or not an obsessive interest in a particular cultural practice is conducive to community-mindedness. Well, yes, it’s possible (esp in the case of dancing), though your notion of ‘community’ might be quite specific. And when I watch a lot of telly (esp the ABC), hell I get some politics up me, what with actually knowing what’s going on in the world.
So it’s an interesting idea. Perhaps, rather than saying ‘don’t watch telly’ (which is how McKee seemed to have interpreted ‘turn off the TV week’, rather than as ‘hey, try some new stuff this week’), we should say ‘don’t turn off your brain’. Which of course brings us back to one of the oldest stories in the cultural studies book. Can you say encoding/decoding or Stuart Hall? We aren’t passive consumers of media. I like to think of us as media users and I definitely like the phrase ‘cultural practice’, because it suggests that we do stuff with media, rather than just stooging it up.
Which I guess is McKee’s point, ultimately.
So, with these initial (and obviously circular and somewhat misinformed) comments, where am I going with this? Heck, I think it’s time to read the article.