Cruel Optimism (I)

Posted on | June 15, 2012 | No Comments

the object of cruel optimism… appears as the thing within any object to which one passes one’s fantasy of sovereignty for safe-keeping. In cruel optimism the subject or community turns its treasured attachments into safety-deposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution, the energy of feeling relational, general, reciprocal, and accumulative. In circulation one becomes happy in an ordinary, often lovely, way, because the weight of being in the world is being distributed into space, time, noise, and other beings. When one’s sovereignty is delivered back into one’s hands, though, its formerly distributed weight becomes apparent, and the subject becomes stilled in a perverse mimesis of its enormity. In a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.

- Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, p. 43

Category: Reading

M/C Journal Special Issue: ‘Marriage’

Posted on | June 12, 2012 | 2 Comments

If any of my intimacy students are reading…. here is your chance to be published!

The question of what ‘marriage’ is, and what it is capable of becoming, has increasingly become a hot topic across many countries. In Australia, a key turning point occurred when the then Howard goverment amended the Marriage Act to explicitly restrict marriage to the union of one legally recognised man to one legally recognised woman (a fact that has significant implications for those whose natally-assigned identity does not accord with their actual identity, as well as ‘same-sex’ couples). In response to this, and echoing successful (and unsuccessful) movements in other countries, legislation is now being presented to both State and Federal Parliaments seeking to allow same-sex (or ‘gay,’ in some popular iterations) marriage to be legalised in Australia.

This restriction on, and petition for access to, marriage in Australia highlights something of the polarised nature of debates over marriage in this country. This plays out in many ways across a range of communities, such as when political parties take positions on what marriage is or ought to be – and on whether it is a matter of public morality or individual conscience. In regards to those excluded from marriage, some lobby governments for access to marriage, whilst others critique such lobbying for failing to challenge the privileging of particular kinds of relationships in regards to, for example, the racialised, classed, sexed, sexualised and normalising effects of marriage. And of course some (typically religious) groups lobby governments to maintain marriage as a heterosexual, reproductive institution, the alleged cornerstone of a stable society.

At the same time as these polarising debates go on, weddings and marriages remain sites of intense affective and consumerist investment. Pop culture continues to return to engagements, marriages and weddings, often thereby revealing contemporary anxieties about sex, gender, love, intimacy and relationships. The wedding industry has taken off, with large sums of money spent in producing one ‘perfect day’. In the cultural imaginary, marriage remains, at least ideally, a key step in the imagined trajectory of an individual’s life.

This issue of M/C Journal seeks to provide a forum for accessible but critical discussions of the current imagining of marriage. Papers might seek to provide an account of the current ‘marriage equality’ movement in Australia or elsewhere, critical engagements with such movements, discussion of the interplay between the institutional and personal investments in concepts of marriage, discussion of marriage’s current form as depicted in filmic, televisual or other texts, discussion of the continuing affective investment in marriage, or any other critical reading of marriage and the debates that surround it in Australia.

Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).

Details

Article deadline: 12 Oct. 2012
Release date: 12 Dec. 2012
Editors: Jess Cadwallader and Damien Riggs

Please submit articles through the website: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal. Send any enquiries to marriage@journal.media-culture.org.au.

Category: Gender, Marriage, Research

The problem with work (I)

Posted on | May 20, 2012 | 3 Comments

Feminist calls for better work for women, as important as they have been, have on the whole resulted in more work for women. Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work… the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers (see Hays 1996). Given all the ways that the institution of the family — on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained — is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibility for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.

[...]

Feminist antiwork critique would need to accomplish several things at once: to recognize unwaged domestic work as socially necessary labor, contest its inequitable distributon (the fact that gender, race, class, and nation affects who does more or less), and, at the same time, insist that valuing it more highly and distributing it more equitably is not enough — the organization of unwaged reproductive labor and its relationship with waged work must be entirely rethought. For feminist postwork imagination, it raises the following question: if we refuse both the institution of waged work and the model of the privatized family as the central organizing structures of production and reproduction, what might we want in their stead?

- Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2001: 110-11.

Category: Gender, Politics, Reading

Life, Labour and Information

Posted on | May 16, 2012 | 1 Comment

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION AND THE ARTS

Communication studies seminar
VU City campus Flinders Street
Level 11, room 11.05

30 May 2012
2pm – 3.30pm

PANEL TITLE: LIFE, LABOUR, AND INFORMATION

PANEL OVERVIEW:
There is a key conjuncture of bodies and technology which underlies all three papers: our unprecedented ability to process and circulate vast amounts of data related to life and labour. At issue are shared questions of spatial/temporal measure, wherein the body is more intensely scrutinized by capital which seeks ever-more productive and profitable calibrations. This plays out on the scale of global enterprises where new logistical regimes seek increasing control of labour and life under protocological power; on new temporal scales where information labourers are permanently on call regardless of their location; and, in new mediated cultural practices of mobile connectivity in which we collectively generate ‘big social data.’ What possibilities for new forms of self-organization does this conjuncture afford? Is there liberatory potential in the autonomous movement of social data? In short, is there a crisis of measure that can engender radically new forms of labour and life?

1) DR. MELISSA GREGG (UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY)

PRESENCE BLEED: KNOWLEDGE WORK AND THE CRISIS OF MEASURE
This paper draws on empirical evidence and theories of affect to make sense of the online landscape for information labour. My aim is to unpack notions of workplace subjectivity and agency premised on ‘separate spheres’ and ‘clock time’ questioning their usefulness in biomediated work worlds (Adkins 2009, Clough 2010). While the evidence used is based on a small study of professionals in Brisbane, Australia, the discussion bears relevance for workers in a range of industries, due to the so-called ‘ubiquity’ of mobile computing (Dourish and Bell 2011). If modernist notions of labour hinged on a set number of hours for work, often conducted at a set physical location, the fact that labour now escapes spatial and temporal measure poses obvious problems for defining work limits.

Melissa Gregg works in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney. She is author of Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011), Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave 2006) and co-editor of The Affect Theory Reader (with Greg Seigworth, Duke UP 2010).

2) DR. NED ROSSITER (UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY)

LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARES: SOFTWARE, INFRASTRUCTURE, LABOUR
Logistical nightmares are everywhere. The unruly worker, the software glitch, wilful acts of laziness, sabotage and refusal, traffic gridlock, inventory blowouts, customs zealots, protocological conflicts and proliferating standards. Inefficiencies abound and logistics is forever frantic in its attempt to close the gap between labour and life in order to register productivity in real-time. The industry term here is ‘fault tolerance’. And this is when logistics becomes our collective nightmare. How does informatized labour go about self-organizing when situated in logistical regimes of protocological power? Where does subjectivity belong in the machinic production of value? What is the role of imagination and wild fantasies of other possible worlds when contingency equals closure? What becomes of life itself? Moving across Shanghai, Kolkata, Sydney and Athens, this paper sketches out a new theory of global logistics industries and their informational systems as the dominant architecture of control for contemporary labour and life.

Ned Rossiter is an Australian media theorist and author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006). He was based in Perth, Melbourne, Ulster, Beijing, Shanghai and Ningbo before taking up an appointment as Professor of Communication in 2011 in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney where he is also a member of the Institute for Culture and Society. Ned is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Creative Industries, Peking University. He is a researcher on Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, http://transitlabour.asia

3) DR. MARK COTÉ (VICTORIA UNIVERSITY)

MOBILE BODIES AND MOTILE DATA IN THE AGE OF ‘BIG SOCIAL DATA’
My paper situates what Gregg calls information labour and Rossiter informatized labour in new mediated cultural practices engendered by ubiquitous connectivity and the rise of the smart phone. In the past I have examined this conflation of work and play via the concept of immaterial labour 2.0; here I will consider its extension and intensification via mobile access. In part, I will do so by previewing an innovative method under development here at VU which will utilise smart phones to gather data on mobility, location and information. In turn, I will suggest using ‘new materialist’ media theory to help us analyse such components of ‘big social data’ and the ramifications for labour and life, particularly in a new media ecology which affords a differential mobility of the body and ‘data motility.’

Mark Coté is a Canadian media theorist currently teaching at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia and previously held positions at McMaster University and Trent University in Canada. He has published widely on new media, social networks and the relationship between the human and technology in Theory & Event, ephemera, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Journal of Cultural Economy among other scholarly journals. He is also co-editor of Utopian Pedagogy (University of Toronto Press, 2006).

Category: Cultural Studies, Events, Travel

Commuter marriage

Posted on | May 1, 2012 | 4 Comments

I have been reading a book from the early 1980s on ‘commuter marriage’. It stood out from the shelves in the library when I was preparing my course reader this year, and for obvious reasons I have an interest in the topic. What’s remarkable, reading it from the set of presumptions I have today, is how troubling it seems to have been not so very long ago. In fact the book opens by explaining that the practice was technically illegal in the US at that time if it involved separate residences.

Reading some of the passages below I began to realise how regularly I have been exposed to people’s concerns about this aspect of my relationship over the past couple of years. This makes me wonder whether my responses to such concerns have been performative or truly held statements about the kind of marriage I want. As students have been writing in their GCST2610 essays this month, this is the difference between ‘surface acting’ and ‘deep acting’ in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s framework of ‘managing feeling’. It has a lot to do with the pressure I feel to conform to others’ expectations of marriage in spite of my personal politics and situation. This book has some helpful points of clarification as I think about changing concepts of work, intimacy, presence and love.

Notes from Fairlee E. Winfield’s Commuter Marriage: Living Together, Apart, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Two-career couples: ‘feel no need to choose between two very important aspects of their lives, a job and a relationship’ (4)

Both job and an intimate relationship are highly important. Commuter marriage is a new social structure for which there are no rules and few norms (4)

Types of commuter marriages:
- The Young Professionals
- The Relocatees
- The Well-Established: ‘both have important and possibly even prestigious careers in different cities when they wed, but they choose to continue their two-city lifestyle. Frequently the well-established are also “well-heeled,” famous, and highly visible’ (16)
- The Economically Motivated

Younger couples struggle with ascendancy conflicts; they wrestle with the dilemma of whose career should predominate (21)

The issue is not whether the wife shall have a career; the majority of male students in university classes and middle-class males in the work force now state that they expect their wives to work. The issue is whose career is more important (24)

The gaming approach of “we’ll take turns” is a hedge that allows retention of male self-image on two levels: first, the recovery of the traditional ascendency of the male breadwinner role; and second, the maintenance of pride in a more participative intimate relationship (24)

‘adjusting couples’ (Harriet Engel Gross 1980: 573): ‘have not had the time nor the shared experiences that contribute to a sense of “we-ness.” They lack the emotional reservoirs of an enduring long-term marriage. Second, as new, struggling professionals, they have not yet confirmed their professional competence. They still lack the ego and strength of their older counterparts (25)

The negative pressures from friends, colleagues, and relatives who question their living apart can be neutralized by seeking friendships with singles and other commuter couples (25)

Three things seem to make coping easier for the older couples: (1) the solidity of their relationship, (2) the faith that they can endure the demands of living apart, and (3) the recognition that they are compensating for the wife’s past efforts on the husband’s behalf (28)

The ‘pseudo-divorce’ category is generalized to all commuters and prevents societal changes that would genuinely make two engrossing jobs, two residences, and a rewarding relationship less bizarre (28-9)

“Syndromes” affecting commuter couples

- The Supermom, Superdad, Supersuccess Syndrome

- Fatigue Fallout Syndrome: physical exhaustion; emphasis on good health; problem of stamina commuting requires (31)
“You do run out of steam. We’re amazed sometimes that we have survived until the holidays.” Not everyone makes it. They are simply too tired. But only a few considered that the drain on physical energy incurred by frequent travelling is a major issue. The commitment to work, especially for established couples, is so well fixed that dropping out seems unthinkable (33)
Commuter couples aren’t the only ones who fact the “intermittent husband and wife syndrome.” Military, diplomatic, truck driver, and oil rig wives, to name only a few, have all reported that they feel more relaxed when their husbands are away once they have become accustomed to getting along on their own. Adjusting to widowhood or divorce has received a great deal of attention from psychiatrists, but adjusting to a returning husband or more recently a returning wife is just now beginning to be investigated.
Symptoms include weeping, headaches, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity… early psychiatrist studies classified these as neurotic responses (34)

- Identity Syndrome: internally generated conflicts about whether one is a ‘good’ husband/wife/person…(35) arising ‘from cultural ideas of work and family as intrinsically masculine and feminine’ (36)
Lacking a new model, the exotic two-city family compares itself with “real’ marriage (people live together)… there is limit beyond which experimentation seems unable to go without damaging the male or female sense of self-esteem (36)

- The Motivational Syndrome: Why am I doing it?
→ alone at the top syndrome: both partners need a “wife” (41)

Married singles are expected to be promiscuous, and because of this expectation they are frequently subjected to sexual harassment. Peers, friends, co-workers, an employers look at the partners in commuter marriages as footloose, fancy free, and ready-to-play. They assume that the commuter is “separated” or getting a divorce, that no serious relationship exists simply because the couple is not living together as convention requires. Married singles are seen at best as “available” and at worst as rakes and wantons (46)

Most of the commuter couples tend to rule out sexual jealousy because such doubts are too much to cope with in a busy two-city marriage. They feel that extramarital relations are likely to cause serious strains on their present relationships. Sexual permissiveness is not a natural outgrowth of untraditional marriage (47)

Researchers insist that commuters do not have any more affairs than stay-at-home couples. So much concentration is poured into work and marriage that there is little energy left over for it. Obviously, women who were once upon a time limited to the milkman or the golf instructor now have the same opportunities for misbehavior as the men have had all along, but fatigue can put restrictions on extramarital affairs (49)

Dual-residence relationships don’t have more sex but the people involved enjoy sex more. Couples are generally highly monogamous and devoted to their sexual partners… Social problems, obstacles to privacy, and financial difficulties of commuter marriage at the lower income levels can diminish the “honeymoon” aspects. However, the couples who can use their imaginations in detailed planning of their “prime time” together have an advantage regardless of income level. It is really the care taken in shared time that is the important factor, and commuters seem to take more care because time is so precious (60)

The two-city marriage breaks a rigid moral commitment to the traditional family. Because this new social structure demonstrates that the major concern in our culture is not the family, nor intimacy, but work, it breaks very powerful taboos (63)

Couples who live together, apart, resort to the strategy of insisting that they are “only doing this temporarily” (77)

The required behaviour, at least for the moment, is that a couple live together. If you can’t do that because of a career considerations, you must at the very least say that you would like to do it. That is the ideal (77)

Commuter couples have almost no time for mutual friends, but their support system can more easily develop through encouraging separate circles of friends in the two locations where they live (84)

Overall, commuting couples report fewer social contacts because of their ambiguous social status, but they seem to be only slightly disturbed by this… “we each have a few devoted friends in our separate cities. That and our relationship is enough” (85)

It is estimated that half of the commuter marriages are in the academic world where work schedules are flexible and jobs are very scarce. But the number is growing in business, politics, journalism, publishing, and show business (166)

Couples who live together full time frequently seek leisure activities with outsiders – as a type of release from overdoses of intimacy in a marriage. Commuters, on the other hand, continue their leisure activities together (168)

Solitude in itself doesn’t produce loneliness, it comes when expectations fail (170)

Category: Gender, Marriage, Reading

In praise of strategic complacency

Posted on | April 15, 2012 | 15 Comments

What follows is the basic text from my talk to “Early Career Researchers” at UQ earlier this month. As you’ll see, they are rough notes, intended for a small and currently employed audience. This is only one experience of “ECR”. I welcome comments for how to expand and edit as I might try to publish a version (taking my own advice? You decide…)

Not another mentoring talk
My own feelings about mentoring – and the category of ECR – are at best ambivalent. Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. Whereas once academia resembled a vocation, with a clear model of apprenticeship that led to security and stability, this is no longer the reality we face. This is part of the post-Fordist shift in economic capital and employment that is moving from organizations to networks. The form of recognition encouraged by the current regime is less about accumulation and duration of service, and more about flexibility and productivity. Put simply: you are only as good as your last five years, or even, it seems, three years. You only need to look at what is happening at my own university to see how this can play out.

Mentoring also suggests an ongoing interest in the development of a career, the gradual realisation of your individual potential. It’s not enough to have gotten the job. No, landing the job is just the first step in a constant process of planning, assessing and maximizing “opportunities”. From now on, there will be little if any time to sit back and acknowledge your achievements, and yet part of what I want to suggest today is that you must fight for this time. And beware of people offering “opportunities”!

This is because the system is set up to make you feel that you are never doing enough, just as technology has accelerated the amount of things we are expected to be able to do. This results in us all feeling like we are constantly behind, always “catching up”. How many times do you hear yourself saying that to people: “we must catch up soon”. The “catch up” is one of the principal manifestations of our present ontological bearing. At work, it occurs in small and large ways, whether it is the sense of defeat you feel in “wasting” an hour deleting email or the failure you might feel at not seeing your colleagues regularly for coffee. But mostly it presents as a chronic low level internalized suspicion of incompetence, that there just isn’t enough time to do everything you need to do properly.

While it feels highly personal, these are in fact the routine affects of organisational life today. It is worth recognizing the extent to which they are also the principal conditions of your labour that you can control – that is, once you appreciate that there is no temporal or spatial limit to the networked information economy that employs you. The network, which is to say the office, which is to say work and the prospect of doing it, will always follow you home. So part of what we need to imagine collectively is the degree of compensation we want for that new reality, as well as strategies to cope with it.

But I want to approach this in a slightly different way by focusing on the often forgotten fact that the university needs you. There is plenty of discussion about the competitiveness of the job market right now and an impending war for talent resulting from difficulties overseas. But there, as here, the system as a whole can’t afford to lose you. The market for higher education in English speaking countries may be transforming, and in Australia reconfiguring, but on a global scale it is not declining (Marginson 2011). Locally, recent research puts the figure of sector wide job losses through retirement as high as 35% (Hugo 2008, in Bendix Petersen, 2011). Current studies of workforce patterns being conducted here at the University of Queensland continue to identify the large numbers of employed academics who regularly contemplate leaving the industry, whether annually, month to month, or on a weekly and daily basis (I for one certainly count myself in most of these categories). There is genuine concern, which is to say that there is existing policy discourse, that recognizes a “lost generation” of academics that may or may not be recoverable. And while there are obviously many more PhD graduates now than previous decades, what I think this calls for is a level of strategic complacency among entry level staff that is currently under utilized.

By now you will have heard a lot about what you should be doing to get an academic career, and what to do once you’re on the cusp. You’ll have plenty of thoughts on the limitations of that formula. But the point at this stage is that you are all here; you’ve done something right to finish a PhD, or be hired, publish a book or win a grant. So now’s the time to make space to think about the kind of work you want to focus on doing more – and less – of. This involves identifying different styles of academic practice.

Expand your imagined audience
You can begin doing this by thinking about the audiences you want for your thinking and research. It’s tempting to think that the audience for your contribution is the reader, the person who happens to find your article or buy your book. This is only a very small audience. In relation to the multiple publics you address day to day, your readership may be the smallest. In teaching and research jobs, your audience includes your students (undergrad, postgrad) and your colleagues (department peers, committee colleagues, superiors). You probably engage in written communication daily with all of them – but do you count that writing as output? Do you count it as part of your intellectual project? If not, why not?

Here I’m trying to offer ways to think about scale: the audience for your work can have local, national, and international reach. It’s a continuum of interaction and it all matters. One nice email can change the course of a student’s day, even her year; but we tend to want to think that it is our scholarly papers that will change the world. Identifying the many audiences for your practice is an empowering thing.

Publishing: realistic outputs, actual numbers.
How many publications is enough? Homework: check your university’s minimum requirements for research output. Some of my closest colleagues with dozens of publications still think they haven’t done “enough”. Yet they have already published more than most Professors had at the same age. There is a self-punishing dimension to the productivity imperative that today’s PhD graduates have experienced. It has genuine effects on people’s sense of self-worth as well as damaging effects on the research being conducted.

What helps with planning your writing and pacing it? Counting each stage of writing. When you are considering submitting something for publication, or wrestling with the fantastic “opportunity” that’s been offered, take account of how much time it takes to write even a short academic article. I can think of this many steps, but there are more:

Planning the proposal, proposing, planning the writing, writing, rewriting, proof-reading, peer review, recovering from peer review, response to peer review, proof-reading, editing.

Double that for co-authorship (done well).

From what I’m told, writing is like having a baby. We have amnesia about how painful it is, because the end product is so amazing. To push the analogy: try to remember the pain, and that it can be very hard to make happen by force! Also think realistically about how much time you have free to write without interruption, at which times of the year. i.e. without teaching, without meetings, without someone waiting for you to come home for dinner.

Grants: motivations for them – different types – which one is right for you?
DECRA. Discovery. Collaboration. Linkage. Non-ARC (all external income counts). On ARCs, it’s a known secret that the best track record for an ARC is a previously funded ARC. But there are exceptions. Time spent working up a collaboration should be weighed against more time spent on your own writing (track record). Also against how much the focus will change. Assessors will reward something that’s coherent and distinctively yours. Assessors will also be wise to opportunism, and don’t necessarily favour seniors who are overcommitted. Again, be cautious about accepting “help” from mentors: what’s in it for you vs. them?

Teaching and service: making it work for your research goals.
• Course design and content – rarely will your teaching directly match your research. But even overview courses can help keep you in touch with the field (and you can turn lectures into writing outcomes too, eg. book reviews for peers, feedback to colleagues whose work you set, etc).
• Don’t give written lectures every week. Find alternative delivery modes (eg. radio, TV documentaries, student participation). This maintains your energy and encourages others to get involved in the course content/experience.
• Marking: Plan to have it happening regularly over the semester to avoid binges. Continuous assessment helps, eg. small tasks to mark in class or during consultation hours.
• Approach marking in relation to your workload. How much does your workload formula give you for marking? Preparation? Supervision? eg. Honours. Stick to it. Tell your students. Keep records.
• Committee work: inevitable, so try to find things relevant to your research. But don’t go every time. Every third meeting, perhaps. And not when it challenges a research deadline.

Offloading: Claiming time for research
Make time to plan what you want to do. Keep that time factored in to each week. Often we avoid scheduling research time because it’s not face to face – other people won’t notice if we don’t show up. Think of your research hours per week in the same way you do face to face teaching.
• Try to write for a short period every day rather than blocks and binges.
• Maximize the best part of the day. PRIME TIME! Tell others when you are writing so they learn to contact you later.
• Write lists. Try to distinguish between things that you must do, should do, or what would be nice to do. Have daily/weekly lists and don’t be hard on yourself if you need more time.
• Learn to say no, and when you do, say why, or suggest alternatives. Recommending other people for a job can save several people time – and help others.

Invoke strategic complacency
Academics, like other professionals, navigate a range of internally and externally imposed pressures to be productive – and to conclude I want to get you to start getting in the habit of asking: to what end? The model of worker that is rewarded today is that which is endlessly, limitlessly productive. The university will take everything from you if you let it. There are minimum performance levels but you’ll note that there are no maximums. You will rarely be told that you are publishing too much.

In universities today, it is also unlikely that you’ll meet anyone who doesn’t feel overworked. In this context, some of the strategies that can be most useful are discursive. To draw on some cultural studies terminology, you can use the hegemonic language – the commonsense of the university – to pursue counter-hegemonic goals. As academics, your goals are probably not even that radical: you want more time to read books and write. Have a weekend now and then. But it is increasingly obvious that these privileges, the ones that motivated many of us to join the profession in the first place, are unevenly distributed, particularly by age, race and gender. You need to understand that to be able to fight for it.

Replace productivity with strategic complacency. Use the discourse of productivity against itself. Start by using the language you hear routinely around you: “I’m just so busy”; “I can’t do it that day, today’s impossible”; “This week/month is crazy, I just can’t”. The best line I’ve ever been told to use is the simple: “I’m sorry, I’m fully committed”. If what people say is true, who will have the time to check what you’re actually doing? Take your own goals seriously, and set boundaries on doing more.

Setting up these strategies will help to see clearly the source for the multiple pressures you encounter – where they come from. Are they intrinsic (part of the make up of being an intellectual) or externally imposed? Are you just being polite when you don’t say no? Can you still be polite and excuse yourself from certain things?

Making time to organize and rationalize your time can mean you maximize the “good” parts of your job and make better decisions about minimizing what takes you away from them. This is also about developing some institutional nous. Learn whose job it is to take responsibility for things, who has the last say, so you don’t take on more responsibility than you will ever be recognized for.

P.S. The phrase “strategic complacency” is a hybrid term that is inspired by both the autonomist “refusal of work” tradition, and some very sound advice offered by my colleague, Chris Gibson, at the State of the Industry conference in 2009. In the closing session of day one, Chris urged us to exercise some “institutional irresponsibility” as an appropriate response to the more ludicrous conditions of our labour. This post is an attempt to bring these different influences to bear.

References
Simon Marginson (2011) ‘It’s a long way down: The underlying tensions in the education export industry’, Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 21-33.

Evea Bendix Petersen (2011) ‘Staying or going? Australian early career researchers’ narratives of academic work, exit options and coping strategies’ Australian Universities’ Review, 53 (2): 34-42.

Category: Academia, Saturn Returns, Work

Rural cultural studies and hire car research

Posted on | April 15, 2012 | No Comments

…small country town research is important to Australia precisely because of the political utility of the stereotype. The image of the small country town combines practical assumptions about size, location and isolation, but any or all of these may be missing in the definition of a given town as small and rural in character.

[...]

It may be that the lingering spectre of rural social conservatism – however fair or unfair this stereotype may be – still limits the opportunity to engage critically with the present-day cultural experiences of rural Australians. But there is a more sympathetic view which we can take of the national deficit in rural cultural research, which is that the current structure of our research institutions, and the everyday realities of our lives as researchers working mostly in cities, makes rural cultural research genuinely challenging to undertake.

[...]

Young media users in country towns are now part of national and global social networks, rather than confined to the subcultures that happen to exist in town; previously isolated rural parents can seek advice and community over the internet; and traditional business owners or even self-employed treechanging cultural workers are able to meet their clients and pay their bills flexibly from a wider range of different locations. There are still very significant limitations and disruptions to the standard of media services in non-metropolitan places, but it is nevertheless the case that the horizon of social relations and cultural experiences in small country towns has changed.

[...]

Keyan Tomaselli likens cultural studies to a 4WD which is engineered for tough off-road conditions but never leaves the suburbs (2001: 311). This has some resonance for those of us concerned that the cultural research disciplines can look like a fleet of metropolitan hire cars available for the occasional return trip to the country-vehicles which proclaim when parked at farms and on country town streets that the drivers are passing through, and ‘not from around here’. But by asking the difficult questions about institutional power, and engaging in a more direct way with the research expertise outside the academy, we can begin to adopt more sensitive and sustainable practices.

Kate Bowles, ‘Rural Cultural Research: Notes from a Small Country Town’ Australian Humanities Review, November 2008

Category: Cultural Studies, Reading, Willunga

At Sydney Uni this week

Posted on | April 6, 2012 | 1 Comment

Starting with an assembly in Eastern Avenue – one of the many campus locations to have been “enhanced” in recent years at major expense – Wednesday’s No Job Cuts rally moved to the iconic sandstone quadrangle, to the office of the absent Vice Chancellor, Michael Spence.

A section of the protest group then stormed the office of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The final photo here captures Dean Duncan Ivison addressing the group after he was made to wait in turn following other speakers.

Thanks to Save USyd Jobs, USyd Greens and NTEU NSW for these images.

I love the photos especially because of the cubicles. Students fighting for their education in the very scene of administrative labour. But it made me think, how many will end up in a workplace just like this, whether or not their course options are cut? Does the consciousness-raising of this rally partly come down to realising what professional work now looks like? Especially given key staff in the faculty office – many of whom are themselves past and present students of the faculty – were live tweeting the events with empathy?

Protester/student/worker: the hybrid identity of cognitive capitalism.

Category: Academia, Events, Politics, Sydney, Work

Dream large

Posted on | April 3, 2012 | 4 Comments

Dream large of narcotising the practice of thought, of putting to sleep the old cultures of criticism, inquiry and analysis, in favour of a consumer opportunity. Culture becomes brand. Dream large of how to educate and polish up your young people, so that they think efficiently but within certain limits, and so that they never engage their passion and pain as sites of intellectual activity, or as sources of intellectual energy. Perfect stainless‐steel‐coated technocrats, taking care of their affects through sex and drugs. And otherwise, trained to be accomplished but docile consumers; much like the education of previous generations of upperclass young ladies to grace the drawing rooms of power without challenging them.

The faculty of arts become a finishing school in the decorative liberal arts? Graduates knowing ‘just enough to use the trope’, as an American cultural theorist has said, speaking of the death drive? The university become a place for te destruction of thinkers? And collegiality now amounting to little more than averting one’s eyes while some of our number peck more vulnerable members to death? Such a form of thought is paranoid, a nightmare.

Look to the dawn.

- Robyn Ferrell, ‘Income Outcome: Life in the Corporate University’

Category: Academia, Cultural Studies, Reading

MACS in 2012

Posted on | April 2, 2012 | No Comments

Cross-post from Sydney MACS

Following last year’s launch and initial MACS meetings I’m keen to hear thoughts on what events/ activities you would like to see continue in 2012.

For instance, the Melbourne model has decentralised the organisation of MACS events to different individuals and campuses. To adopt this approach, it might be worth setting up a steering committee of people from all of the different Sydney unis to take charge of hosting particular meet ups, talks or events across the course of the year. This could involve staff, students and graduates – anyone who is interested.

In Brisbane, where MACS began, we would take turns to host an event so that those on campus in each location had a chance to attend more regularly. This was a good way to make use of the momentum of the group and the benefits of cross-institutional meet ups while also servicing the needs of local staff and students.

(And in case it’s not clear, the benefits of cross-institutional meet ups include: socialising, getting feedback on your experience, comparing notes on your working conditions, advice on PhD tactics, sharing knowledge about opportunities and expectations in the industry/profession, finding jobs, finding a date!)

Lots of you will already be inundated with requirements and commitments based on your own enrolment, work schedule or program. So rather than make an arbitrary time to try to accommodate everyone, we might instead focus on fewer but more targetted meetings. We might also think about sponsoring particular sessions of local campuses’ and departments’ existing research seminars. That way we don’t double up on work or time commitments.

These are just suggestions though. If MACS is to continue it will need to respond to your needs, rather than those imagined for you. This seems to be one of the classic mistakes of corporate mentoring models applied to the university context. Star professors in the midst of career victory laps are not always best placed to offer advice to students who face a radically different university experience and employment market. Still, wisdom and perspective are valuable qualities in any industry. Access to profs and other academic staff can be one of the many things MACS can deliver if you collectively ask for it.

Alternatively, or in addition, you might also want to maintain this as a space to talk together about routine, material or affective dimensions that accompany research life. Or an excuse for beers at the pub! These are not mutually exclusive… The online aspect to this blog and the facebook group does however suit a lot of people – to keep it going though, I need more people helping. You can become an administrator of both sites easily.

I am more than happy to contribute in all kinds of ways, e.g. suggesting relevant speakers or visitors to Sydney who might be able to address the group. I could also give talks or suggest friends, colleagues and/or students to do so if that would be good. But this is just a warning, I suppose, that I can’t see the group as sustainable without others taking an active lead.

Part of the reason I want to check in with you all now is that I’m heading to Brisbane to give a talk to “early career researchers” this week – a talk that will cover issues to do with publishing, grant applications, collaborations, and so on. If this might be the kind of thing that you want to hear, let me know – and have a think about where you might want to host it. MACS can be on campus or off, or a mixture of both. It’s really up to you

We can set the ball rolling with comments and suggestions for MACS’ future below. By way of inspiration, here’s a link to the preparations that went in to the grad student manifesto delivered at the State of the Industry Conference back in 2009. Do these priorities still matter? What support do you need that you aren’t currently getting? Ask and you may be surprised what can happen.

And as always, please forward this information and knowledge of the group to new students and staff in media and cultural studies in Sydney. There are plenty of us!

Category: Academia, Cultural Studies, State of the Industry 2009, Sydney, Teaching

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