Favorite moment from grad school was in my first year, when on the first day of class we do introductions. Everyone preens & postures, then a german exchange student says she likes tv.
Prof: "You're interested in pop culture studies, media theory?"
Her: "No. I like watching tv."
Uni closed & preschool canceled, but I refuse to carry the water for a failed state. A hearty NO to the neoliberal imperative to Zoomify pedagogy WHILE "parenting" as a verb. Proudly half-assing both from here on out. Love to all.
@elizphil
It’s aggravating but mainly my concern is that the bullshit of course evaluations actively harms grad and NTT teachers, compounded by race and gender. Good for you for not checking!
Breaking: Annelise Orleck, Head of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, has been banned from Campus for six months after protecting Jewish students protesting for Palestine from police attacks
the thing that most bums me out about neoliberalism is that it forces students to see instructors as either bosses or customer service, when the student-teacher relationship exists entirely outside of those bounds.
Today it's official! Now to peddle my wares: If you're into the raucous history of psychology, affect theory, C19 literature & culture, and the racial science called aesthetics, you just might dig this book. sending love & positive vibes to all--
@MollyOShah
I live here too and masking was minimal whenever I took the u-Bahn the past few weeks. We can have different experiences of the same space.
A baby couldn’t come to us because it couldn’t become so we planted a forsythia in the fall in its memory so that as an early spring bloomer it would blossom about the time it would have arrived. Anyway in early spring the colors dazzle most.
dept chair ended the final faculty meeting with "Well, this has been a shit year," and honestly it is the best and only way to properly conclude a meeting.
sorry, have been tweeting & deleting a lot bc so consumed with rage and don't know where to direct it. But it boils down to this: I had long acknowledged that institutions don't love you back. What the pandemic has clarified is that it's worse: institutions hate their employees.
hey guys! if twitter goes down you can find me chained to the wall of a cave, facing a blank wall, where I and a bunch of other folks watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind us.
@GerardCoen
Sure! Universities are institutions that are technically non-profit (so don't have to pay taxes) but accumulate lots of $$ from tuition and their endowments (which accrue a lot of interest). Universities apportion their money unevenly: the least goes to student scholarships 1/
i was an adjunct & gave a paper at MLA. when i return home there's an email from a journal editor who liked my paper and invited me to submit it to the journal once i'd expanded it into an essay. from submission to peer review etc, it was published 1.5 years later.
Last thing, then i'm off the soapbox: You don't owe anyone your abortion story. Freely choosing to terminate is "reason" enough. Compelling the justification of that choice (i.e., "good" vs "bad" abortion) is how women's, NB & trans people's bodies and personhood are regulated.
one effect of working at a university that 10 yrs ago more or less stopped hiring TT faculty is dealing with an acutely geriatric faculty body, which is, unsurprisingly, entirely white and male and out of touch with just about everything (but of course talk down to you).
anthropometry & composite photos get a lot of attention, but galton hand drew people's synesthetic perceptions because he viewed mental life (not just bodily traits) as a metric of racial development. that chart is the book cover:
Historian's review of literary criticism: This is an argument in search of evidence.
Lit critic's review of history: This is evidence in search of an argument.
1 or 2 job openings in your field is not a market. At this point, “job market” is a euphemism for un(der)employment. Let’s be more precise in our naming practices. 🙏
90% of what's happening in higher ed is due to corporatization, de-funding, & anti-intellectualism but 10% is the discipline setting impossibly high bars for entry, e.g.,
Asst. Prof job at R1 English dept listing "book ms published or under review" as a requirement.
My colleagues had a meeting to discuss our by-laws & it devolved into a heated debate about Foucault & I just love how English departments are a parody of themselves
@GerardCoen
so that the university runs more like a resort than an actual place of education. during the pandemic, dean directly told me we need to in teach in person not bc it serves students better (it doesn't) but bc university wants the room & board money. 4/
speaking strictly from personal experience, all i know is that the semester I did away with an "absence policy" about 20% of my class regularly attended, and then I scorched by student evals bc apparently the students didn't learn anything 🤷♀️
@_alyssacsmith
public uni, R1. hired @ $57k (2013), then union raises & cola bumped up to $70k by 2020. post-tenure raise ($4,500) plus adjustments the union did to address "salary compression" (level salary across race/gender) has me at $76k (no research/conf $). thank god for organized labor.
@GerardCoen
thing to run is education itself. Most prof's are adjuncts ($4k/class, no health insurance) and those lucky to be tenured don't make that much. So to make more money, universities need students to be living in dorms, eating the cafeteria food, using various services on campus 3/
the worst part about the university's imperative that humanities collaborate w/ sciences is that we all got into this profession to avoid group projects
@GerardCoen
NYU is a great example of university-as-real-estate developer. They have amassed so much property that they use not to put back into the community but to charge ever higher room & board $ for students, further driving out longtime residents. So, finally 5/
@GerardCoen
(nyu is notoriously stingy despite their huge endowment), while the most goes into sports and acquiring property: new construction for ever more expensive dorms and other 'public-private' programs (like suny's homeland security college). From a cost perspective, the cheapest 2/
@GerardCoen
The university is a corporation that has non-profit status. Education is the least of its concern. The higher tuition $, higher room & board is to amass more wealth for itself by buying more property, building more buildings to then rent out to students or other shops/business.
Non-academic CVs are *wild.* Apparently you can just catalog character traits willy-nilly, eg "emotional intelligence," as objective facts and...no one blinks an eye.
Friends, please spread the word: Hsuan Hsu & I are editing a special issue of
@amlitjournal
(
@DukePress
) on "Senses with/out Subjects." Essays due October 4. Would love the opportunity to think with you & learn from you!
More info here:
there is a certain type of "feminist" male academic that cultivates relationships with celebrity-caliber women scholars, but wouldntyaknow just so happens to not be able to find time for the women who didn't make it into that select world
guys, i know everything feels like sh*t but charlie brown xmas is playing tonight on pbs and a bald-headed kid suffering seasonal depression against a jazzy soundtrack is a real salve for the soul
My lasting memory of Duke WGSS was when they hired 2 post-docs, then put out 1 TT job that year so the two women were set against each other from the beginning. (Yes, one got it, the other didn’t.) But lots of speakers invited to talk feminist and queer praxis!
Found a relic of 1990s suburban girl teendom. Just need to find an Ani DiFranco CD and my youth will have been entirely synched with that of my sisters in law
humbly propose that for promotion to full professor, my dossier include not a second monograph but instead a compilation of all my email communication with colleagues, administrators, and students.
it's cringe to be one of those americans who gushes about europe, but it's also beautiful to experience the benefits of a social safety net, e.g. public school has: free lunch for everyone; free aftercare until 6pm (school gets out at 1.30); free care on school holidays. +
deeply honored to be in the company of so many luminous thinkers, including
@JillCRichards
,
@SarahLWasserman
, and
@edgaresque
-- look forward to celebrating these brilliant first books in november!
Congratulations to Erica Fretwell
@upstaterica
! Sensory Experiments is a finalist for the
@msatweet
First Book Prize. Read the introduction to the book here:
I love film theory. No field has better sentences than, eg, "By reading Aristotle's theory of skepticism in *Metaphysics* with Leibniz's 'ars formularia' and Derrida's law of genre, we can see how the ontology of the image in *Dude, Where's My Car?* ..."
@S_Insley_H
@miriamkp
the fellowship world still caters to "the boys club" where husbands can just willy-nilly pick up and live on the other side of the country for a school year while wifey takes care of the kids. it's time to rethink fellowships for dual-income & caretaking households!
everyone's a climate crisis warrior until some kids throw soup on a van gogh. protest is necessarily uncivil. it's meant to inconvenience the public. it's meant to assault sensibilities. and anyway the painting was protected by glass.
faculty interact most w students, yet our labor & the limits of our power are obscured (students think we're bosses or customer service), so we're the recipients of rightful but misplaced anger. tempted to make the demystification of the univ a first day of class discussion?
anyone else just breaking down in tears throughout the day because, try as you might to keep your shit together, this is all too much? guys, this is too much. no creature is meant to handle this much violence at once. i'm so sad, so tired.
this is correct; we say this constantly to admin. but admin doesn't care bc it's a choice they have made, knowing that using majors as a metric produces the data they can then use to justify further under-resourcing of the humanities & social sciences.
People say the academic monograph is dead; it’s just the intro and a choice chapter that gets read. But when I sent out my book proposal, I promised publishers “All bangers, all the time.”
T/TT fac of course shld pay more for membership & conferences than grads & NTT fac. But I'd encourage societies (C19, MLA, etc) to take a cue from SLSA: *within* T/TT payment tier, differentiate between those who & do not have institutional funding for research & conferences
i spent saturday thinking about white mob violence - from lynching to the pro-Trump coup - at the nexus of terror & entertainment.
@majortominor
shepherded my ideas to Al Jazeera, and I'm so grateful to be able to share this with you now
yes my tweets are public, and this was shared in good spirit, but gut-level response to screencapping for FB is that it feels a little, um, violate-y... right?
Typical Sunday question: I am delving into critical phenomenology (Fanon, Beauvoir, IM Young, Grosz, Butler, Ahmed, Muñoz, Sterne). What other thinkers (Black, Black feminist, postcolonial) come to mind re: texturing or interrogating the category of 'lived experience'?