Bradley Garrett, author of Place Hacking – a key blog for urban explorer geeks with an added tinge of bravery – has recently announced he’s started up a very interesting business venture: Academic Media Productions, basically an audio/visual media service that partners with academic researchers.

Last year I seemed to get quite worked up about the possibilities of using new technologies and platforms for creating, storing and publicising research – film included. Certainly a lot of this had to do with being a co-organiser of the Doing research amongst technologies workshop series. That excitement hasn’t completely disappeared – and I still have a couple of forthcoming non-texty-tricks up my sleeve – but it’s definitely subsided. Perhaps it’s just reality setting in. After all, it’s actually pretty hard to branch out and use lots of new technologies in creative new ways.

Not to mention the question of possible de-skilling. As a geographer with the somewhat odd fortune of mainly dealing with journalism and media students, I am well aware that the notion of a so-called ‘multidisciplinary journalist’ carries strengths and drawbacks in equal measures. Yes, it means thinking laterally about content production across several platforms. This is a good thing in as far as it helps you shift perfectives, express ideas in new ways, and potentially connect to new and unexpected publics. On the other hand, multidisciplinary journalism is almost a byword for being a platypus – doing a lot of things but none particularly well. In effect, being multidisciplinary can actually distract journalists from their primary skills of reporting, investigation and, usually, writing. Because of this, journalists sometimes lament the days when writers did writing, photographers did photography, and designers did graphics and illustrations.

I’m sympathetic to the deskilling argument, but I don’t totally buy into it. It is not only clear that shifting perspectives, expressing ideas in new ways and connecting to new publics are all good things, but also, exploring other forms of expression is just fun. But there’s always the possibility that fun can be had with a little help from a partner. There’s no shame in outsourcing some of that talent from your own embodied self. This may just be my own anxieties speaking out loud here, but you can’t always do it all.

I’ve been surprised of late to see a lot more UK academic jobs than the current HE climate would suggest. And now it’s my own department’s turn it seems to enter into the fray.

This week, we in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London are inviting applications from outstanding candidates for three full-time positions: a Lecturer in Media and Creative Industries; a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies; and a Lecturer in Journalism and Media.

The job descriptions set out the different areas we are looking for with each post, though depending on research interests some candidates may be suited to apply for more than one post. For all posts, we expect a commitment to excellence in research that broadly complements current staff interests (see our staff profile pages for more information). Crucially, we are also explicitly looking committed educators, experienced in or dedicated to teaching the highly diverse body of students we have at Birkbeck.

The deadline for all three positions is Friday, 20 April 2012. Informal enquiries can be directed to either Tim Markham (t.markham@bbk.ac.uk) or me (s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk).

Along with my colleagues Sophie Hope and Lorraine Lim – with whom I am co-organising a postgraduate workshop series – I have been invited to partake in a ‘Live Chat’ hosted by the Guardian Higher Education Network. That chat, which takes place on 3 June 2011, addresses the topic ‘Breaching the digital divide: How could HE better use the internet?’

Sophie and Lorraine very graciously agreed to let me serve as our representative on the panel. The the main thing about the chat however is that it actually has participants (the panel as such is mainly to ensure designated discussants for the duration of the live chat). So, if this is your thing, please do consider joining in at some point on 3 June between 1pm and 4pm. To partake, you simply need to visit the above link and add comments to the article (upon which you’ll be asked to register on The Guardian website, but it’s very simple).

I recently wrote about the Doing research amongst technologies workshop series I am co-organising, and for which I co-convened the opening workshop session. I also had a pleasure of attending the second of the series, convened by a colleague from my Open University days, Joe Smith, a consummate public scholar, both in the broadcast and digital realms. I wrote some reflections on Joe’s session over on the workshop website, which focused on the prospects and challenges of doing ‘digital scholarship’. As ever, Joe provided some interesting and often stunning examples of digital scholarship, many concerning his core research areas of environmental change and the politics of consumption.

A recent adventure in which I’ve been involved in organising (with Sophie Hope and Lorraine Lim) is a Summer Term 2011 postgraduate workshop series on Doing research amongst technologies. Aside from work going into convening the different sessions in the workshop series, I managed to talk myself into co-leading the opening workshop. Luckily, I had a very interesting collaborator in Jake Strickland, a virtuoso user of digital media in his own work as an artist, curator and filmmaker. We decided to start things off by being outrageously foundational, and asked our participants the very basic question: what counts as technologies? An account of how that went, and other things we discussed, can be found by reading some reflections on the session over on the workshop series’ blog/website. Details can also be found there for anyone interested in registering for the sessions to come.

UPDATE: The editors of TOPIA have been in touch (how very thorough of them!) and noted a correction – the number for this special issue is TOPIA 28.

Original post:
TOPIA, the Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies has released a call for papers seeking to tackle recent debates on the future of the university, from various cultural studies perspectives. As the CFP rightly indicates, recent events in the UK, Italy, California, Biritsh Columbia, Quebec and beyond have provoked questions not only about how universities should be funded, or even whether or not they should be ‘public’, but more foundationally, how we might determine just what sort of entities universities might or should be (for an interesting overview, see Craig Calhoun’s keynote lecture at the Open University’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance last year). There CFP does not appear to be online, so I will post it in full below for those interested in submitting a paper. [Update: the CFP is now online on the TOPIA website]

CALL FOR PAPERS

‘Out of the Ruins: The University to Come’

Guest Editors: Bob Hanke (York University) and Alison Hearn (University of Western Ontario)

TOPIA 2728, Fall 2012

This special issue of TOPIA seeks contributions (articles, offerings, review essays and book reviews) that reflect on the contemporary university and its discontents. Fifteen years after the publication of Bill Readings’ seminal book The University in Ruins and in the wake of the UK government’s new austerity budget, Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie proclaim the death of the English university. In Italy students demonstrating against the Bologna Process protect themselves from police with giant books. On the heels of severe budget cuts and increasing privatization in the California state system, protesting students occupy university buildings, while in British Columbia and Quebec hundreds of students gather for rallies against spiraling student debt and increasing corporate influence on campus. Everywhere university systems are being eviscerated by neoliberal logics asserting themselves even in the face of economic recession. After decades of chronic under-funding and restructuring, public universities have ceded the university’s public role in a democracy and embraced “academic capitalism” as a “moral” obligation. Acting as venture capitalists, they pressure academics to transfer and mobilize knowledge and encourage research partnerships with private interests; acting as real estate developers, they take over neighbourhoods with callous disregard for established communities; acting as military contractors, they produce telecommunications software and light armoured vehicles for foreign governments; acting as brand managers, they open branch plant campuses around the world and compete for foreign students who can be charged exorbitant fees for access to a “first world” education. With tuition fees and student debt on the rise, academic labour is tiered, cheapened and divided against itself; two-thirds of classes in U.S. colleges and universities are taught by faculty employed on insecure, non tenure-track contracts. The casualization of academic labour and a plea for sustainable academic livelihoods were at the core of the longest strike in English Canadian university history. As collegiality, academic freedom, and self-governance recede from view, the university remains a terrain of adaptation and struggle.

We will need all the conceptual tools that cultural studies can muster to analyze the changing university as the foundation for our academic callings and scholarly practices. In addition to external influences such as globalization, technoscience, corporatization, mediatization, and higher education policy, internal managerial initiatives, bureaucratization, deprofessionalization, structural complicity between administration and faculty, and intellectual subjectivities must also be analyzed. All of us, no matter what our political position, must take the time to reflect on the broad questions raised by these changes. Is the site of the university worth struggling over or re-imagining? Can the neoliberal university be set against itself? Is it time for reform or exodus? What other practices of knowledge production, interpretations, modes of organization, and assemblages are possible? This special issue is designed to reflect upon, analyze and strategize about the past, present and future of the university.

In addition to these matters of concern, possible topics to further dialogue and enable further study include but are not limited to:

• analyzing and assessing the crisis of the public university
• implementing globalizations: theory, rhetoric and historical experience
• continuity and transformation in national academic cultures
• the position and role of the arts, humanities and social sciences
• university leaders and university making
• managerial theory/practice, academic ethics, and the symbolism of university finance
• university-private sector intermediaries and initiatives; “innovation” and “creativity” as alibis for academic capitalism; knowledge “transfer” and “mobilization”
• marketing, media relations and the promotional condition of the university
• space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university
• the professor-entrepreneur, research practice, and the imperative to produce
• academic labour, tenure, stratification and precarity
• faculty governance, unions and institutional democracy
• the indebted, student-worker and the decline of academic study
• scholarly disciplines and territories, infrastructure, information practices, communication and publishing
• the scholarly community of money: grant agencies, writing, committees and adjudication
• media/cultural production and critical/radical pedagogy
• the development of knowledge cultures and the expansion of the commons
• the university in relation to nearby communities and wider social movements
• resistance, common and counter-knowledge, alternative educational formations
• remaking the public university in Canada and in other national contexts

Submissions

To view the author guidelines, see http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

To submit papers (with titles, abstracts and keywords) and supplementary media files online, you need to register and login to the TOPIA website at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/user/register.

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2012. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by May 15, 2012. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due July 5, 2012. Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke bhanke@yorku.ca or Alison Hearn ahearn2@uwo.ca.

It’s been too long since I have written in these parts. My excuse is twofold: (1) most importantly, happily becoming a parent for the first time this past December, which, for those in the know, is a momentous and notably anti-blog-post-writing event; and (2) enduring a remarkably busy teaching term, of which I am only just now glimpsing the end. I do have a goodly range of things I meant to write about, if for nothing else than to get them out of my head. Some I will follow through on, some I may not, if and when that thought-moment has passed. Anyway, more to come as the title says. Have A Nice Day…

One of the more valuable interventions vis-à-vis the Browne Review (alongside Stefan Collini’s excellent article in the London Review of Books) has been Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie’s ‘The Death of the University, English Style’. I liked their paper because it is succinct and also has a helpful focus on the implications for media and cultural studies. Above is a video version of the same, speaking to some of the real dangers of the current higher education reform proposals, related to but also going beyond this week’s impending House of Commons vote (on 9 December) which will decide on whether the fee cap will be increased to £9,000.

Is ‘neoliberalism’ a concept that works for understanding media? As I left a workshop last Friday at University College London, on the subject of ‘postneoliberalism’, I asked myself this question. My initial, rather impulsive, answer at the beginning of the workshop was no. But I need to put that answer into context.

The workshop was focused on how debates on city development and urban politics might move beyond a near hegemonic (and often unthinking) framing lens of ‘neoliberalism’. I myself came to this workshop as a skeptic about neoliberalism as concept. That – to be clear – is not to say that I don’t think there are certain very damaging models of market thinking being applied to a wide variety of settings and sectors. A clear and present example, in which I’ve been involved recently, is the extremely worrying market model being proposed by the UK coalition government for higher education. And there are many others.

However, I was certainly a skeptic about the easy deployment of neoliberalism by far too many scholars to frame virtually any political policy or phenomena, more often than not without defining what is meant by the term. This is to say that I’ve felt for some time, following perhaps one AAG conference too many, that the term is misused and often abused. At its worst, it often rather unfortunately ends up being little more than a tag line for scholars to demonstrate their criticality. I think Clive Barnett is right to argue that critical scholars who use neoliberalism are often very good about stating what they are critical of, yet do quite poorly in providing a plausible case for what they are critical for, aside from occasional gestures to (usually implicit) utopian ideals. I also think writers like James Ferguson are right to note that neoliberally-conceived market arrangements are often creatively re-imagined by NGOs and activists to form the basis for pragmatic (imperfect yet effective) measures that make the lives of the poor and disposed demonstrably better. And this might just mean that Michel Callon is right: we really ought not leave the detailed analysis about how markets work (and might work) to the economists.

So, back to my impulsive ‘no’ for whether neoliberalism is an adequate concept that works for unerstanding media. Actually, it wasn’t a question I was asked directly: we were doing an introductory go-round, where were asked to identify ourselves and what we hoped to get out of the event. I more or less said something along the lines of neoliberalism not necessarily having the same central place in media studies that it does in human geography, and particularly in studies that connect media and urban politics. This is despite the fact, I added, the longstanding and intrinsic market or commercial basis of so much of the Western media industries. In saying this, I suppose my contrasting point of reference was the tendency for work using the concept of neoliberalism in urban studies to be focused on state actors and their policy programs. In as far as such examples seem to assume a one-way rolling out of state strategy, they seemed to offer little, and admit little, in relation to a more ‘circulatory’ idea like urban public culture.

As the day wore on, however, it did occur to me that this initial statement wasn’t quite accurate, at least not on the surface. First of all, not only have the media industries from their inception been based on the commercial exploitation of symbolic goods (as John Thompson noted in his The Media and Modernity), but it might also be plausibly argued that a major aspect in a typical suite of so-called neoliberal reform policies is the deregulation and commercialisation of communication markets. Second, if one were to be using neoliberalism in a different way, to denote forms of governmentality (i.e. the conduct of conduct), then there is certainly a story about how mediated knowledge and affects might encourage ways of thinking that could be described as neoliberal. Nick Couldry’s recent book Why Voice Matters makes the argument – though not necessarily in a governmentality vein – that major media amplify ‘neoliberal values’, and this is why people need effective ways to express their voice on those matters that affect their lives.

I’m starting to circle about, but I think after Friday’s workshop my answer still remains conditionally no. Conditional, anyway, if we are referring to a neoliberalism which is an objective process, driving or otherwise defining various media-related practices. Perhaps the most useful distinction coming out of the workshop was between neoliberalism as ontological concept versus neoliberalism as a (oppositional?) label. If we are talking about the latter, I suppose I am more comfortable. If we are talking about the former, and especially if we are talking about case studies which seem to offer little more than yet another predictable instance of neoliberalism in action, then I’m not so comfortable.