Posts Tagged academia
MLA 2011 and #mla11: on tweeting conventions
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2011
I’ve just spent quite an exhiliarating weekend attending the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles. MLA had previously been known to me by reputation as a terrifyingly large conference, a place to hear academic rock stars strut their stuff but, for grad students, a purgatory that mainly had to be endured because of the job interviews that take place there. With neither a presentation nor the job market to worry about, and with the luxury of being able to recharge at home whenever I wanted, that couldn’t have been further from my experience. I was able to engage with the conference in a stress-free way and to immerse myself in the new modes of participation Rosemary Feal has been encouraging. When I ran into colleagues and told them how much I was enjoying myself, they tended to look fairly astonished.
Those who followed my twitter stream may have been less surprised. I’ve livetweeted quite a few conferences now, first taking the plunge at DML 2010 after lurking in digital media studies twitter streams more or less for as long as they’ve existed. I love swimming through the datastream, documenting comments, thoughts and interactions as they occur; I find more and more that there is a particular zone of attention it is possible to enter, where I can synthesize and transmit as I hear and engage far more intensely with what’s being said than I ever would otherwise.
The capacity to do that depends immensely on the style and substance of what is being said, of course. MLA is the largest conference I’ve ever attended, with a range of topics of discussion that’s so large it’s difficult to contemplate. For what it’s worth (and I wish I knew a way to easily link to portions of a twitterstream, but I didn’t tag panel numbers consistently), these are the panels I attended. I’d have liked to see more, but the disadvantage of a conference where you can go home any time you want is that you also have all your usual home commitments.
12. Labor in the Digital Humanities
74. Queerness and Disability
86. Writing with Eve: the Legacy of Eve Sedgwick
230A. Speculative Fictions: ‘Near Future’ Visions of Race and Politics
309. The History and Future of the Digital Humanities (#309)
366. Sedgwick’s Endurance: Writing with Loss
580. The Traffic in Gender: New Directions in Trans Scholarship
I wish I had managed to attend more of the “academy in hard times” panels and more on critical race studies, but what I did attend probably gives a good overview of my interests. I attended some of the intensely tweeted digital humanities panels, but more where there were relatively few people attached to their computers. In a digital humanities panel, tweeting made me part of an active backchannel conversation. In other panels, where I was either the only person tweeting or one of just a few, I felt like a broadcasting device, charged with bringing the discussion to those who would have liked to be present but couldn’t, and fervently hoping I wouldn’t misrepresent a speaker. I had some anxiety about sharing people’s words without permission, but enough online acquaintances (many from fannish and activist communities outside the academy, who would never have known about MLA but for its twitter presence) expressed interest my microblogging that I decided to keep going.
Making notes and tweeting in all those panels made me think a lot about the way ideas get presented orally. I often see comments complaining about the way humanities scholars read their papers aloud in conferences, calling for more dynamic modes of presentation. I agree with that to a a degree; no one wants to listen to someone mumbling into a sheet of paper, and we ought to study and practice presentation skills as much as we do writing. But outside the digital humanities panels I attended, most of the presentations I saw were more or less read, and that didn’t stop them from being easy to follow and engaging. I’ve begun to think about tweetability as an index for conference papers’ intelligibility: if they’re easy to parse into 140-character chunks, I am able to feel that I have assimilated what the speakers had to say.
There were two panels in particular where I found the talks sufficiently tweetable that I felt I was able to share with my community of scholars, fans, and online activists, letting them know what was being said inside the academy. The first was a marvellous panel on race and speculative fiction with papers from Chris Cunningham on Phillip K Dick’s imaginings of black leadership, Curtis Marez talking about the United Farm Workers movement as a political undercurrent to Star Wars, Shelley Streeby on queer families and black vampires in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and Kara Keeling on District 9, globalized cinema and black futurity.
The second was Jack Halberstam, Dean Spade and Aren Aizura’s panel on new directions in trans scholarship, though I think my capacity to tweet there was aided by my prior familiarity with Jack and Dean’s ideas and speaking voices. One of the main points all the speakers made in that panel was that sometimes it is politically important to remain unintelligible, that much can be lost when what is marginal becomes comprehensible to dominant discourses. The best example is Dean Spade‘s work on the history of state-sponsored quantitative studies and what kinds of content they require in order to render citizens legible.
While it’s something of a twisted appropriation of the panel’s radical anti-assimilationist politics to say so, I think there is a similar value to difficult intelligibility when it comes to thinking about ideas. And that makes me want to resist my own desire to make every new idea condensable to a 140-character reduction. In the Sedgwick memorial panels, particularly the talks by Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Lee Edelman, the theoretical content of presentations was of an intensity that I find difficult to parse until I have written it down. Deep theory is not tweetable, at least not for me, though attempting to synthesize it on the run is fascinating and engaging as an intellectual workout. Listening to talks of that kind is an experience of grasping the insight that runs away before you can type to the end of the sentence. I tried tweeting what I could catch hold of, but I’m not sure it was useful. Still, I’d hesitate to say that these scholars should begin to give tweetable papers, should package their thought for easier consumption; I think something would be lost then too.
open universities
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on October 23, 2010
Over at HASTAC, there’s an interesting conversation going on about Openness in Academia. I am especially enjoying the ways different definitions of openness are being connected and examined: accessibility not just to technology but also to the conceptual and political visions of what the academy means; the role of online identities to scholars and other intellectuals and the ways privacy and privatization both do and do not connect; questions about teaching and the open classroom versus the matter of whether education is something that its ‘consumers’ should pay for. I recommend checking it out.
This conversation strikes me as especially important right now because I’ve been glued to the news of the drastic cuts in public funding for higher education and just about everything else in the UK. If higher education had not been public, if it had been viewed as something that one’s parents have to pay for (as it is the the US), I can’t imagine how I could have got in to the position I’m in today. I attended university in Scotland when fees had just been introduced, but I wasn’t eligible to pay them, and thanks to the encouragement of my family I got to more or less inherit the way of thinking about university education as something to which I had a right regardless of my economic status. I was already lucky to be able to think that way, to see education as a way to expand what my world could include rather that as something I would invest in and consume in order to make me a more successful participant in a narrowly-defined world of work. The current UK government is tearing down the last remnants of that sense of openness, sending out the message that intellectual openness is a luxury only for the rich and impractical, and it’s breaking my heart.
HASTAC crosspost; fandom, academia, and knowledge production
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on September 4, 2010
I’m involved in the Duke University and MacArthur-sponsored HASTAC this year, as a HASTAC scholar. I’ve been following the conversations and events associated with HASTAC and its various members for years, so I am pleased to be making it official. I hope to crosspost blogs here and on the HASTAC site.
I thought I’d start off my introductory blog post by reflecting a little on the process that has sucked me in to the digital humanities. I feel that I’m only beginning to think about how digital engagement can alter the form and the possibilities of my scholarly work — supplementing writing with video editing as a way to approach and think about how connections between ideas can be expressed, contemplating the way links and tweets and blogs change the shape of narrative and research and analysis. But before I was a professional scholar, I was being led to think about these questions by different paths.
I’m first and foremost a scholar of gender and sexuality, and my own understanding of those things has been massively impacted by my participation in online cultures and by my involvement, as a reader and a fan, with science fiction. I am fascinated by the extent to which digital practices and fictional engagements come to shape our selves and worlds — something that came up fascinatingly with reference to online avatars and other practices during the recent HASTAC forum about queer and feminist media. While I’ve been working on my dissertation, which takes a historical and theoretical look at that question by exploring how a range of fictional engagements with imaginary futures have been used to challenge dominant models of gender and sexuality, I’ve also been a participant in and archivist of science-fiction-focused online fan cultures — and the conversations I’ve been part of there have influenced my intellectual work as much as the scholarship I read in academic journals does.
One of the ideas I’d like to think about while at HASTAC is the extent to which I’ve experienced fandom as a place where all kinds of digital knowledge production happen outside of the confines of academic institutions. I’d like to think that the support for open access scholarship, and the growth of conferences and so forth that bring scholars and different kinds of practitioners together, could include a space for acknowledging the work of amateurs for whom creation and analysis are a crucial part of the texture of their lives regardless of economic or professional reward. Of course that brings up all kinds of contradictions (not least that amateurs themselves don’t always want to be engage with the academic world, or subcultural participants with the mainstream; many parts of fandom firmly prefer to stay in the internet’s backwaters).
I’d like to share a couple of links about fan communities as sites of knowledge production. Alice Bell, an old friend of mine and science studies scholar who has recently become a high-profile science communication blogger, has a discussion about fandom as a frequent practice of self-education at Matthew C Nisbet’s blog Age of Engagement.
At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, there’s also an older piece I helped bring into being, a roundtable on fandom and antiracist activism, published by the open access journal on fan studies whose editorial team I’m part of: Pattern Recognition. Since a year and a half tends to be a very long time in online culture, a lot has changed since the events discussed there, but I still think it’s vitally important to recognize the ways that academic and activist discourses — including, as Alice’s article helped me to think about, scientific ones — contribute to, and get added to, in the context of relatively marginal online cultures.
A video about vidding
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on August 11, 2010
Earlier this year, Anita Sarkeesian of the blog Feminist Frequency invited Julie Levin Russo and I to give a talk on vidding as part of an event on “Remixing Gender and Sexuality” that she was organizing at Cal State Northridge. She has now posted the video online, so you can see Julie and I explain the history of fan video and also watch Jonathan McIntosh talk about political remix video.
I’m excited about this video not just because it shows Julie’s and my talk (although this is my first online video appearance…), but also because it gives people a chance to watch a half-hour vidshow online. The vidding convention Vividcon, which is organized largely around cinema-style vidshows, has just taken place, and it’s been making me think about the pros and cons of watching fanvids with and without detailed contextualization. There is something affectively powerful about seeing video on a large screen, especially given the intense attention to emotional impact that many vidders give, and that can be made even stronger by the juxtapositions between different vids; but, comparing the vidshow we created with the annotated style of discussion that Jonathan used in his talk, it’s clear there’s also something lost, in terms of comprehension.
***
While I’m on the subject of vidding, I want also to link to a recent piece of legal news that bears heavily on it. In July, the Library of Congress announced an exemption to the DMCA for critical remix, which means that it is no longer illegal for remixers to rip footage from DVDs they own in order to create new works from it. This only scratches the surface of the tangled legal issues surrounding vidding (and legality is a limited if necessary angle on why vidding is a legitimate creative practice, anyway, as I’ve argued in an essay on the subject, “Living in a Den of Thieves“), but it’s certainly a good thing.
Digital Media and Learning
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on February 21, 2010
I spent the weekend in a state of gleeful intellectual overstimulation, at the Digital Media and Learning Conference at UC San Diego. The theme was ‘diversifying participation,’ and most of the presentations I attended focused intensely on the divisions, inequalities and conflicts that utopian or dystopian rhetorics about the digital future too often obscure.
I was part of a panel on fan video, which was slightly misrepresented in the program, as we had expected to feature some discussion of other kinds of participatory culture but ended up with five people (six including Francesca Coppa‘s Skype appearance) all steeped in the same fanvidding culture. It made for very complementary talks, but was perhaps a little opaque to outsiders. I dashed around frantically trying to make the recalcitrant technology speak to my computer and gave a short talk on how vidding can be a form of literacy that makes subjugated knowledge formations visible in mainstream media.
S. Craig Watkins’s keynote on black and Latino youth use of digital media was quite fascinating. Watkins talked about the different uses different social groups make of digital media, with particular reference to hip hop culture, and how poor and working class young people can be disadvantaged because the publicity of social networking profiles, twitter etc necessitates such complicated code switching. The news that young people of color spend more time online than young white people was greeted with much excitement on the twitter stream; I couldn’t help thinking that, rather than greater equality, this just marks a change the relationship between access and class. There are a fair few science fiction texts that feature an elite free from the surveillance and alienation of data connections through which working classes labor (two offhand examples: Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer and L. Timmel DuChamp’s five-novel Marq’ssan cycle).
As the conference went on, may aspects of my concerns were mirrored in others’ comments. They are also taken up in Kristina Busse’s non-attending response post to the conference where she argues that, given the current industrial dynamics of the academy, we have to recognize the material privilege that being able to attend large events requires, and make them digitally available to those who lack those resources. DML was free and open to those who could make it, but didn’t have the tech set up for remote viewing.
Despite my presence in the flesh I didn’t get to attend as many panels as I would have liked, partly because I had to leave early. Other highlights of the conference for me included discussions of race in online avatar representations from Lisa Nakamura and Beth Coleman among others, talking about how we need to think about much more than the visual coding of avatars and its relationship to RL images of race: among other things, structures of kinship and belonging and global labor politics should be part of that discussion. I especially appreciated Nakamura’s remarks about how great value is placed on subverting the rules of games when they are remade in forms like machinima, but when capitalist practices like gold farming break the rules they are only seen as cheating.
Most relevant to my own work was the panel on Queer You(th)Tube, with Jonathan Alexander, Elizabeth Losh, and Alex Juhasz. Alexander and Losh laid out the context of online queerness and demonstrated the generic markers of YouTube coming-out videos, talking about the ways queer communities form online and move offline, the support networks that emerge, and how some queers get left off the map. I found the sincerity, diffidence, bravado and anxiety of the queer teenagers’ vlogs quite moving, and it made me quite nostalgic for the message-board-enabled digital development of my own queer self-understanding.
Juhasz punctured that bubble with her provocative YouTube presentation, which took up the parodies made by straight kids of these earnest online comings-out and connected them to what she understands as a pervasive, conservative miasma of irony that permeates all our online discourse. Her critique of the lack of critical distance was very reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s 1980s analysis of postmodernism, but she emphasized one difference; as Juhasz’s recursive use of YouTube to make her attacks on YouTube underlines, her criticisms of irony are themselves ironic. The debate made me think about the multiple definitions of queer that I feel I am constantly trying to balance in my own work: community, sense of self, political identity, political anti-identity, disruption. Queer theory also offers many important interventions to the intense focus on ‘youth’ that tends to dominate discussions of digital pedagogy: learning is not exclusive to the young, and too often all people are assumed to share an overly normalizing life narrative. Similarly, queer and other radical pedagogies remind us that learning never flows only in one direction, from teacher to student.
Thanks to Twitter and HASTAC’s liveblogging, I was able to get a sense of the panels I missed on the last afternoon. It seems that the critical reflections crossing my mind were crossing many others’ too. As always, I am eager to see what may come of the questions raised about institutionalized vs unofficial knowledge production which are now being addressed in Busse’s blog comments.
New media and old institutions: 2
Posted by Alexis Lothian in fandom, media on February 7, 2009
I’ve written about vidding quite a lot on this blog. It’s an artform that is getting steadily more attention: as one facet of the web’s enabling of grassroots, amateur filmmaking, as part of the long history of women’s work with media, as a valuable kind of media literacy. Last weekend, I made a pilgrimage to Riverside to attend the opening of an exhibition that features what is, as far as I know, the first vid to be exhibited in an art gallery.
The vid is Us by Lim (link goes to Kristina Busse’s In Media Res curation), a profound and multifaceted and deep and beautiful piece with which I have a very intimate affective relationship.
I have a short essay coming out in Cinema Journal’s In Focus section that talks about the way the vid comments on piracy and intellectual property in ways that address their significance beyond the (important) legal arguments for fair use by highlighting the artistic and cultural work of media ‘theft’. I love the vid not only for that but for the critique it embeds of academic work on fan cultures, like the work I have done, crystallized in the image of Henry Jenkins as Regina Spektor sings “the tourists come and stare at us”. That critique is not, in my interpretation (which has been strengthened through email conversations with Lim) an expression of hostility, merely an acknowledgment of the power dynamics brought into being by relative institutional status, and economic/cultural privilege.
So what about the power dynamics that come into play when this vid, which speaks to and from a particular subcultural context but has been distributed and discussed well beyond it, is shown to a new kind of public in an art gallery?
I bought the catalogue for the exhibition, which is a beautifully designed little book. The images from Us and the other artworks are shiny and stunning. As you would expect, each artist has a bio, detailing their training and achievements. Lim’s places her outside the professional art world, making it clear that she doesn’t produce work with this audience in mind; it is followed by an essay on the “Anthropology of YouTube” by Michael Wesch. It’s an excellent essay, which explains the work online video does very well. Although it doesn’t go into any depth on the particular activity of vidding, I think it provides a good introductory context.
However, anthropology is a word that makes me nervous; it hints at colonial dynamics, power held by the looker-on and explainer of a strange culture as it is denied to the members of that culture themselves. I know that those aspects of anthropology have been intensely critiqued; but I think it’s worth thinking about the discomfort anyway. As Julie Levin Russo reminded me when I talked about this with her, the problem with anthropological discourse here is precisely the critique that Lim makes of academic fan studies in her vid. Some artists are in the gallery and in the catalogue because it is part of their professional lives, because it will bring them material benefits; some are invited there from other contexts and have to be anthropologically explained. The relationship to explanation, to academic criticism, to exposure won’t and can’t be the same.
I would hazard a guess that, although vidding as a subcultural practice is pretty marginal, there are a lot more people out there who are familiar with YouTube culture than with the art world. But it’s hard to imagine an anthropology that would go the other way. That was what I wanted as I wandered through the exhibit, though: I wanted to record the conversations people might have been having in front of the vid, wanted to hear what interpretations it elicited in a setting so divorced from the ones where I had encountered it. It’s those conversations that are at the heart of what it means to show this work there, as far as I am concerned, and I miss the inbuilt archive for commentary–and impromptu anthropology–that YouTube, imeem and other online video-sharing platforms contain.
New media and old institutions: 1
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on February 2, 2009
I attended a couple of events this week that set me thinking about the complex swirl of issues around digital identity and community, art and academia and their institutions, and how the possibilities online tools and cultures make available translate (and fail to translate) between different forms, different agendas.
First was The Future of Mediated Scholarship, part of a workshop series the Institute for Multimedia Literacy is running for USC graduate students. The talks included USC Associate Vice Provost Susan Metros presenting the Horizon report predicting technological futures (a very science-fictional experience), Mark Marino giving tips for online research tools, and Elizabeth Losh on online pedagogical spaces. Losh wrote a blog entry about the event which makes a grad student at USC sound like a wonderfully exciting thing to be, while also detailing the important questions she raised in her talk.
However, I mainly wanted to write about Kathleen Fitzpatrick‘s talk on the future of scholarly publishing, which kept me frantically typing notes (and the occasional twitter update) throughout.
Fitzpatrick, who’s one of the founders of the ever fabulous Media Commons, talked about the obsolescence of the current scholarly publishing model and the range of things that “obsolescence” means. She summarized her first book‘s argument that frantic declarations about the death of the book tend to mean primarily that a literary elite is afraid its privileged form will no longer be the centre of cultural relevance, then moved on to the conditions of publication of that book to explore the ‘crisis in scholarly publishing’ that means scholars’ first tenure-securing books struggle to find publishers. The book as a form may continue to live, paper being rather more durable than outdated operating systems et cetera; but the academic monograph as a profitable entity is verifiably dead. However, as it is required by the institutional structures of academe, it lives on–it is undead.
Zombie metaphors make any academic talk better. Fitzpatrick moved on from hers to talk about how scholarly publishing has to change to become more alive than (un)dead. Quoting my notes:
Until scholars believe publishing on the web is as valuable as print and until they believe their institutions also believe it, few will risk their careers. Social, intellectual and institutional change are necessary. The ways we research, write, peer review, have to change. The system of peer review is part of what is broken in the current system of scholarly publishing. It is a disciplinary technology that creates the conditions of possibility for the academic institution: the disciplined are gradually given the technology to discipline others. In print, it serves primarily a gatekeeping role, excluding some realms of discourse from the realm of the thinkable. In the digital, scarcity is over: anyone can publish anything, we face an extraordinary plenitude. Digital humanities needs to develop not a means of applying peer review to create artificial scarcity but rather to find a means of coping with abundance, of working within a living system of scholarly publication.
I’ll resist reproducing the rest of the talk in order to think about what a “living system of scholarly publication” might mean, what it already means. In this talk, and in other conversations about new mediations for scholarly dissemination, there’s talk of how blind peer review could be replaced: metrics? Open public comments? Something else? Open source scholarship published publically online is, by definition, open to enter into different living economies of publication, to be read in unexpected ways, just as books are; but books (and peer reviewed journal publications) aren’t validated based on the status they hold in multiple intersecting subcultural publics. For practical institutional reasons, I’m sure no open peer review system would be either; yet in the living systems of publication I’ve been talking about for my last couple of posts, that’s exactly what happens.
In online fandom, as you can see if you follow the links I gave in my last two posts and their ever-multiplying counterparts, abundance is the rule. Every participant has a soapbox and if their contributions to public conversations are considered valuable they get cited and passed around, fans develop reputations for particular critical and political positions, paradigm shifts happen and are contested, personalities clash. I think of fast-changing landscapes like this and other blog-based communities when I think of a living system of publication, in large part because my own scholarly work (whether or not it is about those spaces) is shaped by them and by the networks I’ve built through them at least as much as, if not more than, it is by traditional academic contexts.
As one of the editors of Transformative Works and Cultures‘s Symposium section, I’m committed to bringing the online meta-sphere’s and academia’s institutional discourses into conversation, to the idea that academia and other subcultural presences can meet on something approaching even terms. Media Commons shares the same commitment, as far as I can tell. It still seems clear to me that institutional professionalism and the nonprofessional, community-oriented (even when conflict-driven) spaces of living, open publication must always sit uncomfortably together. Yet I can’t think of them as wholly separate. I’m not sure if that’s just because I personally occupy the borders between them or if there’s something more significant to be said there.
Maybe I’ll get to figuring that out in the second part of this post, about this exhibition, which I will put up in the next day or two. I wish I were a speedier blogger.
Fair use and scholarly vidding
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on October 27, 2008
Today I attended the Fair Use and the Future of the Commons event sponsored by the USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy. Veronica Paredes is hosting a related discussion at HASTAC.
Much of what was discussed I had some familiarity with through my work on vidding; I am in the process or revising a short essay that talks about fair and unfair use (emphasis on the possibilities that accompany the latter) through Lim’s stunning fanvid “Us”. I have, until now, kept my discussions of vidding in this space strictly theoretical. But listening to lawyers talk optimistically about fair use, learning about digitally enabled new forms of scholarship from people like Phillip Ethington, Eric Faden, Virginia Kuhn and Steve Anderson, and reading the Center for Social Media’s code of practice for online video, I realised that there’s no reason for me not to share my own attempts at transformative scholarly work.
Last year, with the encouragement of a workshop-style graduate class on alternative models of scholarship, I learned some rudimentary skills in video editing and Flash, and I used them to make a visual and textual analysis and repurposing of some recent dystopian films which fascinate me. The central film here is a fan video that makes visual an argument that, together with the rest of the framework that complicates and questions it, will likely form a significant part of my dissertation. If I can figure out how to get it into words.
Making this and sharing it in various contexts has really helped me think in new ways about scholarship, visuality, media and knowledge production. And it has given me (perhaps even not only me) some new approaches to the films and to some of the questions around gendered and racialized violence, survival, futurity and representation that it tries to articulate.
For those of you I’ve shown this to before, I’ve adjusted it so that you see a works cited, disclaimer and acknowledgment page before you click to the video. Just exercising a little fair use-related paranoia; but I rather like the result that you have to figure out how to make anything happen.