November 9th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink
I’m currently Adjunct Assistant Professor in Modern Culture & Media at Brown University, where I received my PhD in 2010. From 2010-2011 I was Acting Assistant Professor in the Film & Media Studies Program at Stanford University. I work on television, digital media, convergence, remix/fan production, and gender and sexuality.
Blog entries earlier than 2012 were imported from my previous website (comments are disabled).
April 15th, 2011 § Comments Off § permalink
Déja vu: at this time two years ago, I was scrambling to line up adjunct teaching or other contingent academic work. Now, after a full-time visiting appointment at Stanford in the interim, I'm entering that phase again.
Since October, I've applied for ~15 tenure-track jobs in my area (television, new media, and/or convergence), interviewed for 7, and conducted campus visits for 2. In the process, I've had the occasion to learn about and reflect on the academic job market. There's always the outside chance of an end-run, but I think it's now safe to say that I won't be starting a permanent position in the fall.
In the course of my emerging career, I've absorbed a certain radical narrative about the humanities and higher ed in the US. It circulates in online networks outside the purview of my grad school advisors and peers, among a certain set of academic twitterati, interdisciplinary centers and organizations, and education hackers. It goes something like this: Today, the university is in crisis. As PhD students, our professors are out of touch with how to train and prepare us for the realities of over-production and under-employment. Teaching is as important as research to our profile, but college pedagogy is hopelessly ill-suited to the interests and needs of students today. The humanities are under siege from privatization and anti-intellectualism, and in order to survive our institutions must change. Open scholarship, digital tools, and interdisciplinary alliances are the future. To succeed (at least in the cutting-edge discipline of media studies), we must stand out by demonstrating connections and competencies in this broader project in addition to traditional academic achievements and skills.
This narrative has resonated with and shaped my values as a scholar, which I would summarize as follows:
My wish for a career as a professor is that I will work in a position that affirms these values. I'm well aware that this probably doesn't describe the majority of tenure-track jobs. For the most part, I subscribe to the notion of "fit" -- i.e. hiring committees are looking not for the BEST candidate but for the best fit for a department's particular culture and requirements -- and I understand that finding the right "fit" for me may require patience spanning several years.
If I find myself re-evaluating the system at large, it's primarily the result not of my condition of overall joblessness but of my participant observation of the constitution, process, and result of one particular search. Unfortunately, it's not appropriate for me to describe the specifics publicly, and certainly my perspective is limited. Suffice it to say that, within the beaurocratic mire of the tenure-track, it seems that even very unconventional positions may be filled based on very conventional criteria.
My experiences are inadvertently rewriting my narrative, and I feel a particular responsibility to share these thoughts because, barely a month ago, I participated in a workshop at the SCMS conference on "Blogging, Tweeting, and Posting: Online Media Community Building and Scholarly Promotion." With whatever authority was granted me by this venue, I reiterated the proposition that yes, the titular activities will give you a leg up on the market by offering you name recognition, academic networking, and cutting-edge cachet. I would like to retract this optimism, which now appears premature.
I'm succumbing to a suspicion that the ponderous institutional weight attached to tenure-track hires works to advance the most conservative, middle-of-the-road candidates -- not, in fact, the ones who stand out as unique. In fact, I think there may be divergent logics at work in shortlisting vs. eventual hiring: that innovative touch (the blog, the open access publication, the public lecture, the artist talk, the multimedia assignment, the course website) may be attention-getting enough to land you the interview, but as a group of people with varied backgrounds and status must reach consensus on a finalist who can then pass muster with upper echelons of the administration, will it really get you the job?
So I begin to wonder: will I ever find the "fit" I'm seeking as a tenure-track professor? Now, I'm not saying that I'm giving up on this endeavor just yet. Throwing in the towel after one year on the market would be hubris -- the mantra of rejection should always be: It's Not About You. That said, after struggling with depression for some time now, it's telling that I'm now experiencing a new sense of agency over my future. I'm starting to ask: what if I don't assume that I must follow this normative path -- what other possibilities for my life can I envision?
Meanwhile, looking toward next year's market, I'm re-evaluating my strategies.
Here's how I've been spending most of my time since finishing my PhD:
Here is the only thing that will strengthen my candidacy for tenure-track jobs:
Given this conjuncture, I have to make some changes in my life to focus more on the latter and less on the former. No more new courses, for one, but I also intend to decline any further unorthodox or online projects. I have promised or planned further documentation of my Stanford teaching -- including a blog post about using Elgg as a course platform, a blog post about my evolving strategies for grading, recordings of some lectures, and a "TV show" showcasing student videos -- that is hereby abandoned on the basis of these new priorities. I will also be taking a hiatus from twitter.
As for next year, I don't know yet where I'll be -- in a postdoc, adjuncting in this area, or somewhere else entirely. But now -- as a result, I must emphasize, of access to financial and emotional support from my family -- I have choices.
August 29th, 2010 § Comments Off § permalink
I wrote this piece for my department's Autumn 2010 Almanac, an internal publication organized by grad students. I'm happy I can also share it here. Coming soon: a more pragmatic report on using elgg for my course website.
Last February, the first annual Digital Media and Learning conference convened at UC San Diego. Sponsored by the Digital Media and Learning Hub (a project of the Irvine-based University of California Humanities Research Institute) with major funding from the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, this event marked an influential intervention into current discourses on education. With doomsayers proclaiming that 21st century technology poisons our children and idealists touting the potential of today's "digital natives", the debate over media literacies demands sustained critique. At its best, the DML conference, through a serious engagement in its theme of "diversifying participation," stimulated nuanced and pragmatic conversations about productive places for technology in the classroom. But in my opinion, the role of higher education in this enterprise remained ambivalent and indistinct, no doubt in part due to MacArthur's emphasis on childhood. While many projects in the orbit of instructional technology and the digital humanities (including HASTAC, the Duke-based Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, also funded by MacArthur) build bridges between educators in different milieus, there are important institutional disjunctures that strain these alliances.
Not least of which is the university's equivocal relationship to humanities pedagogy -- especially now, while the field tries to weather a crisis of legitimacy. Is it humanities research or liberal arts teaching that is most valuable, and how do we make a case for either when privatization drives higher learning toward IP and professional training? Our cultural and economic mania for technology renders new media central to these negotiations, as every interested party struggles to incorporate the possibilities of digital platforms (or, more cynically, to cash in on the hype). Accordingly, the discipline of media studies is in a unique position to mediate (so to speak) the conflicting investments and imperatives converging on the scene of higher education. master tea original flavor low prices We have an opportunity to demonstrate the merits of a critical approach and contribute to emerging praxis in creating, transmitting, archiving, and representing cultural production -- and yes, teaching it to college students.
This commitment to the stakes of media literacy animates my development as a teacher. Now, the discourse of literacies is not without its problems, and the dispute rages on about whether (or, more realistically, how) computers, video, and mobile devices belong in the classroom (and in young people's lives overall). Technology is certainly not a magic bullet that revolutionizes education by its mere presence, nor are today's students impossible to engage without internets and gadgetry. But judicious deployment of digital tools can support old-fashioned pedagogical principles like participation and assessment, as well as connect learning to our contemporary milieu. 2 step coc/cocaine detox program for persons over 200 lbs I would argue that the humanities do have a responsibility to demonstrate relevance, and that it is my job to help students make meaningful links between the theoretical traditions of my field and their own personal and social experiences.
Most of my courses cover topics related to television and cyberculture, formations with particular ubiquity in these life experiences. Here, a reflexive approach that facilitates learning through and not just about these media seems essential. Experiential pedagogy involves students in using the artifacts that we're studying and in thinking critically about this use. I would not teach online community, for example, without a course website that allows us to explore and evaluate representative systems in a structured way. Moreover, I encourage students to engage with media form, aesthetics, and infrastructure as creators, not just as users. Written composition is no longer the professional world's primary skill, and competence in multimedia rhetorics is something I would like students to take from my discipline, as communicators as well as critics. buy single panel coc/cocaine home urine test kit For these reasons, I often incorporate at least one visual or multimodal project into my classes.
Of course, non-traditional assignments bring specific challenges. It can already be hard to cover adequate topical material in a quarter, much less master technical capabilities within a studies course. Budgeting scarce resources, from time to expertise to equipment, is often difficult. I have found that offering students individualized guidance plus a suite of resources appropriate for various levels is more effective than attempting to systematically teach aptitude. With this launchpad plus guidelines emphasizing the recommended steps in the process of completing a project, Stanford undergrads seem more than capable of self-directed and innovative problem-solving. Most importantly, I stress that creative work in a studies course is evaluated based on its rigor, originality, and intelligibility and not on its technical polish. zydot ultimate blend orange flavor buy. With today's vernacular tools, it is eminently possible to devise a compelling online artwork using only simple interfaces. In fact, the changing landscape of today's media industries and social web depends on facilitating this sort of "user-generated content".
Much credit goes to my students for excelling at synthesizing their talents and viewpoints with critical texts in inventive art-making. In Introduction to Digital Media, I asked them to collaborate in groups to "create a multimedia web-based work that engages with the theoretical perspectives we have studied." As an example of the provocations that are feasible through accessible platforms, I would like to highlight "Novus Reproba Verum" by James Johnson, Patrick Kelly, Stephanie Ogonor, Mandy Sa, and Alfredo Sabillón. This experimental, parodic "un-art movement" has as its nucleus a basic html web page built in Google Sites, comprising a manifesto, artist bios, and links. The bulk of the project expands hypertextually in a distributed, ephemeral network of sites and interventions by these ficticious artists, levaraging Blogger, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook, YouTube, and more to embody the collective's mandate to be "the only reputable source of digital misinformation." The personas imagined by individual group members include Chevo Mnomno, a retired priest who copies film reviews and blogs them with a different title swapped in; Stacy O’Keefe, a poet whose works are generated by computer code; Mitch Paxton, a radical who defaces famous images and texts and promulgates a YouTube hoax about the death of Susan Boyle; Oni and Ur, lesbian lovers who sell realistic sculptures of bombs (actually found photos of real bombs) on Ebay; and a pro-art heckler named Joan Chebert.
The dispersed, parasitic, and dynamic form of "Novus Reproba Verum" elaborates course questions about online identity, authorship, archiving, and agency in ways that are both entertaining and critical. Performative stunts like the fake Susan Boyle memorial video and Oni and Ur's militant feminist feuds in YouTube comments mobilize familiar web destinations for unpredictable interactivity, manifesting rather than just describing the implications of digital architecture. This ambitious accretion of appropriations and incitements intersects many of the internet's compromised binaries, including real vs. fake information, human vs. computer intelligence, art vs. nonsense production, legal vs. illicit creativity, and publishing vs. filtering content. The project is thus exemplary of how multimedia work can give students the opportunity to experience and manipulate the characteristic constraints of media as a means to learn about and critique them.
In Transmedia TV, my students were equally adept at appropriating media footage and techniques to create video projects. Even beginners were game to use consumer tools like iMovie and the department's dedicated Kodak cameras to produce thoughtful and thought-provoking visual essays on topics ranging from television's product placement to YouTube's spreadable memes. In the coming academic year, I hope that connections with campus groups like the Stanford Cardinal Broadcasting Network and alliances within our department will further support my development of experiential curriculum in media studies. In particular, I have plans to incorporate video commentaries leading to a TV presentation into Introduction to Television Studies and experiment with pedagogy structured around remix in spring's Copy This Class. I believe that Art & Art History's unique interchange of approaches and resources offers opportunities for teaching media through media that are invaluable to my growth as an educator. With its theoretical, aesthetic, and historical orientation and contact with active art-making, the Film & Media Studies program makes possible a distinctive response to humanities challenges in the context of Stanford and academia at large.