Another new feature. When I meet cool or interesting people, or hear a talk that I find particularly engaging in one way or another, I will make mention of them here with a link to their work. I may or may not be loquacious. So, first up is Rupert Cox, social anthropologist, who’s been doing …
Category Archives: Academe
…and we’re back…
So that whole social media “platform” this was an interesting ride, wasn’t it? Turns out, nothing is ever free, the new captains of industry are as selfish and narrow minded as the old ones, and we are just the product. Oh wait, we knew that already: I submit that the materialist answer to the question — What …
An Open Letter in Support of Divest McGill
As I’ve mentioned before, McGill students have been organizing a campaign to get McGill to divest from fossil fuels. This seems eminently sensible to me. This past week, the Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility released a report to the Board of Governors recommending AGAINST divestment because (among other things) oil companies have …
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Geoffrey Bennington’s review of the new translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology: read as a commentary on the humanities.
Read the review here: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/embarrassing-ourselves This was a great read over breakfast. I want to leave aside the intra-Derridean sniping and draw some bigger lessons from this review: 1. It’s dangerous for scholars to cut corners: look at the text, not your notes on the text. Advice for students and super stars alike. (or rather, we …
Some Suggestions for Improving the Humanities Dissertation and Defence at McGill
…or at least the dissertation in Communication Studies. How do you improve the dissertation and the defence? A few weeks back, the faculty members in Communication Studies at McGill met to talk about the graduate curriculum and these topics came up. But some changes we would like to make would be impossible in the current …
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New Text [in a general sense]: Footnotes to a Manifesto for Diminished Voices
My contribution for last summer’s “5 Minute Manifestoes” plenary for the 2014 Encuentro. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Now that I have a Vimeo account, I am posting some stuff that’s been sitting on my hard drive.
(Not) Her Master’s Voice
Roughly two weeks ago, Wolfgang Ernst came to Montreal. I missed both talks, as I was at the University of Michigan.* But we did meet up on Saturday for a visit to the Musée des ondes Emile Berliner, whose back areas are filled with old media technologies, as well as many versions of the His …