and I just heard something ominous about my hotel, but I’m hoping it was a fluke.
As usual, no guarantees of continuity until I return next week. But you never know.
For the Record
Right now, Carrie is watching curling.
Attack on Academic Freedom
It’s a big topic in among US academics, with Horowitz’s “Discover the Network,” the attacks on Ward Churchill, and some smaller skirmishes as well. And yet I’ve been saying all along that humanities intellectuals are not on the cutting edge of the attack but rather a secondary front. Today’s Globe and Mail has an article on attacks on NIH grants that study a wide range of issues such as sexually transmitted diseases among truckers to single mothers and beyond. One striking quote from the article dealt with the increasing use of “code” to talk about research subjects, where, for instance “potential mothers” would be substituted for “lesbians” so that religious groups trolling the NIH’s list of grants wouldn’t know to look further. it sounds like a story Slavoj Zizek about state censorship in a former eastern-bloc country.
Between the corporate takeover of science funding and the religious right’s attacks on science in the name of morality, progressive academics in the U.S. have their work cut out for them. Intellectuals who write about culture — in the humanities and social sciences — need to begin seeing their common cause with the scientists who are getting overrun with this bullshit. This is a truly transdisciplinary problem, and if the left wants to get into the action, it will need to move beyond the 1980s-language of the “culture wars” to understand its role in a much bigger battle.
“Cud-Chewing Misogyny”
is the phrase I’ve heard applied to Frank Rich. Having just returned home from Sin City I’d have to say that it’s fitting. Definitely one of the most creatively misogynist movies I have ever seen.
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Tomorrow is P-Day
The permanent residency packet is assembled and goes out registered mail tomorrow. I even made sure I had my accents right on “Montreal” and “Quebec” (don’t know how to do them in .html yet).
Our awesome friend Greg arrives tomorrow.
Gertrude Robinson
Today, I met Gertrude Robinson, one of the founders of Canadian Communication Studies. A founding mother, really. She was also one of the first tenured women at McGill. Robinson got her PhD from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois and wound up here, in the sociology department. She gave a talk over at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada on journalism and gender, based on a comparative study of data collected in 1974 and 1994. The comparison was pretty interesting just by virtue of that old-school social science approach: design a questionnaire, ask the same questions of lots of people, and tabulate the results. Over two decades, you can see a lot. I’ve never been that interested in consistency or discipline in conceiving my own work, but there’s no arguing that over time, it has its rewards. Carrie went too — she likes Carrie, which is not terribly surprising given their shared interests.
Afterwards, we went and got passport photos taken — AGAIN — to the right specification for the Quebec permanent residency form. Which I hope to send out tomorrow.
In “I watch stuff way off schedule because of my DVR” department, last week’s Alias was actually good. I still don’t trust it, though.