Media@McGill Occupy Event

Friday was an all-day event around #occupy organized by Media@McGill. You’ll get the full report on the M@M website, no doubt. But for me, some of the highlights:

1. The degree to which the event wasn’t just academic spectatorship of social change. Local Occupy Montreal activists showed up and participated in the workshops. The evening lecture by Chris Hedges and discussion panel (with Anna Feigenbaum, Patrick McCurdy and Nathalie Desrosiers) had about 300 people in attendance, many of whom had either been at #occupy or had engaged with it in some way.

2. I could only attend one of the workshops, by Nathalie Desrosiers, but I learned a lot about rights to assembly in Canada (I am still catching up on Canadian civics) and also about the politics of policing. As a bonus, I learned about the good work being done by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The CCLA is mostly supported through memberships, rather than big grants or donations, so if you like the work they do, consider joining.

3. The involvement of the #occupy activists in the main talk, from the various mic checks to the calls for people interested in the movement to come out and participate. As a friend pointed out to me last night, it was a nice reminder of how hierarchical academic events tend to be (after all, our field still has an essentially medieval structure) vs. the more lateral structures that the #occupy activists are trying to build.

4. Learning about the work of the Protest Camps Research Network. I expect the book will cast the current movement in an important historical light. While there are lots of cases of academics of various profiles (from sessionals to superstars) being involved in the movement, it is clear that at a theoretical level, we’re just catching up. Part of this is because Marxist ways of thinking have been assimilated rather easily into the institutional culture of the university, whereas anarchist models (see #3 above) have not. Sure, there are the autonomists and one could argue some of the poststructuralists, but the models of organization happening don’t, to my mind, yet have an adequate theoretical expression. To be clear, that’s the job of the academics. The activists have more pressing work to get done.

5. As a contribution to #4 above, let me just point out that for all the organized disorganization (or is that disorganized organization) that characterizes the #occupy movement, it heavily depends on massive, institutionalized and regularized infrastructures, from city transit systems, sewers and parks to the various telecommunications infrastructures, portals, standard and platforms that make the movement’s otherwise lateral organization and self-representation possible. I’m not sure what that means, except that I would love to know what an anarchist theory of infrastructure (or just an anarchistic infrastructure) would look like.

Things You Don’t Want to Hear at the University Library

Me [returning 1968 issue of Time Magazine]: this is really delicate. Are you sure you want me to put in the returns chute?

Library employee: Yeah, put it in and don’t worry about it. We’ve got that in digital and microfilm format.

I had originally gone to the issue because the digital version lacked some of the editorial content and all of the advertising and context.

UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time

I had occasion to read the October 4th, 1968 issue of TIME magazine (Canada edition!) cover to cover last night.* There is something magical about reading periodicals from another era, where what we experience as history is rendered as quotidian life, and you get a glimpse of how your own moment, as it is rendered as “news,” will look in retrospect. But what caught my attention most was an ad at the end of the issue, right inside the back cover. There was an ad for a computer:

 

The UNIVAC is saving a lot of people a lot of time

 

The ad is unremarkable compared to some other, more visually interesting UNIVAC ads, but I find it interesting as something in a newsmagazine aimed at an upper-middle class market.  Most of the ads are for cars, liquor and cigarettes, with airlines, luxury hotels (Montreal or Vancouver!) some fine watches and audio gadgets thrown in.  This wasn’t an ad for computer users, but a public relations campaign, designed to sell not just computers but computing for business.  What’s interesting is that the rhetoric essentially hasn’t changed–in terms of its propositions, the ad might as well be for IBM business solutions.  As to the sale of computing itself, that has, I think migrated to smartphone and tablet ads.  What was once a business plan is now a lifestyle.  Draw your own conclusions.

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*The OED led me to it, as I was doing a little digging on the history of the term “soundscape” for an essay.

Work for Hire and Oxford University Press

Steven Shaviro recently posted about pulling out of an Oxford University Press collection because they wanted to define his contribution as “work for hire.” This is objectionable for lots of reasons, but in particular because academics should retain the right to be associated with the ideas we produce, and so long as we’re above board about it, we should be allowed to develop those ideas and republish them in other forms (for instance, as part of a monograph).

I recently had two go-arounds with OUP for handbooks. In both cases, I felt a personal obligation to the editors such that I didn’t want to pull out. I also had the same acquisitions editor for both volumes, so it was at least not two different fights. We had a lot of email back and forth. I tried everything. I started with the SPARC authors’ addendum and then got to the point of refusing the $200 “fee” — it can’t be work for hire if they don’t pay me. Unfortunately, that didn’t fly even though in monetary terms, $200 is a joke: amortize that over the hours required to write an essay and you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, I think a good portion of my salary is for me to do research and write, so I’m not going to sweat $200.

I finally got a clause added stating:

Notwithstanding the foregoing, provided that full acknowledgment of the Volume (including bibliographic details) is given and that such use does not affect prejudicially the sales or other exploitation by the Publisher of the Volume, the Publisher will not object to use by the Author of parts (but not the whole) of his contribution to the Volume in reworked form as the basis for articles in professional journals, conference papers, training materials, newsletters and similar materials, as well as for chapters in books by the Author.

This was a compromise with the press for those two cases, though I don’t think I would do it again (this, of course, assumes I have the privilege to be able to publish in lots of places–not everyone does). Amusingly, the one of the two articles that used some material that will appear in the mp3 book is in a collection that was delayed (as edited volumes often are), meaning that it is unlikely that I can provide full bibliographic acknowledgment in the mp3 book, and the OUP will technically be the republication even though it’s an earlier version.

And yes, I got the $200 for the collection that’s out. For the one that’s not out, I haven’t seen the money yet. I am sure it will come eventually, and though I am somewhat moved to not cash it, there’s also something odd about having a $200 check in your drawer. If I am not going to use the money, there are many others who could.

What Is To Be Done

The solution here seems pretty simple, which is one I’ve taken to. Ask to see the contract up front and negotiate the terms before you agree to write (I haven’t done that in cases where I already know what the press’ contracts look like). Refuse to publish with presses that have contracts like this. I won’t put myself in this position again, and if I’m going to let down my friends, it’s better and less melodramatic to simply say I can’t do it on the front end.

And, as always, I refer you to Ted Striphas’ excellent Acknowledged Goods essay, which lays out the stakes in journal publishing, but is relevant for book publishing as well.  Click here for the official but padlocked version (you can read it if your school has a subscription to the journal) or here for the free version.

Academic Freedom

But first, more institutional politics.

I’ve agreed to be on a committee out of the vice-provost’s office which is organizing a 1-day symposium on academic freedom in April, which could well lead to a written policy on academic freedom for the university, to be submitted for approval to academic senate and the board of governors.

I am not totally sure that a formal policy on academic freedom is a good idea, but after the various events of last semester, it at least needs to be discussed.

By virtue of its membership in the organization, McGill is listed as an official endorser of the AUCC’s abysmal policy, which I’m told was changed because religious colleges couldn’t sign on to a proper academic freedom policy. Which begs the question of whether it’s academic freedom anymore if it exists as the pleasure of administrators: it’s sort of like redefining evolution to accommodate creationism.

Anyway, a number of us were horrified at the announcement, and when I challenged the principal on it she emphasized that it didn’t reflect McGill University’s value or policies. The thing is, we don’t have an academic freedom policy at McGill. And maybe we shouldn’t have a fixed definition of academic freedom, but the current scheme unfortunately means that people with power get to say that academic freedom is whatever they say it is. And that is not academic freedom.

There is always some danger that a formal process of discussing academic freedom will turn into “a democracy theme park,” as one of my colleagues calls it, but I think it’s important to take it seriously and try and make sure the conversation goes in the right direction, starting with strong protections for faculty and students who criticize people who have authority over them, up to the top of the administration and the board of governors; who take public political stands; or whose work takes heterodox positions within their home departments and disciplines.

In the meantime, if you’ve dealt with this in your home institution or have some policy advice for me, please send it along. I would also love to have recommendations for speakers, though I’m sure we can only have a few.

Projection: A Word for Future-Orientation with “Project” In It

Although I’m not doing any classroom teaching this term* (I am, however, doing plenty of teaching), it somehow started off with a sprint. It’s taken me until week two to get together a plan for the term. Maybe others are more organized in thought and action, but I always have a moment after completing major book projects where I don’t know what the next big project is, and so I go in a million directions at once. This is that moment. I have a(n un)healthy pile of writing and research projects I’m undertaking. Part of it is I said yes to too many different things, each of which seemed perfectly interesting on its own but the sum total of which is taking me away from my own emergent agendas. Part of it is that I have so many directions I want to go in (aka, the emergent agendas) that it seems like there are dozens of moving parts.

So yesterday I sat down, wrote them all down (though I keep remembering new ones to add) and started entering date-specific “to dos” into my calendar in a rather ugly shade of green. Happily, I got to start the list with one thing crossed off (internal SSHRC grant application submitted Monday) and another almost crossed off (my next Flow column, due Friday, which is all-but-conclusion).

While I’m committed to a loud semester on the reading/writing/travel front, I’m hoping for a quieter semester on the political front (though more will be written about that as well). My intent is to use this space to write a bit about stuff I’m working on and thinking about so that others who share my interests might find me and give me good ideas. At least that’s the thought. So lots of projects will be mentioned and named in the coming months. I won’t post them all here just because composing the document was overwhelming enough.

And then there’s the rest of my life beyond the academic stuff–I’ve got a couple audio projects I’d like to finish by summer, one of which is attached to a website, I’m trying to learn a new instrument (an Octatrack) and swimming twice a week, and on and on.

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*I’m collecting on two of three course releases that were owed me after my term as chair. If I took them while chair, I wouldn’t have seen many students, which would have been lame.