LA-bound

Carrie and I both got fellowships to do a four week digital humanities institute at USC. So we’ll be heading down, and hopefully spending about six weeks in LA from 1 July-15 August. Now we just need to find a place to stay. The LA trip is great for several reasons: the compare/contrast with northern California, the chance to see LA friends, the chance to extend my comparative burrito studies project, and the chance to extend our sabbatical travel a little longer.

We’ll get back to Montreal two weeks before the first day of class. That will be a little stressful in terms of getting set up again, but our colleagues tell us re-entry is hell, so maybe a “pull the band-aid off fast” approach is better.

Officially our sabbaticals end September 1st, and my first teaching is at 11:30am on that day (COMS 608: Sound Studies). I am tempted to throw a party the night of the 31st, just to eek out every last bit of awesomeness.

AAA, WTF?

The American Anthropological Association meets next fall in Montreal. I’m excited to see some friends, and when some colleagues asked me to be on a panel, I agreed. Little did I know that the paper submission process involved a money grab by AAA, and that their conference registration system has no provision for participation from people from other disciplines, who might not need everything AAA has to offer.

So when I finally finished registering (after only one call to their main office, where I found the person on the phone to be very helpful), their system asked me what I thought of the paper submission process. My answer was this:

I think very poorly of it.

1. The interface was glitchy on a Mac running the latest version of Safari (I switched to Firefox but there were still rendering issues with lists).

2. It was poorly designed in terms of usability, which is a little surprising in this day and age.

3. I think it’s a crime to charge someone who is not an anthropologist over $350 for the privilege of submitting to the conference. Fine, I’m willing to register if my paper is accepted, but otherwise it’s just a money grab on your part.

[Edit — Carrie saw me approving a comment and asked what this was about. I told her about the $350 and she replied “that’s extortion.” Of course, she would take my side, wouldn’t she?]

4. I requested a temporary membership waiver pending the acceptance of my paper via your online form and did not receive anything back–not even an acknowledgement I’d submitted a request.

5. There was no way to correct a misspelling of my name in the paper submission section.

(I will apparently be listed in the program as “Jonathan Jonathan Sterne Sterne.”)

A lesson for the humanities from new music

This month’s issue of The Wire has a nice article on the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (including a wonderful description of the dilapidated condition of the original equipment). It was the first thing I’d read about Milton Babbitt in a long time, which led me to go find his infamous 1958 essay “Who Cares if You Listen?”

The first thing to note is that the title wasn’t his and he didn’t like it (it was supposed to be called “The Composer as Specialist.”) I don’t know if I ever actually read it before or if I’d imagined I read it before, but this time I found the essay quite profound. I was a little taken aback, which is what I enjoy about reading old things that are immersed in other arguments.

Babbitt’s argument roughly parallels the argument I routinely hear for why university professors in the humanities and social sciences shouldn’t write like journalists. He begins by acknowledging that the contemporary concert-going public of his time has mostly rejected new music. His response is to effectively let them off the hook. Why shouldn’t they? The avant-garde of his time required a great deal of abstract knowledge about music that even the most seasoned season-ticket-holder to the orchestra simply wouldn’t have.

He writes:

Advanced music, to the extent that it reflect the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than [those] arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields. But to this, a double standard is invoked, with the words “music is music,” implying also that “music is just music.” Why not, then, equate the activities of the radio repairman with those of the theoretical physicist, on the basis of the dictum that “physics is physics”? It is not difficult to find statements like the following, from the New York Times of September 8 1957: “the scientific level of the conference is so high…that there are in the world only 120 mathematicians specializing in the field who could contribute.” Specialized music on the other hand, far from signifying “height” of musical level, has been charged with “decadence,” even as evidence of an insidious “conspiracy.”

Let’s take Babbitt’s own strategy and update the essay. Substitute “humanities,” or “theory,” or “cultural studies” for “music” and you’ll see what I mean. In writing on music, Babbitt’s position is generally considered indefensible (though on a careful reading it deserves to be taken more seriously even if he’s a little misguided about where musical “progress” must come from). Yet I know many humanists who would make exactly the same argument for their use of any number of specialized languages.

The alternative is equally unsatisfying: imperatives like “democratize the humanities” “speak only what is easily understood” and “we must all reach out and cross over” abdicate too much. Sure, we should be able to speak in multiple registers, but that doesn’t mean abandoning the space of the university or the values of specialization entirely.

Don’t we already have coalitions?

I have been following the coverage of the Canadian election with my usual-wish-I-could-vote interest.

Everyone is so exercised about coalitions. But Canada’s a constitutional monarchy. It’s got a parliament. What exactly do you call it when no party wins a majority and then other parties vote with them to keep them in power? I think we already have a coalition and have had them for quite some time now. . . .

Academic Labor in Communication Studies — Call for Papers, Commentary and Multimedia

(apologies for cross-posting; please distribute widely)

International Journal of Communication Feature Special Section on Academic Labor and Administration in Communication Studies

Edited by Jonathan Sterne

Academic labor today is characterized by a series of disconcerting trends: an increasingly casualized professoriate; universities that increasingly depend on chronically undercompensated part-time and graduate student labor to support their course offerings; a top-down managerial style and erosion of faculty governance; increasing economic exploitation of staff and undergraduates; rising student debt; governments that attack public education; shrinking endowments (for the schools that had them) and heighted expectations for sponsored research; wooden research assessment exercises; and the acute uncertainty of the academic job market for recent PhD graduates. Against these, there is a growing academic labor movement, with its own intellectual organs like Workplace and Edufactory and a wide range of activist manifestations, from labor unions to non-commercial alternative universities. Academic journals have also fielded debate in this area, from Social Text’s foray into the Yale Strike to Topia’s announced special issue on the anniversary of Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins.

This special forum of the International Journal of Communication aims to make two contributions to the ongoing discussion of academic labor.

1. To encourage university administrators — current and former — who are sympathetic to the academic labor movement and the new student activism to reflect on their experiences in administration and thereby provide useful knowledge for activists, organizers, and others. Much of the existing literature on academic labor treats university administrations as a fairly monolithic “management,” yet university administrations are riddled with conflict, contradiction and constraint. In most instances, administrators used to be faculty members, and in many they will be again, once their administrative terms are over. A better understanding of the politics and conflicts of administration may be useful in the struggle for better conditions within universities as places to work and study.

2 To encourage people in Communication Studies — at all levels in the field — to reflect directly on the state of academic labor in our field. Much of the academic labor literature has come from fields with considerably worse job markets than Communication Studies, like English and History. Yet Communication Studies does not conform to so well to models of those other fields, either academically or institutionally. More importantly, it is possible that within professional organizations and within departments we can begin to address some of these issues. But first, we need to confront them.

Submissions should be 500-4000 words in length and may come in any form of critical commentary piece, ranging from academic analysis of some aspect of the current crisis; to personal/political reflection; to recommendations for activism, policy, or best practices; or any other style of critical commentary. We are particularly interested in pieces that not only identify problems but offer potential solutions or new perspectives.

Multimedia submissions are also welcome.

Although the section will be edited and reviewed, it will not be subject to blind peer review.

For the purposes of this forum, “Communication Studies” will be interpreted broadly to include all related fields and subfields, theoretical and applied.

We welcome commentary from any and all parts of the world, though submissions should be made in English. Submissions by current or former administrators in fields outside Communication Studies are most welcome.

Send queries, proposals or essays to al@sterneworks.org .

Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2011

Decisions, and comments on accepted submissions will be returned by 1 July 2011

Expected date of publication will be September 2011.

All submissions must follow IJOC style. Author guidelines for the IJOC are available at: http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

This CFP is also available here: http://sterneworks.org/academiclaborijoccfp.pdf

I wonder what it would feel like to write a book every year or two

Because the way I do it sure takes forever. The good news is that I’ve more or less finished my revisions. It felt nice to upload the revised conclusion today. My RA has the manuscript, then I’ll go over her changes and send the thing back to Duke in a couple weeks. At that point, I’ll celebrate even though there are many more steps toward publication.

I am of course looking over the book’s should to the next thing. I’ve started interviewing people for this signal processing project I have (which has already yielded a series of essays). Will it be a book? Too early to tell. I’ve also got a bunch of other ideas, and will spend the rest of the sabbatical exploring. Many of my more prolific teachers seemed to know what the next book was as they were finishing one. Me, I seem to need to wander in the wilderness a little, write a few essay and see what sticks with me. It’s like “pilot studies” that social scientists do. I will say that with essays, the satisfaction of finishing comes much faster and more often. I seem to be able to churn them out without much trouble. But it’s not as sweet.

As I’m hanging out with social scientists this year, the conversation sometimes turns to articles vs. books. They each have their trials. It is true that word-for-word articles are scrutinized more by reviewers. But I feel like I scrutinize my books more, and I also go to more extremes in seeking out criticism and trying out ideas in public before publishing them. Maybe I’ve made the form too precious. This one was supposed to be short (it is, after a great deal of editorial effort, shorter than the Audible Past). Perhaps I will need to try again.

No Brown M&Ms

I haven’t blogged much about CASBS, which I will do. But part of the deal (for now) is that each fellow delivers a lecture. We meet once a week. Yesterday was my day. I’ve given a few talks this year and each one has been an experiment to see what my voice will handle and how I can figure out a mode of delivery. This seems so simple, but given that my performance style was very much structured around a level of power in my voice that is simply not possible to reproduce now that I only have one vocal cord, I’ve been wandering in the wilderness a bit.

For now, I think I’ve finally found the solution:

1. Sit down. I have a lot of adrenaline pumping when I deliver a talk. Sitting forces me to, well, sit still rather than pace, and focus on my breath and delivery.

2. Don’t read. I’d originally though reading would be a good idea because it would allow me to focus on the mechanics of speaking. But that’s not actually true. Working from a script means bending my speech to written language. So yesterday I used notes and did a more “torture by powerpoint”* type of presentation.

3. Use the speech amp instead of a mic. The key here is that I’m wearing it on my head, rather than on my lapel, or leaning into a stationary mic. I guess if I had a nice strong mic on the table that would be one thing, but lapel mics and the like don’t give me the same feedback (the good kind), and I’ve had several podium mics this year that wouldn’t cooperate. Anyway, it’s sort of like walking with a cane instead of hanging onto the guardrail.

4. Know the material cold. For formal presentations, at least, I need to go in absolutely sure of what I want to say and how I want to say it. I don’t actually have to be finished with the project, but I have to be very comfortable with what I want to say. That way, I can focus on the delivery but in my own voice. How this will work with work in progress or things I haven’t been working on for seven years has yet to be seen.

All this means that I will be a more demanding guest speaker when people invite me to give talks. Which is fine–I already am. Now I just know what to ask for.

I also wonder whether this means I will be delivering large lecture courses while seated and how that will work. I have a year to figure that out and work on my delivery more. And to see my speech therapist in Montreal. We shall see.

—–

In other news, the mp3 ms is with my research assistant who is editing it. Then it goes back to Duke. I’ve got a few loose ends (acknowledgments) but sometime in April it will be off my desk.

* “Torture by powerpoint” was coined by Jenny Burman to describe the insipid practice of putting up slides and then reading them to the audience with additional content. I didn’t actually do that, but I did have a few bullet points.