It's summer, and the picture of me above may be a bit misleading since I have emerged from my wintry book-laden cavern to delight in the lush greenery of my backyard, taking in the sights and smells now that I've finally butted out my last ciggie (clean since May 27).
GEEKY STUFF:
A lot in the hopper for this summer. Research-wise, I am laying down serious "tracks" in my planned book on Social Capital(ism): The Network Spectacle, which brings a heavy Marxist-Debordian reading of online social capital as a grounding for what has yet to be fully achieved beyond some of the work of Christian Fuchs and Evgeny Morozov: a complete political economy of the social web and the role of big data. I've already tested the waters by mixing in some Veblen and Deleuze on control societies in an entree piece you can read at tripleC. So where will this book go once all the heavy lifting is done? Thinking maybe I could aim it at Verso, Routledge, or possibly Amsterdam UP. I could use some funding to get the thing really off the ground, so I have signed up for Onarbor, a new crowdfunding site built by some savvy gurus from MIT and Harvard. The Social Capitalism fundraiser has officially kicked off!
I've also been tapped to submit a reworked version of my paper on apps I now tentatively entitle "There is an App(aratus of Capture) For That." Ok, a bit of cheek and feigned cleverness, but I think it "captures" well my Deleuzian view of the whole app craze.
Another tap to submit something for a special issue of edusemiotics. Don't know what that is? You are probably not alone. It is relatively recent, first coined by Marcel Danesi back in 2010, and it was Inna Semetsky and Andrew Stables who really took the ball and ran with it (incidentally, they are having an official "launch" at a special colloquium in Bulgaria). So what will I contribute? I am thinking of working in some Gilbert Simondon and going all fang and claw against the notion of output metrics in higher education.
I am also quietly scribbling notes on the side for two papers on folksonomies. What's that? You know how libraries use taxonomic classification? Folksonomy is when the public users catalogue the content themselves using tags. I'm not going to uncritically sing the praises of folksonomies since there are a lot of problems along the lines of relativism. So, yes, I am going to geek out a little bit on the library information science end of things (even though I am in no way a LIS person). The two papers planned: one as a followup to my piece in the Journal of Documentation, and the other a return to my bibliophile buddy Borges in assessing the folksonomy in the Library of Babel (which I might try to land at Variaciones Borges - the journal that published my first academic article, so a kind of homecoming for me).
My colleague Marc Ouellette and me are looking at collaborating on some secret academic stuff again. Our previous collabo should be coming out this year in The International Handbook of Semiotics (Springer, ed. P. Trifonas). Oh, and another colleague of mine, Bill Irwin, has dangled the prospect of working together on linking Alice in Wonderland with current neoliberal "logic." It writes itself!
I'll have two more articles published in the coming month: one on digital astroturfing to appear in the Journal of Information, Propaganda, Intelligence and Security Studies, the official journal of the Austrian Centre for Intelligence, Propaganda, and Security Studies. In a way, this allows me to burnish a bit of cred since I do teach a course on propaganda. The second paper will be on precarious academic labour to appear in Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics hosted by Linkoping Uni in Sweden.
ARTSY STUFF:
I cannot seem to go a whole year without having another novel under my belt. This one is a breezier read as it is modelled from Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, but retells the story from the perspective of precarious academic labour. I am simply merging my political and labour issue interests with the literary. It is available in paperback and on Kindle, so I think you should go buy it! A great beach read with plenty of satisfying revenge. The book is Professor Montgomery Cristo. Read more about it on my books page.
I am also chipping away when there is time on my really complicated novel involving big data, algorithms, social engineering, cybernetics, austerity economics, a rise in allergies and aggression, alienation, autism, the I Ching, Soviet cybernetics, and the Cherokee - spanning about three centuries. Holy crap. Unlike the novel I referenced above, this will not be a breezy read. If John Barth set out with the Sot Weed Factor to write a plot more complex than Tom Jones, I am setting out to out-complicate John Barth. Contribute a few doge or bitcoins to the thing? Generous backers will get a free copy of the novel if it gets published and/or anything from my backlist. Check out the fundraiser here.
UNION THUGGERY
Our faculty association is currently in negotiations with the employer, and that means we are all fairly busy behind the scenes. That aside, I am in the process of creating a national association focused on precarious academics, and have been in conversation with lots of great people from unions in Quebec, a few adjuncts in Ontario, some great people at CAUT, a bit of banter with adjunct organizations in the US like New Faculty Majority et al. Also, this August I'll be attending COCAL XI in New York City, August 4-6. There is no use for me to deny that I'm staunchly pro-labour, if not a bit Marxist.
Other than that, have to prepare for some new courses in my roster for next year, and heavy revision on some courses I haven't taught in a few years (along with my usual slate). I only have three months to get a handle on all the above before the semester starts, so no sense me typing this out - time to get back to work!
GEEKY STUFF:
A lot in the hopper for this summer. Research-wise, I am laying down serious "tracks" in my planned book on Social Capital(ism): The Network Spectacle, which brings a heavy Marxist-Debordian reading of online social capital as a grounding for what has yet to be fully achieved beyond some of the work of Christian Fuchs and Evgeny Morozov: a complete political economy of the social web and the role of big data. I've already tested the waters by mixing in some Veblen and Deleuze on control societies in an entree piece you can read at tripleC. So where will this book go once all the heavy lifting is done? Thinking maybe I could aim it at Verso, Routledge, or possibly Amsterdam UP. I could use some funding to get the thing really off the ground, so I have signed up for Onarbor, a new crowdfunding site built by some savvy gurus from MIT and Harvard. The Social Capitalism fundraiser has officially kicked off!
I've also been tapped to submit a reworked version of my paper on apps I now tentatively entitle "There is an App(aratus of Capture) For That." Ok, a bit of cheek and feigned cleverness, but I think it "captures" well my Deleuzian view of the whole app craze.
Another tap to submit something for a special issue of edusemiotics. Don't know what that is? You are probably not alone. It is relatively recent, first coined by Marcel Danesi back in 2010, and it was Inna Semetsky and Andrew Stables who really took the ball and ran with it (incidentally, they are having an official "launch" at a special colloquium in Bulgaria). So what will I contribute? I am thinking of working in some Gilbert Simondon and going all fang and claw against the notion of output metrics in higher education.
I am also quietly scribbling notes on the side for two papers on folksonomies. What's that? You know how libraries use taxonomic classification? Folksonomy is when the public users catalogue the content themselves using tags. I'm not going to uncritically sing the praises of folksonomies since there are a lot of problems along the lines of relativism. So, yes, I am going to geek out a little bit on the library information science end of things (even though I am in no way a LIS person). The two papers planned: one as a followup to my piece in the Journal of Documentation, and the other a return to my bibliophile buddy Borges in assessing the folksonomy in the Library of Babel (which I might try to land at Variaciones Borges - the journal that published my first academic article, so a kind of homecoming for me).
My colleague Marc Ouellette and me are looking at collaborating on some secret academic stuff again. Our previous collabo should be coming out this year in The International Handbook of Semiotics (Springer, ed. P. Trifonas). Oh, and another colleague of mine, Bill Irwin, has dangled the prospect of working together on linking Alice in Wonderland with current neoliberal "logic." It writes itself!
I'll have two more articles published in the coming month: one on digital astroturfing to appear in the Journal of Information, Propaganda, Intelligence and Security Studies, the official journal of the Austrian Centre for Intelligence, Propaganda, and Security Studies. In a way, this allows me to burnish a bit of cred since I do teach a course on propaganda. The second paper will be on precarious academic labour to appear in Confero: Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics hosted by Linkoping Uni in Sweden.
ARTSY STUFF:
I cannot seem to go a whole year without having another novel under my belt. This one is a breezier read as it is modelled from Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo, but retells the story from the perspective of precarious academic labour. I am simply merging my political and labour issue interests with the literary. It is available in paperback and on Kindle, so I think you should go buy it! A great beach read with plenty of satisfying revenge. The book is Professor Montgomery Cristo. Read more about it on my books page.
I am also chipping away when there is time on my really complicated novel involving big data, algorithms, social engineering, cybernetics, austerity economics, a rise in allergies and aggression, alienation, autism, the I Ching, Soviet cybernetics, and the Cherokee - spanning about three centuries. Holy crap. Unlike the novel I referenced above, this will not be a breezy read. If John Barth set out with the Sot Weed Factor to write a plot more complex than Tom Jones, I am setting out to out-complicate John Barth. Contribute a few doge or bitcoins to the thing? Generous backers will get a free copy of the novel if it gets published and/or anything from my backlist. Check out the fundraiser here.
UNION THUGGERY
Our faculty association is currently in negotiations with the employer, and that means we are all fairly busy behind the scenes. That aside, I am in the process of creating a national association focused on precarious academics, and have been in conversation with lots of great people from unions in Quebec, a few adjuncts in Ontario, some great people at CAUT, a bit of banter with adjunct organizations in the US like New Faculty Majority et al. Also, this August I'll be attending COCAL XI in New York City, August 4-6. There is no use for me to deny that I'm staunchly pro-labour, if not a bit Marxist.
Other than that, have to prepare for some new courses in my roster for next year, and heavy revision on some courses I haven't taught in a few years (along with my usual slate). I only have three months to get a handle on all the above before the semester starts, so no sense me typing this out - time to get back to work!