Arizona’s Experiment: Just How Bad Is The Academic Job Market, Anyway?

Posted on February 21, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Take a look at what the Arizona legislature is considering doing. Professors at state institutions would not be allowed to publically advocate for any political candidate, give expert testimony in trials, or have a public opinion on any issue considered “partisan”. You’d be fined if you broke the rules.

A biology professor would probably lose his or her entire salary in fines in a semester where they taught about evolutionary theory. This blog would rack me up a $500.00 fine every time I made an entry. My books would cost me fines when I published them. How do you write a historical study that doesn’t in some respect make an argument, offer an interpretation, have some aspect that is in some sense “partisan”? Any engineer or scientist who assisted local, state or federal governments with technical issues could be fined, given that almost any project or initiative could arguably be said to be “partisan”. The vast majority of economists would be in some sense “partisan”, in that the paradigms of the discipline have a distinctive and politically meaningful perspective.

Arizona’s legislature should really just close all of its public universities if it regards faculty as such a clear and present danger to society.

Posted in Academia | 13 Comments

Beware of What You Wish For

Posted on February 21, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I get the sense occasionally that some of my colleagues see me as an evangelist for the use of new technologies in the classroom and in academic research. If I’m a technological missionary, though, my faith and more importantly my knowledge of what I preach is pretty weak.

There are so many things I would like to know how to do, so many technologies that seem or sound interesting to me. But I have the same basic self-protecting instinct that my colleagues have: in many cases, it’s better not to know about a technological possibility at all than to know just a little bit. Knowing a little bit becomes an obligation to know more and more, to break out your pitons and ice axes and start climbing a steep learning curve. Expressing an interest in something off-handedly can be a signal that you’re seeking resources, training, access. And maybe you are, but not now. At the same time, though, you can’t just leap on people with support capabilities in late May and say, “NOW NOW NOW”. (As if I had the energy to in late May anyway.)

It’s also that the acquisition of new technological competencies is impossible (at least for me) if I’m not putting what I’m learning to immediate and repeated use. The immediate spur to this post was a reminder from a colleague in our Information Technology department that there were opportunities for me to further explore GIS. I’ve been generously supported to attend a GIS workshop in the past. I learned a lot, but most of the hands-on competency I acquired in three days I would have to re-acquire, because I wasn’t able to put it to immediate use.

The problem is also that I learned that to use GIS in a classroom in the way that I imagined using it (largely to talk about spatial and visual information as historical knowledge, or as a part of a class on using virtual worlds as a tool for representing and teaching history), I would almost certainly have to devote a significant portion of the class to instruction in the technology. That’s a pedagogical problem that isn’t just confined to information technology: when you try to teach both a technique or a literacy and some kind of content, you often do a bad job at both. But if you try to teach some form of literacy by itself, it’s often so arid and mind-numbing that students turn off. If you try to teach content that presupposes a kind of literacy, it’s equally unsatisfying. I think you end up having to limit yourself to exploring a single technological or technical skill in a content-centric course. In my History of Play and Leisure class next year, I’d like to get the students to make short machinima–but I have to balance that aspiration against basic literacies needed to explore computer and video games, which I don’t think you can assume all students naturally have already.

In a lot of cases, even when you’re very certain about the usefulness and intellectual power of a new technology, the cost-to-benefit ratio of actually using it is not very favorable. It might be too time-consuming to learn. It might be a technological platform which will shortly go obsolete. It might be too difficult to teach to students, or rely on lower-level competencies that you’ll also have to teach. It might be that you’re too busy or harried right now. Or that your available time to learn a new technology is unpredictable–I know I’m tremendously inhibited about calling up someone and saying, “Hey, I happen to have two hours free now, could you train me?” Other people have schedules and demands, too. Plus, once again, learning something in those serendipitious hours does you no good unless you’ve got a plan for using it right away. If you had a plan, you’d be able to schedule training at right moment.

The schizoid awareness of the usefulness and power of new tools versus fear of the costs to my time and energies leads me, at least, to cultivating a deliberately hazy attitude towards information technology in general. I keep my fingers on the pulse as much as I can, but try not to become too acutely aware of opportunities or facilities that might compel me to respond at this very moment. I got to see our current faculty resource room just yesterday for the first time in quite a while and it is unbelievably awesome. It was kind of painful to see, though, because now I feel this incredible desire, a burdensome desire, to do something more ambitious than the modest immediate project I had in mind for some of this equipment. It’s techno-guilt: the machines are like a beloved relative that I don’t call nearly as often as I should.

The further behind the bleeding edge you get, the more acute the anxiety becomes. I’ll often criticize the technological literacy of academics, especially when it comes to research tools and publication tools, but there is a point at which it may be entirely rational to simply shut down all awareness of change. The ways in which most institutions support faculty retraining or the acquisition of new literacies are interstitial and voluntaristic. You do it when you can and when the institution can. Which means, much of the time, that you don’t do it at all. To really do it right, in a way, faculty and staff would almost have to shut down all of our ongoing business and spend concentrated and dedicated time on acquiring new literacies or technical skills.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 4 Comments

Not a Sandbox

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been struggling to figure out what to say, or whether to say anything, about the issue of blogging in the Edwards campaign. Outside of a few comments threads, I decided to not say anything while the issue was hot, partly because I think the people attacking Amanda Marcotte were largely hypocrites or nutcases. None of them struck me as having an evangelical commitment to online civility or a temperate tone in blogging. I don’t see any of the people on the right complaining about some of the material from Pandagon giving right-wing blogs (including some associated with campaigns) the same kind of going-over for issues of tone and fairness. (They would have had to attack their own blogs to do so.) I’ve read Pandagon for a long time, I like it (and Amanda Marcotte’s writing in particular) sometimes and sometimes I don’t like it so much. That assessment didn’t magically go away because Amanda Marcotte was being attacked, but it’s not a strongly felt sentiment on my part, so it wasn’t terribly relevant to share urgently.

I also was wondering a bit at whether a current political campaign actually needs a “head blogger”. Obviously Edwards was hoping to imitate Dean, both in fundraising terms and in gaining the loyalty of the “netroots”. But paying for it by moving someone onto your staff almost strikes me as buying something you can have for free. Why not just extensively court some of the most influential bloggers, maybe see if you can’t grow a blog yourself within the campaign that has a fresh, aggressive tone, and so on? Again, I might have wondered that at the time of the announcement if it hadn’t turned into such annoying sound-and-fury.

What finally made me want to write something short was reading this thread at Geeky Mom, where she wonders about whether to keep blogging. As readers here know, I’ve wondered the same thing about my own blog. I hope Geeky Mom continues: I find her blog really valuable and interesting.

But the one thing I didn’t like from some of Marcotte’s defenders was the proposition that somehow what we have written in the past in our blogs is trivial, or disposable, that our freedom as writers requires that blogging be understood as Not Ready For Prime Time. I was reminded a bit of a similar discussion at 11D.

In a way, that’s true. I misspell things in my entries here. There’s often grammatical errors. I write hastily, sometimes poorly. I write off-the-cuff. Also, I certainly do not write about some of the things that I might wish to talk about in the context of academic life. I can’t use the blog for some kinds of cathartic release. These are all reasons that I would hope any reader following the trail of digital breadcrumbs into my online archives would do so in a tolerant spirit. Sure, there’s stuff that makes me look kind of dumb. I’ve changed my mind from time to time.

Yes, it’s true, as Marcotte herself has said, that blogging has the rapid-fire liveliness (and sometimes the vileness) of written and spoken political debate in the late 18th and 19th Centuries, and that this is precious. It’s also true, as she said, that it poses a threat to some kinds of mainstream media writing. In my opinion, the threat is to op-ed writing and other kinds of punditry, which is often less well-informed, less well-written and much more smug than what the blogs have to offer.

In earlier cultures of political and polemical writing, as now, you have a choice about what you want to be and how you want what you say to represent your aspirations. I love Mencken and Twain, but if you want to be a 21st Century Mencken, it should hardly be a surprise that your voice doesn’t carry well into all places and contexts. You can warm your pen up in hell, just don’t be surprised if it’s then unwelcome in a church.

Blogs are not greasy kid’s stuff. They’re informal, they’re spontaneous, they’re freer in some ways than the mainstream media, not just because of the genre’s evolving expectations but because of their technological and economic character. But they matter, and they should. We can’t suddenly ask that they be dismissed as mere prologue to whatever else we want to do with our voices, our thought, our politics, when the day before we were trying to do something that mattered.

This is not just about blogging: it’s about history. The more you write, the more your writing is both burden and expectation, a second self whose permission is required before you do something new–or whose betrayal is necessary should you wish to be free of your shadow. I get the vague whiff from some of Marcotte’s most ardent defenders that they want to have it all. I’m free to say what I like, and if I say it at a cocktail party or talking with a friend, I would have every right to say, “Hey, come on, that was not for publication”. When I write it–even in a blog–it has, and ought to have, some greater weight. If that weight becomes like Marley’s chains, forged in life, it’s up to me to do the hard and complicated work of unlocking, not to complain that what I wrote was read.

Posted in Blogging | 10 Comments

Media Non-Literacy and Representational Authoritarianism

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Following some links from a discussion of the visual imagery in some computer games, I ended up at the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, as well as a short BBC news item on the study.

I’m going to leave aside the side of the task force concerned with documenting the effects and extent of such sexualization, save to say that I have the same skepticism about those arguments that I have about most “media effects” claims. Such claims are habitually reductionist in their understanding of how expressive culture is interpreted, used and productive of consciousness. They’re almost always slippery in the way they infer the scale or size of the effects observed from laboratory or survey contexts that do not scale at all well to the complexity of the overall social world, and also ignore contradictory trends at the overall level that shouldn’t be possible. (In this case, for example, the report argues that sexualization in media is at an all-time high and argues that this makes women less able to self-actualize and pursue professional and aspirational goals, but shouldn’t that lead us to look for the steady retreat of women from professional or working life?) Such studies are also largely uninterested in the complexities of the longer-term history of the images and effects they describe: they’re hopelessly presentist, envisioning a state of crisis which is uniquely aggravated at this exact moment in time.

It’s the other side of the argument that gets my goat more this time: the proposed solutions. All the stuff about teaching girls to value themselves for who they are and all that is great, fine, valid. It’s also been around for a long time, is well-distributed in a variety of well-meaning media contexts as well as a lot of educational and institutional settings. Like all ABC Afterschool Special messages, it has less meaning as a maxim and more meaning if it’s just a quietly lived and demonstrated philosophy. In fact, I suspect such well-meaning ethical propositions become less and less effective the more we attempt to teach them as external dicta.

What bugs me more is the suborning of the concept of “media literacy” to the delivery of a single dogmatic reading of media images. A media-literate person, man or woman, should be able to look at a representation and understand its hermeneutical, historical, contextual complexity, to decode its power, and even to playfully defenestrate or reimagine the image in question. And that kind of literacy is not a simple function of education, something that’s best left for the Right Kind of People. That’s what I usually hear back from media-effects critics when I say, “But some people can look at what you term a ‘sexualized image’ and see it in many ways, or be unaffected by it, or reuse it”. What they’ll always reply is, “That might be true in the household of the Right Kind of People, but we’re worried about what those images are doing to the proles”. Media literacy is about about means, not ends. It’s about a toolkit. What people build with it is up to them.

Eileen Zurbriggen, one of the Task Force members, is quoted as saying in the press release, that “we need to replace all of these sexualized images with ones showing girls in positive settings—ones that show the uniqueness and competence of girls”. We need to replace. There’s so much wrong with that simple sentence. It’s just not how culture works, whether we’re talking about a premodern agrarian village or contemporary global popular culture. You don’t go out and just say, “We need to get rid of all the bad images and make a lot of good ones instead”, whether you’re the United States government trying to promote liberal democracy or the APA Task Force trying to go after sexualized images. Expressive culture is path-dependent, an organic product of history. It doesn’t turn on a dime. The APA is, as most modern professional institutions as well as governments are wont to do, speaking a top-down language about a quintessentially bottom-up problem. You want a different culture than what you got? Make it, don’t call for it. And make it so it sells, so it comes out of what has already been rather than out of some idealized conception or antiseptic utopian alternative to what has already been. Cultural consumption as Heroic Duty works when you’ve got a gulag and some commissars, but in the here and now it’s just a way to pave the way towards being a target on the next season of South Park.

Posted in Politics, Popular Culture | 3 Comments

Compromise

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I joke that when they’re presented with two or more diametrically opposed ways of interpreting knowledge or evidence, Swarthmore students habitually say, “Both are right, to some degree”. But who am I to talk? That’s my schtick too.

So in this spirit: is this the Year of the Fire Pig? Or the much rarer Year of the Golden Pig?

Here’s what I think: it’s the Year of the Golden Pig On Fire.

Posted in Miscellany | 3 Comments

From the Mixed-Up Bookshelves: Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism; Alberto Manguel, The History of Reading

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Timothy Burke

When I spoke to a group of publishers two weeks ago, I said that a world in which there were fewer specialized monographs would be a good thing. Fewer, better (and better-selling, one hopes) books from academics. What do I have in mind as a model, however? What kind of “better book” could an academic write that was still scholarly in some fashion?

I’m teaching Alberto Manguel’s The History of Reading this semester. If I had to pick a single book that I think could be a model for scholarly writing in cultural history or literary studies, I think I would pick this book. It’s a very distinctive, individual, and beautiful book. You couldn’t reproduce it exactly as a matter of disciplinary craft. This is precisely the point, however. The first principle of scholarly writing, once a scholar is done with his or her apprenticeship as a graduate student, should be to let a very distinctively observed book stew for a while, to develop its flavor and particularity.

However, Manguel’s book is also a delight because of its erudition. I am often in awe of him as I read it. I may live another 40 years and never know more than a small percentage of the texts and references and ideas that he uses. However, all scholars can aspire to a kind of erudition, and it should look like Manguel’s learning, with both breadth and depth, governed by both delight and functionality. That should be a basic part of the professional culture of academia, and it should govern what we write as mature scholars.

I don’t want to set the bar too demandingly. Manguel’s book is “best in show”. Saying that we should all write as well or as compellingly as he does is too much. More importantly, Manguel couldn’t write what he writes if there wasn’t a base of specialized knowledge for it to rest upon. It’s a great book to read, and a great book to teach, but if someone asked how it added to what we know about the history of reading, I would have to say, “not that much”. It just brings it all together very well.

The problem often in academia is that we continue to insist that many of the subjects that we study are not well known in this sense, that we must continue to do basic research. I think for many subjects in the humanities, that is simply no longer true. So what we often do is insist that books which should be Manguel-style explorations of a topic have to put on a cloak of being “basic research”, to trumpet discoveries and novel inquiries, to fill gaps. Worse yet, in the humanities, we often then turn around and theoretically rubbish the idea of knowledge as accumulative while all the while demanding that new entrants to the profession masquerade as such. We need clarity. When we’re genuinely learning something new, we should write clearly, compactly, to the point. When we’re doing the work of interpretation or explanation, then Manguel’s book is a marvelous example of what a confident and erudite scholar might choose to write.

I bring up Buruma and Margalit’s Occidentalism here to note, however, that a book of this kind can also go badly astray, that it is also possible to write a weak work of meandering, erudite commentary.

I am favorably disposed to what I take to be the central point of Buruma and Margalit’s book, that anti-Western ideologies and beliefs in the last two centuries frequently have their roots in the West itself. This argument is a kind of claim that I’ve come to label, “Stupid Foucault Tricks”, with the Letterman reference not intended to say that the argument is actually stupid. It’s more saying, “A thing that presents itself as the antithesis of something else is often in fact systemically part of what it opposes, and in fact reinforces its seeming opposite through its actions.” It’s like a constipated dialectics.

I found Paul Berman’s version of Buruma and Margalit’s argument fairly credible because he works through the genealogy of Sayyid Qutb’s thought. If you’ve got to sketch out an intellectual history and don’t have time for the methodological and structural challenges of weaving together the wider strands of culture, everyday life, social movements, institutions and so on, stick to texts and the biographies of authors, where the trail of breadcrumbs is fairly clear.

There are also way, way dumber and polemically nastier versions of the argument that Occidentalism offers, such as Dinesh d’Souza’s laughable new book. The problem with Buruma and Margalit is that they don’t have Manguel’s curiosity or his individuality, or his generosity of spirit and warmth. They want to make grandly authoritative and polemically-charged pronouncements based on idiosyncratic, careless or cherry-picked foraging through big piles of information.

The first chapter, for example, is about the “occidental city”, about anti-Western representations of the West as urban, degenerate, and so on. However, it’s a meandering mess that borders, like a lot of the book, on being manipulative. A goodly portion of what they’re talking about in the chapter is the general global history of rural or town discourse about the city, about the dangers of Babylon (by whatever local name it might go). They acknowledge as much, but that doesn’t seem to slow them down. This train’s on the tracks, whatever obstacles might lie in its way. Dealing with a vague set of widely distributed images and ideas, they’re going to somehow extract a far more specific history and then describe the part as the whole.

Manguel’s book is a book of pleasant wanderings. Buruma and Margalit, on the other hand, are often either doing sleight-of-hand or are possessed by attention-deficit disorder (the one being purposive, the other accidental or compulsive). They make pronouncements, seem about to demonstrate or prove what they have declared, and then go often on a mini-rant about some other subject entirely. The idea of the book is sound, I think. There’s something to it: nationalism, anti-Western ideologies, and so on, clearly have genealogies that lead back to European romanticism, the counter-Enlightenment, and so on. But exploring that either takes a more generous and intellectually curious vision or a more tightly drawn argument.

The History of Reading may be a good model for cultural scholarship, but it’s not a blueprint that can be easily or unerringly duplicated. Occidentalism shows how it is possible to go badly wrong with this kind of writing.

Posted in Academia, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 5 Comments

Publishing Presentation on Academic Blogging

Posted on February 15, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Last week, I had a chance to talk about academic blogging in relationship to academic publishing at the Professional and Scholarly Publishing pre-conference event in Washington. Here’s the basic outline of my talk here, with some additional notes.

The main thrust of my talk concerned outlining where I thought academic blogging might be useful or specifically interesting to publishers, particularly scholarly publishers. The most obvious use is promotion (in a good sense). Academic blogs are a good way to get conversation going around important or interesting books: I think symposia have been very successful at Crooked Timber, The Valve, Cliopatria and elsewhere. They’re certainly a huge improvement over the timid and almost-always obsolete publication of reviews in scholarly journals three to five years after the publication of a book.

——–
I. The Academic Publishing Scene, from one outlier’s perspective

a. Medium-term trends
i. Good-bye to the non-digitally published narrowly specialized monograph (and good riddance).
ii. Movement of journals to digital distribution, and maybe (?) to open-access models.
iii. New digital forms, such as archives and data.

b. Prediction: academics will be largely unwilling partners in the longer-term transition (the MLA not withstanding).
i. MLA report a good way forward.
ii. A good outcome: less publishing, more attention to quality of writing and research, more openness and individuality in academic writing, more attempts to integrate and synthesize knowledge. These outcomes have significance beyond publishing, for the entire shape of academic life.
iii. A bad outcome: “circle the wagons” against generalists and popularizers, living in denial about changing circumstances, obstructionism.

II. Overview of academic blogging
a. “Academic blogs”: Language Log, The Valve, Terra Nova, Long Sunday, Cosma Shalizi, Digital History Hacks, This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. Work is somewhat “scholarly” in character, focused on disciplinary or specialized topics, authors are usually writing under their own names.

b. “Academics Who Blog”: Barely Tenured, New Kid on the Hallway, Acadeemom, Chronicles of Dr. Crazy. Mostly pseudonymous, often by women. (An issue which frequently sparks discussion.) More focused on compelling discussions of everyday life with interspersed attention to institutional issues in academia.

c. Hybrids, eponymous and otherwise: Bitch Ph.D, Easily Distracted, Michael Berube, Dan Drezner, Crooked Timber, Brad DeLong, Elizabeth Lawley, Margaret Soltan, PZ Myers, Acephalous, 11D, Cliopatria. (biggest group, wide variation in style and content).

III. Academics, Blogs and Publishers: Opportunities and Problems

a. Academic blogging is good for some things that don’t have direct relevance to publishers (syllabi construction, community building).

b. Blogs for promoting published work: the evolving models. Theory’s Empire at The Valve, Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks at Crooked Timber.
i. Symposia: big advantage over book reviews in journals both in terms of timeliness and liveliness
ii. MIT OpenCourseware and other syllabi online. A potential way to find out what are faculty actually doing with books, what do they actually want?

c. Blogs as a method for recruiting authors. If academic publishing moves closer to mainstream publishing, it may become more important to actively solicit manuscripts from authors who can write for bigger audiences.

d. Training academics to write for larger publics. Blogs help scholars to find out how their work and interests sound in a larger room, outside of the ivory tower.

e. Advocacy for transformation of publishing, tenure, etcetera. Bloggers can help push academic practices closer to what the MLA is describing.

f. Value-added, open-access method for servicing and updating textbooks (a textbook specific wiki; or the model of Rheingold’s Smart Mobs or some of Amazon’s plogs, where editors track and link to relevant news items and online materials).

g. Incubation and promotion for upcoming projects (Michael Berube’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?).

h. Direct-to-publication: blogs as completed manuscripts (Language Log’s anthology, Berube’s Rhetorical Occasions).

i. Substitution of some formal publication practices that are now difficult to support (short research findings, conference papers, bibliographic guides, formal book reviews).

j. Blogs as possible platform for open-access journal publication (just-in-time publication of articles rather than monthly issues? But, problems with existing blogging software in terms of suitability for archiving and reuse of older material).

k. Bottom-feeding: bloggorhea, blogspats, energy creatures, etc. Blogging is in some cases the opposite of both scholarship and public intellectualism. Academic bloggers are easily drawn into bitter and small-minded partisan discussions, or can find themselves just echoing whatever meme is burning its way across the web. Maybe some academic blogs are more about being talkative than talented?

l. Productivity questions. Do blogs take away from publishable writing? (The thing every non-blogging academic wants to know…)

—————

Posted in Academia, Blogging | 7 Comments

Obama and Blackness

Posted on February 13, 2007 by Timothy Burke

The worst job interview I ever had for an academic position included among its memorably difficult moments an interrogator with extremely strong Afrocentric views. She started by asking me what books I had read recently that I found useful or interesting. I mentioned Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House, knowing that I was likely to provoke a response. (I had already decided it was the only position that I wasn’t interested in taking, based on hearing that it was a 5/5 load with average class sizes of 200 and no T.A.s., with all but one of the classes being sections of Western Civilization.)

She grunted and said, “Are there any African authors that you like?” I said that I was under the impression that Appiah was. She said, “No, he’s not African, and he’s not black. You know who’s a real African? Walter Rodney”. (I decided not to take it further by insisting that Rodney was from Guyana, in South America.)

I was thinking about this conversation in the context of discussions about Barack Obama’s “blackness”.

Some of this conversation is coming directly out of the political vision of some of the black leadership floating that trial balloon. A part of doing so is pragmatism: they’re trying to send a signal that Obama will have to earn their support rather than assume it. That’s fine: all constituency politics operates that way. But a part of it is also reflective of the quasi-nationalistic narratives that underwrite at least some organized African-American political power.

It’s true that the historical condition and consciousness of recent Afro-Caribbean and African immigrants to the United States is different from that of African-Americans whose roots go back to the slave systems of the Atlantic world. One of the side effects of that difference is a complicated tension between those historically different populations within the United States. One of the repeated claims of identity politics is that dominant power structures within American society enforce and inflict a common racial ideology on all people who fall within a certain racial structure: that “blackness” is enforced on all black subjects, “Asian-ness” on all Asian subjects, and so on. In part, I take that claim to be part of trying to mobilize all constituencies named as racial subjects behind common political and social projects: “same struggle, same fight” and so on. It’s meant to remind people not to attempt to opt out by distinguishing themselves from racial compatriots, in this case, to suggest to African or Afro-Caribbean immigrants that they have nothing to gain by trying to be “model minorities” whom white leaders can praise and use to demonize other black subjects.

Fine, but if it turns out that dominant racial ideologies do in fact make relatively fine-grained distinctions between different historically-shaped communities, if “blackness” is a complex historical condition and the African diaspora not a single community or subject position, then the political point may run aground somewhat on lived experience. More importantly, it is then hard to turn around and say that Obama (or Appiah) aren’t really Africans, or aren’t really black. You can’t say that one hand, a inflexibly enforced experience of racial discrimination creates a need for unified political action, and then say, “Well, if you don’t signify as ‘truly’ black, you aren’t black.”

Ken Warren has written about “misrecognitions” in the African diaspora, and Jim Campbell’s fantastic new book on the history of African-American engagements with Africa extends Warren’s insights. (I’ll also note Ibrahim Sundiata’s excellent book on Garveyism and Liberia.) This is an old problem in the diaspora. African-Americans have a long-standing interest in Africa, and a wide range of intricate engagements with and travels to the continent. But that interest, as often as not, gets tangled up in paradoxical desires to see Africa as an indistinguishable extension of the African-American experience and with strong attempts to reject or exclude the reality of Africa and Africans as having any legitimate place in the African-American imagination. Either one of those extremes is a problem, and they have something to do with the situation that Obama now finds himself in, dealing with some political and intellectual figures who insist that blackness within the African diaspora and Africa can be one thing and one thing only, and that they are the people who have a monopoly on its distributions and definitions.

Posted in Africa, Politics | 3 Comments

Pop-Culture Settings

Posted on February 1, 2007 by Timothy Burke

So there’s been a bit of talk recently about teacher movies, and how obnoxious they can be. You might wonder about why doctors, firemen, and police are so central to a great deal of TV drama (and even situation comedy). There really are limits to the kinds of stories you can plausibly tell about a lot of other workplace settings. I love the show Dirty Jobs, but imagine a workplace-oriented fictional show stuck in one of the settings described in that program. Equally with teachers (or professors), you’re either going to be telling inspirational stories or stories about the students that are almost divorced entirely from the realities of education. Unless you’re The Wire, I guess.

But as always, The Onion really gets it right.

Posted in Popular Culture | 6 Comments

Wikitedium

Posted on February 1, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I’m with Geeky Mom: how many times do we have to have this discussion?

I’m using Wikipedia this semester where it seems appropriate: to provide quick, condensed background on a historical subject as preparation for a more general discussion. Next week, for example, the students are having a quick look at the Malthus entry as part of a broader discussion of critiques of progress in the Enlightenment.

Big deal. The folks at Middlebury are perfectly correct to say that students shouldn’t be using Wikipedia as an evidentiary source in research papers. That’s got nothing to do with Wikipedia’s “unreliability”, or the fact that it’s on the web, or anything else of that sort. It’s because you don’t cite an encyclopedia article as a source when you’re writing an undergraduate paper in a history course at a selective liberal-arts college. Any encyclopedia is just a starting place, a locator, a navigational beacon. I’d be just as distressed at reading a long research paper in my course that used the Encylopedia Britannica extensively. As a starting place, Wikipedia has an advantage over Brittanica, though: it covers more topics, is easier to access and use, and frankly often has a fairly good set of suggestions about where to look next.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 2 Comments