Basically, what it sounds like. The author reached out to me over email back in December and we had a conversational back-and-forth and this is the result. Give it a read and let me know what you think.
Tag Archives: academia
Podcast – Academics on Air
This spring, I was part of producing a podcast about a UAlberta campus radio show from 40 years ago. Check it out at https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/
Presenting my six-year old:
Well well
It’s hard, when you’re in graduate school, to prioritize your physical health. Mental health awareness campaigns, resources, all that good stuff is made available (at least at my institution) in what on good days I think is evidence of the way that society is changing to recognize the holistic nature of our ontological health, and on bad days merely a response to the fact that students keep trying to kill themselves because Anthropocene.
Musings
Typing posts up is exhausting and takes my mental energy away from where it needs to be (e.g. my thesis, maybe), so I’m not going to be making any more gigantic posts about theory – or, well, I won’t be pushing myself to do so, at least until my dissertation is over and done with. Life is too short to hold oneself to academic standards for writing that is non-peer-reviewed – and, let’s face it – that isn’t generally even considered by a hiring committee for a traditional academic job, or tenure review board.
Post-
Back in July, I was chatting over the phone with my parents, telling them about the research trip I was taking, the book I was reading, and generally the sort of life-update type things that you do when you live with two entirely separate provinces between their home and the one that you live in. I’m currently reading The Posthuman Glossary by Rosi Braidotti & Maria Hlavajova; on hearing this my parents wanted to know what I meant by posthuman. I entirely failed to explain it to them.
On public writing / writing for the public
(In January 2018, I found this in my drafts folder from August 2016; I’m posting it now)
I’m currently in the midst of reading Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, and I just finished Sina Queyras’ contribution – “Public Poet, Private Life: 20 Riffs on the Dream of a Communal Self”. I really like it. It’s vulnerable and defiant, a quasi-autobiographical account of her struggles with engaging with a public voice. It touched a chord in me.
Niceties
(Found this in my drafts folder in January 2018; it is unfinished, but I’ve lost the thread of my thought, so I am back-posting it now)
On Canada Day, post-Brexit and pre-US Presidential Vote, I was feeling the Canadian smugness, not going to lie. Something about having spent almost a year now with a government that seems a lot saner and less deliberately apocalyptic than the last has put part of my brain at a dangerous ease, and I slipped more readily into the national myth than I have for years. Isn’t it a nice feeling, to be Canadian? Isn’t it nice that we’re just so nice?
We’ve been telling ourselves that for decades, now. Even last year this time, when anxiety over the Harper Government was at its height, a lot of the criticism could be boiled down to a concern that we had become, as a country, not very nice. We love this myth. The world loves this myth.
Accessibility of Information: IT, Academics, and the Internet
We’ve all heard the stereotypes about the IT… not the tech department, but the Ivory Tower of academia. Even the name connotes its pristine and precious nature, its rarity, it’s high-and-mighty nature (not to mention its whiteness sourced from colonial oppression and illegal trade). Its halls, hallowed. Its customs, arcane. Its usefulness to the world, almost nil because nobody really understands it and can’t access it anyway.
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