Teaching and Learning as Making

I will be beginning my talk for the Re:Humanities, an undergraduate conference on Digital Humanities run by students at Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford, with these observations. There are certainly reasons that the digital humanities lend themselves to an integrative pedagogic method (including both undergrad media production and research):

• the field is new: so there is still not a lot of original research, and there’s room for undergraduates
• it is digital and therefore young people’s “native status” qualifies them to do work that many more “qualified” experts can not or will not
• web 2.0 is characterized by a diminishing of the power of expertise with a linked growth in access to voice (through both production tools and distribution platforms)
• since digital literacy includes reading and writing beyond the word, the production of sounds and images becomes critical
• working with digital tools allow us to stay within the vernacular of what we critique while modelling the methods, ideas, and norms we wish to see on the Internet

(this video won best in show for the Learning from YouTube 2012 video about YouTube popularity that was also a good video for school).

Fred Rant

I have a piece, “Fred Rant,” in a stellar special issue of TWC on fan/remix video edited by Julie Levin Russo and Francesca Coppa, who write:

“In this special issue, we zoom in on questions foregrounded by the proliferation and mainstreaming of remix video over the past decade. Not coincidentally, this summer will mark the 10th anniversary of VividCon (http://vividcon.com), a convention founded at a time when the fan vidding community was weathering the transition to digital editing and an associated influx of new devotees. It would have been difficult then to anticipate the scale of this transformation, both in the prevalence of fan music videos (which are now a YouTube staple) and in their new interchanges with a vast ecology of remix practice. As mashup video genres increasingly coexist, cross-pollinate, and collide online, emerging scholarly canons and debates on these distinct traditions can become similarly intersectional and mobile. We aim to bring diverse critical engagements to this conjuncture by fostering connections between scholars and fans across disciplines and subcultures.”

And there, I rant this and more: “I think it is necessary to look to the common practices of quotidian YouTube culture (and its fans, and its students of fans) and try to name how this culture is failing us, to learn from the failures of children and scholars (starting with my own).”

Voice as Structure

Yesterday afternoon, I had the decided pleasure of partaking in a conversation with Natalie Bookchin, the amazing new media artist who is my friend and even sometimes collaborator. We spoke together with the Critical Digital Humanities group at UC Riverside about space, quotation, and community in relation to our critical media practices.

A highlight in our conversation addressed how we both conscientiously move and link our work between “real” and “cyber” spaces always anticipating how they are co-constitutive (thanks to April Durham for this clarification) while trying to maintain a shared, and admitted commitment to the “real” in the last instance (what I called a complex three-way). But I was most inspired by our interactions about the voice, body and structure: how Natalie explains the ways that her voice is visible in the system, tensions, arguments, and connections she draws from the indexical images of faces and words of others from YouTube, while my online feminist mantrafesto didactically insists that the (feminist, raced) body of the user must be seen. Bookchin’s unseen but anchored presence as artist may be the out I’ve been looking for, as participants at my road show have consistently been critical of these lines:

All voices want a body. A body needs to be visible
Visibility allows for warranting

Is Self-Branding Feminist Practice?

Sarah Banet-Weiser and I co-authored, “Feminist Labor in Media Studies/Communication: Is Self-Branding Feminist Practice?” for the International Journal of Communication (IJoC) new special section on “The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies.”

Edited by Jonathan Sterne, this special section features 21 authors who raise difficult questions about academic labor in our field. We may have learned to speak of our work as a calling, but it is also a job. Our jobs are changing, and there are fewer of them. What is to be done? English, history and anthropology have rich discussions of the politics of academic labor; it’s time for people in communication studies to join them in reflections on the future of universities and colleges and our place in them.  These articles are meant to spur further conversation in organizing our departments, universities, and associations, as well as in coalition with others who hope to defend and advance higher education.

Authors consider a host of issues big and small, from defunding of universities to the real dilemmas facing administrators: from the changing politics of careers to the ways that gender and class play out for faculty and students; from the types of work that get published and promoted to the tyranny of PowerPoint; from the politics of fundraising, to the devolution of administration, to the role of unions in universities. The authors provide plenty of proposals and programs for change, from small but meaningful gestures to activist programs for pedagogy and research, to massive proposals for organizing ourselves and transforming the ways our departments and fields do business. In the process, they raise even more questions.

Contributors include Sarah Banet-Weiser, Fernando Delgado, Thomas Discenna, Michael Griffin, Jayson Harsin, Mark Hayward, Alex Juhasz, Kembrew McLeod, Kathleen F. McConnell, Toby Miller, Michael Z. Newman, Amy Pason, Victor Pickard, Michelle Rodino-Colocino, Joel Saxe, Carol Stabile, Ted Striphas, Ira Wagman and two chairs who elected to remain anonymous so they could tell their stories candidly.

Visit IJoC at http://ijoc.org to read these essays and more.

 

A Truly New Genre: Lessons Learned from Digital Publishing

An essay that I wrote, reflecting upon my experiences in online digital scholarship and publishing, has just been published at Inside Higher Education.

I begin:

“It’s true, unlike most academic e-books — erudite words placed into regulation paragraphs unceremoniously plopped onto a new environment with a few links and illustrations added — my video-book (according to my Glossary) is “large-scale online writing that depends upon video, text, design, and architecture for its meaning making.” That I can’t begin without defining the work itself (like the press’s request that I add a glossary to help readers) demonstrates how common terms of scholarly writing and publishing must be reworked, modified, or scare-quoted to most effectively describe and traverse the “limits of scholarship” of the digital sphere. But what, precisely, gets muddled at these borders and what might we best do about it?”

I then go on to enumerate nine lessons of fully online scholarly publishing that raise questions about medium specificity, reading practices, writing practices, temporal expectations, expanded audience, expanded authorship, legal challenges, vetting and support structures.

Teaching, Intellectuals, the Left, Families and Activism, with Toby Miller

The second pod of my interview with Toby Miller for his CulturalStudies podcast was just cast. This one ended up being pretty personal: about my family of lefty intellectuals, like my sister, Antonia, who is in London with her new book, Black Tide, and several Gulf Coast residents, all attempting to attend and testify at the BP Annual Shareholder Meeting (last year, she and several others were arrested when they attempted to speak at the Chevron Annual Shareholder’s meeting).

One day later: things are heating up in London! A protester got arrested, my sister and others are all over the international press. Go sister, go!

We Walked Out

About an hour into my course on Feminist Spaces Online a student informed us that an absent class member had just texted her suggesting that we should leave class and join her at the USC Walkout for a Safer Campus. This we did, and I couldn’t have scripted a better “teachable moment” for our class.

While we are certain that the distinction between online and offline experience is no longer useful to describe most of our lived experience of self or community, in our many conversations about place, activism, self-authoring and self-representation, I have always held the protest up as a sort of litmus test of embodiment. Given that the vast majority of my students had never been in (or witnessed) a protest, the sustaining  gap between (my) lived, bodily experience and (their) experience via representation would then function in our classroom to authorize and alienate, albeit kindly. That is, until they voted to walk out.

The heat of the sun, the surge of eighty voices together, the stares of suspicious classmates and smiles of fellow protesters, the sense that we had transformed a normative space along feminist and anti-racist values, the understanding that many bodies are both more visible and also more safe than any one alone, the pride in taking action in the name of principle, and the weak and strong pull of the ever-present media in relation to these actions and experiences taught my students and I about feminist place and the Internet in a way that this blog (and my classroom teaching, and our books, and incessantly accessible protest videos) will not, can not, and need not.

Anxiety Is a State of Media/Mind: On SCMS and Feminist Blogging

I’ve returned from SCMS and Louisiana (having seen two alligators in the wild on a hike and eaten crawfish and shrimp in innumerable yummy formats) and would like to briefly mention a few of my more memorable media encounters: like the alligator, anxiety-defined all.

Tara McPherson organized New Media Futures: The Digital + the Academy, the workshop where she and I spoke with Nick Mirzoeff, Joan Saab, and Wendy Chun about how digital technologies are altering our new media labor (research and teaching), writing, and publishing practices. While the fact that the projector did not work, definitively disenabling our techie show ‘n tell (has this even not happened at a conference where I am speaking about the Internet?), and thereby providing some felt anxiety for each of the able speakers who could not readily rely on machines to illustrate our points as planned, I’m more interested in highlighting some of Wendy’s brilliant observations about anxiety and new media (studies). She suggested that fears about the future of new media (and its theories and applications) are definitive of the findings and methods of the field, as well as anticipating and self-defining the very forms that new media will take, leading to more uneasiness, more anxious findings, and more twittery tools needed to soothe our ever more shattered nerves and brains. For instance, an anxiety about loss leads to tools that save and thereby produce easily erased, unfindable, updated, quickly unusable, outmoded, unstable records that so engulf us that we become too overwhelmed to remember or (re)visit our saved stuff, thus already producing the loss we anxiously anticipated and the need to build even newer tools and theories to remedy all the more future loss we do and must anticipate.

Now, one might imagine that old-school (dying?) feminist (academic) blogging (and “self-promotion”), the topic of another workshop I attended (highlighting the powerful blogging and other online experiences of Miranda Banks, Ryan Bowles, Alisa Perren, Anne Petersen, Julie Russo, Patty Ahn, and Inna Arzumanova), might be a remedy to our nervous media condition in that blogs (like this one) might allow the lady-theorist (like this one) to calmly, and perhaps communally (or at least in-community) name her own terms, moods, tools, and forms; boy did Wendy Chun get this one right! These amazing, ambitious, bright, primarily young academic women (most were in grad school or ABD, one had just gotten tenure), as well as the mostly young feminists in the room, discussed their blogging, tweeting, and online personae (and thereby use of new media tools and the futures anticipated, hoped for, and associated) as organized by what … Anxiety of course (about being hired, promoted, and otherwise evaluated) and even fear (of hostile readers and punitive potential committees).

Their anxiety made me feel, well, anxious (to feel so differently from everyone else in the room, my comrades, and then try to articulate it cogently) but mostly sad. Then mad, and now compelled to speak and explain. My feminist (academic) blogging might be understood or termed as “self-promotion,” or even “self-branding” (a term tossed about, uneasily, at the session), just look below: I pitch my films and books. Yet I truly think of this very same practice (without fear) as a public engagement in thinking out loud, honing a voice, self-naming, community-building, and stake-holding.

This media platform, like all others, is pretty neutral (yes I know, ownership, design, protocols have meaning, but this is not my point here). Rather, we assign to platforms like blogging (or are assigned) feelings and anticipated futures, but we feminists need not accept the anxiety that holds us in check, that makes us self-doubt, that assures us that speaking about our own good work or new ideas is somehow too prideful rather than merely productive. Feminism gives us all the tools we need to understand that economic conditions like a depression and an academy that sells advanced degrees to pay for itself,  social conditions like patriarchy and racism and homophobia, and psychological conditions like anxiety, should not be suffered as a personal, debilitating and self-censoring problem, but should be understood and fought as political issues best addressed by being named, refused, refined, and remade within the power of movements and with the tools of technology. Sure, all these amazing young women should be anxious about getting a job, but they shouldn’t be anxious about blogging that fact, or blaming whoever they want to blame, or naming the forces in their way, and then doing, showing, and sharing their great work, from which we can all learn and build. I choose anger over anxiety any day (including in your comments, or as I like to think of them my no-mments. We fruitfully discussed in the workshop the value of the under-sung, underdone labor of commenting to better build dialogue, community, and confidence in the anxious world of feminist academic blogging).

Also, a shout out to a great panel I went to on Interactivity. Marina Hassapopoulou spoke about the legacy of expanded cinema and video installation to help us historicize new media, Aubrey Anable about the lie that interactivity is a forum for democratic participation in the new urban planning of New Orleans, and Vinicius Navarro about the new media index as an emptiness that points to a referent in-between.

CulturalStudies with Toby Miller

Toby Miller, Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, chatted with me over tofu for his podcast, CULTURALSTUDIES. Since last summer, Toby has recorded meandering, lively and detailed conversations with scholars, artists, and activists and he releases them in unedited real time on his podcast to 1000 or so subscribers, all probably three men and their dog in Sweden, according to Toby.

Sitting over lunch with just his shiny laptop open doing the quiet work of recording us—slurps, clinks, and all—I was reminded about the beauty of these kinds of DIY, “hand-made” practices (something we discuss in relation to my video-book’s fears about YouTube and the corporatization of “DIY”) enabled by technology. We discuss this, revolution, AIDS video activism and more. Hope you’ll take a listen.

Learning from the Book Tour

I’ve been on the road with the video-book: CAA, NYU, University of Toronto and OCADU. I’ve been having fun, and learning a lot too during long and intense Q and As where people are actually critical and productive (in this sense it feels more like a film screening than my image of a book tour, but maybe that’s because showing the video-book is more filmic in that it is screen-based, live, loud, and defined by images). A few beginning thoughts, now that I’m live, and being read and even talked to (btw: write a texteo in my book and talk back through the v-book, please!)

-The video-book is harder than most online experiences (more dense and has its own rules of navigation) and this turns readers off. Food for thought for other budding digital-auteurs, and like everything else in this self-reflexive process, useful in its failures.

-Along this vein, the video-book takes time. I’m suggesting now that people should give it the length of a movie, not the three clicks usually afforded a web-site. It takes that much commitment to take in its logic, scope, scale, and structure, which in some ways makes it like a book (that is if you all actually read books, and don’t just buy them as a sign of [later] commitment).

-Users really don’t like my (highly limited, fiercely constrained, but ultimately, I think, empowering) mode for commenting (see link above), and feel it goes against the best of the internet. They want a wiki.

Two more cool things: this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and an invitation from the Library of Congress for “inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials.” Who knew!?