Search Results for academia

Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman have written an excellent article for the Chronicle, A New Philosophy for the 21st Century. A stupid subscription is required, frustratingly, so let me excerpt some of the good bits for you here [update: here’s a PDF]: It is time to reclaim the public role of philosophy. This does not mean rejecting rigor. By venturing… read more

In comments to my response to Geoff Dyer’s critique of academic writing, Bill Coberly suggested that “a lot of the tolerance for lousy writing in academia does come from that (probably unconscious) desire to keep academia sacred and mysterious.” There’s probably something to this. On a related note, the faslanyc blog responded to both articles by excerpting a portion of… read more

In Friday’s New York Times, the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer wrote a scathing indictment of academic writing. An Academic Author’s Unintentional Masterpiece takes aim at the well-known art historian Michael Fried, but it could easily have been written about almost any scholar in the humanities, veteran or novice, successful or luckless. It lambastes the bad, turgid, unclear writing so… read more

I’ve been noticing a lot more activity via Academia.edu (it’s a social network for academics, for those of you fortunate enough not to be one and who might not be familiar). I wonder if folks are creating new accounts or reanimating old ones partly because of recent dissatisfaction with Facebook’s ongoing privacy woes. Though ironically, Academia.edu’s account landing page currently… read more

Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She’s doing a feature for a local magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of press over the years, and it’s become increasingly important to me to find ways to make my work comprehensible and applicable to a general… read more

There’s been a surge of discussion in the past couple days about the relationship between object-oriented ontology and politics. For one part, Levi Bryant responded to Reid Kane’s concerns about what he perceived to be the “absent political dimensions” and “neoliberal alliances” of OOO and Actor-Network Theory. A liveley discussion ensued, and Levi followed up with some thoughts on the… read more

This past week, renowned new media scholar and colleague Jay Bolter and I staged a debate on theory in the study of digital media. Here’s how we described it: The Digital Media program in LCC is described on its website as follows: â??The Georgia Tech Digital Media Ph.D. provides both the theoretical and the practical foundation for careers as digital… read more

Jason Mittell, a media studies scholar at Middlebury College, recently wrote about his experience being a researcher at a liberal arts college. Mittell’s offering points to and comments upon a related article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kristen Ghodsee, who explained her path from UC Berkeley graduate student to Bowdoin professor. Both Ghodsee and Mittell question the assumption… read more