The Academic Fake Self

H/T Progessive Geographies, here’s David Berliner’s How to get rid of your academic fake-self? I’m lucky to have been in a place where I felt I had the room to take false roads on projects, to be open about what I did or did not accomplish, etc. But these are important reminders as many of us leave our summer research time: we didn’t get to reading all of Hegel while finishing two MSs and correcting proofs on our last two. Alas, this advice can probably only be used for tenured faculty, and non-tenured or underemployed faculty would probably have violent thoughts if told by a senior colleague that they were not up to much, that they haven’t felt the need to read x, y, or z, etc. But these are best practices: the best scholarship takes time, or even the patience to wind around a certain set of ideas over the long term. I just think of all of the work people do, say, on the topic of not-working in anarchism…sometimes a counter-practice shouldn’t just be theorized in more work.

Latour’s Facing Gaia reviewed at the LSE Blog

Here. It’s his most important statement on ecology since Politics of Nature (2004, though much of this was available online as part of his 2013 Edinburgh lectures.

Open Access issue of Southern Journal of Philosophy

Lots of good articles around the theme of “Critical Histories of the Present:

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      Editor’s Introduction: Critical Histories of the Present (pages 5–6)Verena Erlenbusch

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12244

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      Overcoming “The Present Limits of the Necessary”: Foucault’s Conception of a Critique (pages 7–24)Tuomo Tiisala

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12224

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      Comments on Tuomo Tiisala, “Overcoming ‘The Present Limits of the Necessary’: Foucault’s Conception of a Critique” (pages 25–30)Maia Nahele Huff-Owen

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12234

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      “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology” Revisited: Foucault’s Historicization of History(pages 31–46)Amy Allen

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12229

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      Commentary on Amy Allen’s “‘Psychoanalysis and Ethnology Revisited’: Foucault’s Historicization of History” (pages 47–50)Jasmine Wallace

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12227

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      Toward Abolitionist Genealogy (pages 51–77)Andrew Dilts

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12237

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      Specters of Sovereignty: Comments on Andrew Dilts’ “Toward Abolitionist Genealogy” (pages 78–85)B. Tamsin Kimoto

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12235

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      The Genealogy of Abstractive Practices (pages 86–97)Mary Beth Mader

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12230

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      Abstraction and the Method of Genealogy (pages 98–102)Jordan Liz

      Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12233

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       Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and Wittgenstein (pages 103–121)Colin Koopman

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12228

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       Comments on Colin Koopman, “Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and Wittgenstein” (pages 122–125)James E. Zubko Jr.

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12222

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       The Morality of Corporate Persons (pages 126–148)Ladelle McWhorter

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12226

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       Response to Ladelle McWhorter, “The Morality of Corporate Persons” (pages 149–152)Shouta Brown

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12236

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       Foucault and Shakespeare: Ceremony, Theatre, Politics (pages 153–172)Stuart Elden

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12225

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       The Modern Drama of coup d’État and Systems of Discipline: Foucault and Political Ceremony (pages 173–179)Bilge Akbalik

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12232

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       When is the Time of Revolution? Critical Reflections on Political Insurgency(pages 180–199)Kevin Olson

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12223

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       Polyrhythms of Revolution: A Comment on Kevin Olson’s “When is the Time of Revolution?” (pages 200–208)Andrew Daily

       Version of Record online: 30 AUG 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/sjp.12231

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2. Jump to…

 

Melvin Rogers on Charlottesville

Here:

Our choice — and it has always been our choice — is to decide how we will narrate this moment. How will we weave it into the narrative that is America’s political and ethical life. Will we continue to see this as an aberration, the expression of a time that has long since passed away? Or will we see this as that portion of our past living in the present and struggling to secure its future, and confront what this means for our ethical and political choices today?

Gary Shapiro’s book on Nietzsche’s Politics

Reviewed at NDPR. It’s really an excellent work.

Foucault Studies: Discipline and Punish Today (2017) – Foucault News

Foucault Studies has a special issue on forty years after Discipline and Punish Today (2017).

BODIES ACROSS BORDERS BY BRONWYN PARRY, BETH GREENHOUGH, TIM BROWN, AND ISABEL DYCK – Society & Space

By mapping out the spatial dynamics of the circulation of patients, health professionals, and bodily materials across international borders, the volume attempts to disentangle the complex social, political, ethical, and legal implications of contemporary medical transnational migration.

Source: BODIES ACROSS BORDERS BY BRONWYN PARRY, BETH GREENHOUGH, TIM BROWN, AND ISABEL DYCK – Society & Space

The Changing Role of Journals and Journalism

The Atlantic has an excellent article up by Franklin Foer on his time as editor of The New Republic and the changing landscape of journalism, one that is dire though it might be understating the problem: we all know about click-bait and such, but knowing people in other sectors online shows how SEOs and such have taken any style out of writing headlines and even stories. (This is why everything on Vox.com is in listicle or clickbait style, even when done by authors who have in the past published well-written long-form articles). In any event, there’s a small point to make about academia from the below:

Makers of magazines and newspapers used to think of their product as a coherent package—an issue, an edition, an institution. They did not see themselves as the publishers of dozens of discrete pieces to be trafficked each day on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Thinking about bundling articles into something larger was intellectually liberating. Editors justified high-minded and quixotic articles as essential for “the mix.”

This is also true of all the journals at which I have edited. While certainly not every issue was dedicated to a theme, one thinks of the particular issue or even yearly volume as a coherent whole. But now that articles are accessed online—and this is well known—it makes less and less sense to me to publish curated, special issues as if we still lived in the days where subscribers read each issue like a mini-book or like I still read The New York Review of Books or like publications: passing through most of the articles one after another. (Or at least feeling guilty that I only read one of those pieces while meaning to go back later.) Now, we search for articles by keywords and it matters little if, say, that article on Angela Davis and critical theory came from one journal or another, or was even part of a special issue on her—since one is searching for a specific look at her work, which the other articles in the special issue might not do. If anything is left, then, for special issues dedicated to an author or subject, it’s simply for the statement that this is important than the coherency of the combination of articles that follows. No doubt, with access to books being moved online by libraries (and by pirate sites), this is already happening with edited volumes (of which I’ve done a bunch myself).

The time will come when we may dispatch with abstracts and the oddly old apparatus of journal articles (why all this work on footnoting the publisher and city of the publisher, etc., of the single edition of books whose info is widely available?) and start publishing “articles” that mirror the more popular formats we find in the journalism we are all reading, especially when our own version of SEO (citations) is a metric used for tenure, promotion, departmental funding, and so on. How long before we are publishing articles such as “Top Ten Things Angela Davis got Right about Critical Theory—and Five She Got Wrong”?