The “Age of Precarity” after the doctorate
I have my doubts about whether precarity is always a good category for academic labor organizing. But from within the universe of European precarity discourse, I especially admire Mariya…
Author: eli
Women in the French academy
I wanted to repost a useful graphic from a French academic feminist group in Lyon. The self-explanatory title reads (approximately), “Women’s share declines, the higher you go up the hiera…
Language politics and the French “Master” degree
I’m planning on writing more about French higher education policy in the next few years, since even after my dissertation there’s a lot to learn. For instance, there’s…
The institutional conditions of possibility of David Harvey
In a 2015 essay by David Harvey (need I add, “the venerable Marxist geographer”?) that reflects on the relations between different radical currents in the academic field of geography, he g…
Dijon vous craignez
I’ve been working on a paper about the failure of left-wing internationalism at the “European counter-summits” (at least the two that I was able to observe in 2010 and 2011),…
Teaching and bad affect
I’m teaching an Anthropology of Europe class and I decided we’d end by talking about current events. So the week before this, we talked about the Greek economic…
Papers on French philosophy, precarity and protest
It’s been a fun year for me (leaving aside here, you know, many disturbing political events, trends, pomps and circumstances, because this isn’t that kind of blog) because some…
Plato and the birth of ambivalence
I’ve been teaching a class on anthropology of education this fall, and we spent the first several weeks of class reading various moments in educational theory and philosophy (Rousseau,…
Self-governing schools in Tanzania
“Neoliberalism” is always an unsatisfying category, but as it does broadly designate a cluster of policies and institutional logics, it tends to stick around as an ideal type. David…
Does academic informality matter?
Since I started teaching at Whittier, I’ve been thinking about how I like my students to address me. There’s something of a local norm of just calling everyone “Professor.” It …
Is writing composition or improvisation?
In my corner of the academy, one isn’t really taught much about writing. One is taught constantly to produce texts and to judge texts, but that isn’t the same thing, because writing is…
Whittier College at the end of summer
I grew up partly in a college town, and I’ve been around college campuses most of my life. One of my favorite times of year is this late-summer empty…
Derrida on complacency and vulgarity
In Benoît Peeters’ biography of Jacques Derrida, there is an intriguing interview with Derrida that was never published. Peeters writes: In 1992, Jacques Derrida gave Osvaldo Muñoz an…
Style, bad prose, and Corey Robin’s theory of public intellectuals
Ten years ago, before I started doing research in France, I wrote my MA thesis about the politics of “bad writing” in the American humanities. Empirically, my major…
Working-class in academe
When the Minnesota Review changed editors a few years ago, the old back issues disappeared from their website. Fortunately, one of my favorite essays, Diane Kendig‘s “Now I Work In…
He doesn’t hold back his criticism
I was looking at one of my interviews with philosophy professors and was struck by this little explanation of why he had not picked someone as his dissertation supervisor (directeur in…
Affiliation is power (without irony)
As many of my readers probably know, the big controversy in my field this year (in American cultural anthropology) has been about a proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions, essentially…
The risks of expertise in studying higher education
I just got home from a great panel on “Re-Creating Universities Through Critical Ethnography” at the Society for Cultural Anthropology Meetings. It was organized by Davydd Greenwood, who…
The teacher’s body
I used to have a pretty decorporealizing view of teaching, back when I was starting out as a classroom ethnographer. I mainly paid attention to the teacher’s voice,…
Revisiting field interviews
I’ve been going back lately to my interviews with French philosophy teachers and students. I just never had time to transcribe or work on most of them during…
Overproduction as mass existentialism
Earlier this year, I observed that there are two kinds of scholarly overproduction, “herd” overproduction and “star” overproduction. I’d like to come back to that line of…
American representations of French social movements
So over in France these days there’s a pretty major protest movement against efforts by François Hollande’s Socialist Party government, and its current Minister of Labor Myriam El…
Philosophers without infrastructure, Part 2
Following up on my last post (and indirectly on a couple of older posts), I came across an interesting interview extract that comments in a bit more detail…
Philosophical lab infrastructure
The short version of this post: Philosophers have practically no lab infrastructure. The long version: Coming back to my research about philosophy departments in France, I was recently reading an…