Scholarly meetings with a “Disclaimer and Waiver”
I’m guessing that most anthropologists don’t read the Disclaimer and Waiver to which you must consent when you register for conferences through the American Anthropological Association. It…
I’m guessing that most anthropologists don’t read the Disclaimer and Waiver to which you must consent when you register for conferences through the American Anthropological Association. It…
Jeffrey Williams wrote in his excellent essay Smart that academics’ hands are remarkable for their contrast with working-class hands: My father has a disconcerting habit, especially for people…
When you spend a few years writing code, the principles of programming can start to spill over into other parts of your life. Programming has so many of…
If you submit an article to a journal, they always ask you to list your “affiliation.” Typically this means name, academic department, name of college/university, email and mailing…
Failed research projects ought to count for something! It’s too bad they don’t. They just disappear into nowhere, it seems to me: into filing cabinets, abandoned notebooks, or…
I’ve been thinking about certain scholars who have written, for lack of a more precise way of putting it, a lot. The sort of people who seem to…
One day back when I was working in my campus IT job, I jotted down some notes on a day at work. I was in the middle of…
Outside my new house, which is currently full of half-unpacked boxes and lamps waiting to be reunited with their shades, there’s a palm tree. If you go out…
I’m not sure whether this little descriptive passage from my fieldnotes will ever have much use in academic discourse, but it does remind me quite vividly of urban space in my fieldsite.…
I came across a confrontational moment in one of my interview transcripts. We had been talking about philosophers’ metanarratives about “truth.” But my interlocutor found my question…
I was reading through my field notebooks lately and I came across a little ethnographic snippet of description. It is a description of a male French student sitting in a…
I’ve now had the Ph.D. in hand for about three weeks. It is in a large brown folder. It looks pretty official. There is, if anything, something incongruous about the…
Here’s a tidbit from before Sarkozy was President that gives a certain sense of how his administration was likely to regard philosophy, and the humanities in general: «…
I’ve been reading up a bit on the international circulation in ideas of the university. It’s not hard to find documentation of how France has for a long…
A snippet from my dissertation chapter on the French university strike of 2009. Nicholas Sarkozy was elected President of the Republic on May 6, 2007, and took office…
I’ve been thinking about what counts as utopian in my research site, and happened to come across a handy definition by René Schérer, now an emeritus professor. It’s…
Continuing with my sequence of book reviews, I recently sent LATISS a review of Nancy Abelmann‘s fascinating 2009 book The Intimate University. It should be coming out in…
Editing is a lot of things, but one of them is an endless series of minor improvements in phrasing. While I was in the field, I often wished…
This is the roof of the library where I’m writing a first draft of the introduction to my dissertation. The sunshine is always encouraging. In writing the…
The precarity of academic workers, far from being a merely local or institutional problem in academia, indicates the foundational contradiction of universities’ missions in neoliberalizing times…