Why we can’t abolish “best”
In my email right now, there are 10,364 messages signed with American academia’s standard valediction: Best, I have always found best an incredibly alienating sign-off. So alienating that…
In my email right now, there are 10,364 messages signed with American academia’s standard valediction: Best, I have always found best an incredibly alienating sign-off. So alienating that…
I’ve been exceptionally dismayed this year by the retrograde, anti-open-access, profit-oriented publication philosophy at the American Anthropological Association. Earlier this year they announc…
Last Friday, as my last work event at Whittier College (since my postdoc contract is finishing up), I went to graduation. A few observations on graduation as seen from the…
If Noam Chomsky had done nothing else, he would have given us one of the strongest critique of the New York Times as the guarantor of nationalist ideology for the U.S.’s…
In so many ways, academic work is hard to recognize as being work in the standard wage-labor sense of that word. It can take place at all hours of day…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…