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January 24, 2008
Melissa Greg has kindly provided an online link to her Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conversational scholarship paper in Continuum that I indirectly referred to in this post. The paper is a defence of academic blogging.
Greg mentions the potential that self-publishing platforms like weblogs have for academia in terms of both what an academic career can involve—and involving to an interested public:
Blogs have made scholarly work accessible and accountable to a readership outside the academy, an achievement that seems important in the history of cultural studies’ concerns... The ‘interpellative imperative’ of criticism as a genre...seems to have avoided discussion of how practices like blogging fit within a tradition of public intellectualism otherwise mourned .... As I want to argue here, it has also overlooked blogging’s role in carrying out cultural studies’ long-standing commitment to scholarship which reaches beyond the limited range of the academic sphere.
The institutional constraints on academics that challenged the objectives of sharing knowledge and fostering conversation with an audience outside the university are then mentioned in relation to the ethos of cultural studies which asks that academics make a career out of ‘rocking the boat’. These constraints in Australia are:
* the effects of the bureaucratisation of the university on the writing of academics in the humanities and social sciences’. Academics now write in order to fulfill the criteria of a carefully managed university institution and this pushing their writing ‘away from contribution to culture and society. Academics publish regularly in refereed journals to secure their career and professional advancement.
* academic professionalism brings a necessary end to a certain cherished sense of political engagement as public intellectuals.
So blogging is seen as extra-curricular intellectual engagement (community work) or viewed with hostility. So the intellectual life of the walled university is that of a gated community and that outside is defined in terms of self-serving, self-aggrandising or self-delusional. Why so? Gregg says that the ‘publish or perish’ dictum has been particularly effective in narrowing the ambitions many academics hold for their writing to the extent that a ‘yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit’ is regularly met with disbelief, if not also disapproval, from colleagues.
Surely blogs are a different kind of writing for a different audience from the closed world of academia? Gregg suggests that blogging lies in the ‘mid-range’ between disciplinary insularism and public intellectual practice, and she unpacks it thus:
the ‘conversational scholarship’ it gives rise to can be seen to follow a tradition that includes independent and small press publishing, reading groups, salons and even café culture; that is, before the real estate boom and rising standards of living demanded that urban-based students work full time to support their study, severely limiting other forms of recreational intellectual practice.
This is how I've understood it. its a continuation and development of that tradition. It has always amazed me how few of the chapters, draft papers, little magazines, reading groups, salons and even café culture are online. It is not just academia that resists the changes wrought by digital publishing.
Gregg then states the significant potential that blogging offers for cultural studies. She says that in the world of blogs:
..knowledge loses any sense of being something to be guarded. It instead becomes something to be facilitated, discussed and improved. Blogs can create an economy of generosity and gift at the expense of jealousy and possessiveness.... They encourage collaboration as much as competition. The participatory nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this they illustrate very well that version of cultural studies practice described by Stuart Hall, which is ‘to work with our always inadequate theories to help move understanding “a little further on down the road”’.
Precisely, even the traditional academic culture has a deep fear of the democratic public sphere.
Gregg defends the middle ground by saying that blogging can contribute to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than just threatening it. Graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is that blogs offer solidarity out of isolation, especially on long projects. They create the conditions for collegiality, brainstorming and frank, fast feedback while also generating and maintaining interest, enthusiasm since blogging offers an exciting new avenue for academics and non-academics alike to ‘speak to each other’.
This potential has to be actualized.The best way to do this is to recognize that blogs can foster conversational scholarship by actively seeking the voices of others and that blogs are a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech traditionally securing academic privilege.
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Gary,
We had a chat about this at my confirmation seminar. There's a bit of uncertainty over how to conceptualise digital publishing of all sorts for academic purposes.
Do you really want your work exposed to the sort of public bun fights in OLO comments? Why would a PhD candidate waste time writing something for OLO when they could spend their time working on something for a brownie point accumulating exercise in a print journal or conference?
According to heavyweights Habermas and Jeff Alexander the internet wilds where public discussion occurs is a disorganised, disreputable rabble. Babel. As an academic with a reputation to build or preserve, mixing it with the hoi polloi can be a bridge too far waking up with fleas.
Some free access, peer reviewed journals are appearing as you know, but they don't carry the same weight as the gated community. Academic linguistic requirements don't lend themselves to public discussion.
There's also uncertainty over how to teach the internet and how, or whether, to use it for teaching/learning purposes. Internal discussion boards work well for external courses, but not so well for internal ones. Is it reasonable to ask a tender undergraduate to expose their work in progress?
Glen Fuller documented his whole PhD experience on his blog Event Mechanics. On a recent LP thread other people I suspect are also academics ripped it into him for his phoney cultural studies pretentiousness. He took it well but I know I couldn't.
As a lecturer/blogger, do you want your students to see you getting flamed? It would be a great tutorial discussion cue, but academic egos are not all the same size.
Personally I'd like to see blogs building collegiality and the bravery and gentleness of Home Cooked Theory. But I expect you'd see the same sorts of divisions in academic blogging as in the rest of the blogosphere. Left, right, civilised discussion, discursive war, high brow,low brow.
Also, what do you do with a moving target? By the time you've organised what you're going to do blogs could have morphed into little TV stations.