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January 31, 2008
I have followed up Melissa Greg's link to her draft paper Banal bohemia: Blogging from the ivory tower hot-desk that she mentioned in the comments in this earlier post. The text refers to the academic blogger—especially those younger scholars aspiring for employment following their PhDs who blog to maintain their momentum and prospects during candidature--- within the university sausage factory.
Greg says:
These students display alarming conscientiousness about the requirements for career success, yet the decision to blog rather than write exclusively for refereed journals places them in direct opposition to current notions of appropriate academic performance.
Why do they do so? Why the transgression in a wold increasingly marked by diminished opportunities for tenure and the casualisation of the academic workforce? Greg says that:
Blogs serve as a sort of short-term ideological resolution to the contradictions of the contemporary university workplace, a safe space to share the disappointment arising from the end of guaranteed ongoing employment, the growth of casualisation and the lack of agency that persists in large organisations of the knowledge industries. At a time when traditional versions of labour-related union-led activity appear in decline, blogs are an interesting instance of emergent co-worker solidarity amassed in virtual space.
This academic labour and class mobility territory was explored by Invisible Adjunct---the experience of early career academics being part of ‘a volunteer low-wage workforce for whom ‘low compensation for a high workload’ has become ‘a rationalized feature of the job’. Greg's article is concerned with those PhD students or junior faculty members who have developed blogging communities to keep them company as they move along their career paths. These blogs help sustain motivation, ease loneliness and mark time in a world where many are being excluded from or pushed to the margins of the vocational university life that is promised but not delivered under neo-liberal governmentality.
Greg says that the focus of the subculture of the American blogs that have developed in the wake of Invisible Adjunct (Adjunct Whore, Ferule and Fescule, New Kid on the Hallway, Professorial Confessions, Lumpen Professoriat and Profgrrrl)
... give voice to a range of personal and work-related issues that arise for their authors as the reality of professional identity sets in. The various grievances endemic to the industry that feature in discussion include teaching loads, unmotivated students and intimidating senior colleagues. But the blogs also offer plenty of advice and suggestions about developing a research profile, coping with living away from loved ones for work, even riding out bouts of jealousy or bitterness at others’ success.
They are about the trials and tribulations of academia (including conferencing) rather than stepping beyond outside the walls of academia to the wider public culture and playing around with, and assessing, different ideas from the perspective of their discipline. The key concern of this US academic subculture of bloggers to use their weblogs to “bitch”,or to “badge” their identity in the hope of boosting career prospects.
Sharing and conversing about ideas are not central in the work environment of this academic community and so there is little by way of an intellectual community ---its more imagined than real. This brings us to the limits of Greg's paper.
Firstly only a few Australian bloggers are mentioned ----John Quiggin as senior faculty and for junior faculty Lucy Tartan's Sorrow at Sills Bend, and Glenn Fuller's Event Mechanics. Surely more PhD's and are junior faculty are blogging? The paper is largely based on the US with Australia as an addendum.
Secondly, the PhD's and are junior faculty using their blogs to write about more than bitching or badging about their careers in what Glenn Fuller calls the university factory’, even if they desire to become part of the ‘new’ technocratic regime of ’specialists’ . What about their ideas in their PhD's and papers and linking these to public debates?
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Gary,
The G8 universities are now arguing publicly that university-based academics should be able to contribute openly to public debate and discussion in their areas of expertise. They have been rather silent about this in the last decade. Has there been pressure to prevent this from happening? What sort of pressure--internal or external?