The current health crisis has swept the world, provoking worldwide change at the political, economic, and social levels. Scholars have been caught in two contradicting roles: experts discussing the causes and consequences of the pandemic and victims of the pandemic workflows’ extensive impact. They have been forced to change their work dynamics and rethink the Academy’s processes and offering during this time.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
A sense of loss pervades critical accounts of the contemporary academy. There’s little uniformity in what these accounts regard as having been lost, or explanations of how this was lost, but mourning nonetheless unites them in a critique of the university system we now work within.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
This passage from Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (pg 108) resonated horribly with me at a time when universities are freezing their recruitment: There were a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals […]
Estimated reading time: 58 seconds
This description of life within the publishing industry, from Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley loc 133, struck a chord with me: Every assistant I knew quietly relied on a secondary source of income: copyediting, bartending, waitressing, generous relatives. These cash flows were rarely disclosed to anyone but each other. It was […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Friday, 03 April 2020, 11am-5pm in London, UK Register online here: https://www.srhe.ac.uk/events/details.asp?eid=456 There is widespread agreement that universities are undergoing a profound transformation but much less agreement on what these changes mean and how we should characterise them. The Digital University Network has stressed the role of new technologies in […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
From Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System pg 101: Political information cycles rest upon a subtle political economy of time. This involves not only the often-rehearsed “speeding up” or “efficiency” of communication but also the importance of continuous attention and the ability to create and to act on information in […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
CFP – Prospecting: Extraction, Speculation, and Liberation in the Accelerated Academy (Accelerated Academy 7) Nov. 22-23, 2019 Michigan State University Digital Scholarship Lab An interdisciplinary symposium on the future of academic life and labor, organized by Zach Kaiser (MSU) and Erin Glass (UC San Diego) In theory, the academy is […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
There’s an interesting section in Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain discussing Ross Ashby’s experiments in building cybernetic systems and the design philosophy these undertakings led him to articulate. As Pickering describes on pg 128: If, beyond a certain degree of complexity, the performance of a machine could not be predicted […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
My notes on Nash, K. (2018). Neo-liberalisation, universities and the values of bureaucracy. The Sociological Review, 0038026118754780. It is too easy to frame neoliberalism in institutions as an outcome rather than a project. In this thoughtful paper, Kate Nash explores the space which this recognition opens up, the “competing and contradictory values in the everyday […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Organised by Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan and Filip Vostal Keynote: Liberalism Must Be Defeated: The Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene by Gary Hall, Director of Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. Full schedule of speakers and talks: Jana Bacevic (University of Cambridge): TBC Garfield Benjamin (Solent University): The fractal knowledge […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
I can’t remember when the notion of concept wrangler first occurred to me. I meant it semi-jokingly but the idea of a role in which one would round up, herd or take charge of concepts had a distinctive appeal. It helped articulate a transition in my own intellectual career, as I ceased […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
November 29th and 30th Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge Organised by Jana Bacevic, Mark Carrigan and Filip Vostal Keynote: Liberalism Must Be Defeated: The Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene by Gary Hall, Director of Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK. The conference seeks to conceptualise change […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The Idealist by Nina Monk, cited by Daniel Drezner in the Ideas Industry, presents a vivid account of the frantic pace at which the economist Jeffery Sachs has tended to work. This intensified work, fitting as much action as possible into each day, will appear to his detractors as a […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
What does it mean to write? For a long time, it carried a sense of total immersion for me, letting the world recede in order to lose yourself in the production of a text. This is ‘binge writing’ and it was my standard mode for the six years I spent […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
I spent much of the recent Accelerated Academy talking about the limitations of the fast/slow dichotomy and my concern that the framing of our series entrenches it. To talk of the ‘accelerated academy’ implies there was once a slow(er) academy and hints that the pathologies we currently face could be […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
June 8th, 12pm to 2pm, DMB 2S4 Faculty of Education, Hills Road, Cambridge In the fifth event in the Accelerated Academy series, the Cultural Politics and Global Justice cluster at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education hosts an afternoon seminar on critique and agency in the accelerated academy. How is […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute
Accelerated Academy #4 Academic Timescapes: Perspectives, Reflections, ResponsibilitiesMay 24-25, Villa Lanna, Prague, Czech Academy of Sciences After meetings in Prague, Warwick and Leiden, the fourth Accelerated Academy conference calls for a more nuanced perspective in order to advance our understanding of academic temporalities as experienced, understood, controlled, managed, imagined and […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the notion of ‘the literature’ and how it is invoked by scholars. I’m now rather sceptical of the way in which many people talk about ‘the literature’ and the role it plays in scholarship. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Our opening talk at the second Accelerated Academy conference in Leiden in December: Some two years ago the two of us started discussing Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration and how it manifests in the present condition. Though we found his theory fascinating and provocative we also noted important conceptual […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
