Epistemographer

Bruno Latour’s talk tonight, sponsored by NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, was an interesting extension of his argument from We Have Never Been Modern. In essence, he was arguing for the same kind of symmetry in approaching religious belief as he has been with regard to scientific knowledge. Rather than claiming that religions are constructed, which has a negative connotation as well as the embedded implication that the speaker is able to judge that some things are constructed while others aren’t (a vestige of the modernist rationality he’s trying to eschew), Latour claimed that we should talk of gods (the subjects of religious belief) simply in terms of how well-constructed they are.

The talk was well-argued, and from a philosophical standpoint made quite a bit of sense. Latour, ever his charming self, did however punt on one question, when he was asked essentially how useful this theoretical shift in how to discuss religion might prove when confronted with fundamentalists who chose not to engage philosophically with it. Not unlike the Science Wars, I wonder if this sort of approach would simply be dismissed as “relativism,” driving those who follow Latour’s argument into a reactionary posture out of sheer defensiveness when under siege by others who choose not to engage on his terms.

…click here…

[found while compulsively scanning the Chronicle’s job postings like a good little do-bee]

UPDATE: So, the Chronicle seems to have wised up pretty quickly and yanked the ad, which was posted as from the “University of Duke” and simply read, as both job title and description, “Ass Kicker.”

Phoebe Sengers just presented an interesting critique of S&TS, arguing that as we’ve been discussing it this weekend, there are several aspects which in fact obstruct S&TS from engaging with engineers and designers in HCI and other cultures. In essence, her argument is that in emphasizing itself as an academic discipline, S&TS has erected boundaries around itself, which have the effect of closing out interesting connections with other research.

This is an interesting angle, especially for the crowd gathered in this room. Cornell has been one of the pioneers of a certain flavor of Science & Technology Studies (yesterday, Sheila Jasanoff discussed the ways in which even the placement of the ampersand in S&TS as opposed to ST&S is a political move that reflects the Cornell project of building S&TS as a discipline), and most of the people here are pretty much within the core set of S&TS practice. The “Making Digital Stuff“ panel, and Phoebe more particularly, seem very interested in connecting S&TS with other kinds of research, which would have positives and negatives. On the plus side, expanding the boundary of S&TS (or rendering it a little more diffuse) would bring more researchers under the big tent, researchers who according to Phoebe and others are already reading S&TS literature and see themselves as doing resonant work. On the other hand, between the Science Wars and countless institutional battles, the erection of S&TS as a discipline itself rather than an interdisciplinary collective has been essential to the accumulation of the institutional resources and power which are essential to the practice of scholarship, both on the departmental and individual level.

Sometimes, I wonder which course S&TS will follow – will it become a real and tangible field like English or Political Science, or will it eventually become a sort of virtual discipline like Marxism, offering a way to view the world and a set of theoretical tools with which to do so, but without any of the trappings of a more explicit discipline (departments, PhD programs, endowed chairs, etc.)…

I’ll be spending Friday through Sunday at a conference hosted by my department. If I can snag a wireless connection in the room the sessions are in, I’ll try to blog it a bit – if not, I’ll post some synopses afterward…

Nice, encouraging piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, by a historian turned freelance writer turned professor. As I’m trying to figure out what comes post-dissertation, I’m trying hard not to see things as black and white (i.e. “Choice A will rule out your ability to do B or C for the rest of your life”), and stories like this one make me feel a little more at ease…

I so want to teach this class…c’mon somebody, hire me so I can teach this class.

I’ve been starting to put together a list of places where one can learn how to teach writing at the undergraduate level for a friend of mine who’s looking into grad school. So, I figured I might throw the question out to anyone who might be reading this…cast the net wider, so to speak.

Right now, the vast majority of my experience has been with Writing in the Disciplines programs, in particular the Knight Institute at Cornell. To be concise, Writing in the Disciplines (or Writing Across the Curriculum, or any of a number of other titles) yanks writing instruction out of the first-year english composition courses to which is has traditionally been relegated and situates in classes throughout the disciplines. The goal of a WID/WAC program (love those acronyms) is to establish that writing is something that happens everywhere, not just in composition classes, as well as to teach students the conventions and norms of writing in a given discipline.

It seems that most WID/WAC courses rely wither on faculty converts who drink the Kool-Aid and become converts to this way of teaching within their discipline, or by finding graduate students who teach either pre-defined courses or create their own. Hence, my own experiences teaching Science and Media and the forthcoming Writing as Technology seminars at Cornell.

A list of WAC/WID programs can be found here, but I’ll mention a few that I know a little more personally. I’ve met the people in charge of Princeton’s Writing in the Disciplines program, and they seem exceptionally committed to WAC/WID pedagogy (including offering some sweet fellowships not just to Princeton graduate students but also to visiting postdocs!). Duke University also has a great program, also with good support for students and postdocs. I met Jim Slevin of Georgetown’s program earlier this year, and they seem another interesting place, as do George Mason, NYU, University of New Hampshire, and MIT .

The thing here is that pretty much all of these programs are places where you learn to import WAC/WID into your “real” work – the pedagogical training is a corollary to your main graduate work in a discipline. From what I can tell, at none of these programs would one begin school already knowing that one would be teaching writing, nor would one even be guaranteed training in this pedagogy. It’s kind of a bonus, one which in my case has dramatically changed the way I think of teaching.

So, here’s my question – where does someone (like my friend) who knows she’s interested in teaching writing, not necessarily within any specific disciplinary framework, go for a graduate degree? Are there any MFA programs that’re particularly strong in pedagogical training/opportunities? How about composition programs (which I’ll admit that I know embarassingly little about)?

And let it be said that I’m including a link to Invisible Adjunct’s site here, which is the best gateway available into the network of articles, blogs, and other commentary on the darker side of higher education and graduate education…plus, this piece by Thomas Benton sums things up nicely.

I’ve been thinking about writing something on this for a while (I’m finding that I’m mentally writing blog posts to work out ideas, but once I write it in my head I don’t bother to write it out when I’m actually at a computer), but it took Alex Pang to actually jolt me into doing it.

Alex writes:

…will [blogging] matter in the academic job market?

At a micro-level, it might: graduate students who blog might find that they have higher professional profiles than those who don’t, and perhaps have become more fluid, faster writers. But at a macro level, I suspect it won’t.

I’ve been wondering about this quite a bit lately, and on a broader level wondering what I should do with this space once I hit the job market in earnest this fall. There aren’t really any precedents to follow here: I can think of hardly any PhD students in my field who blog, much less who have been out on the market while doing so…hell, the closest thing I can come up with are those (usually anonymous) columns that show up in the Chronicle every so often.

So, should I be keeping a low profile here? Considering the information that’s already out there, plus the links to my personal site on the right, my cover’s pretty much blown – there’s no chance of the anonymity of Invisible Adjunct, for example.

Then again, it’s not really anonymity that I’m concerned with – it’s more the management of my identity as I go through a job search. I’ve read my Goffman, and I’m well aware that the different self-presentations that I’d offer to my family, my friends, my colleagues, my advisors, and prospective employers all could come crashing together in this space. As of yet, this hasn’t been a problem, in large part because I haven’t tackled an issue in which I’ve emphasized different aspects of myself.

To be blunt: right now, I’m open to both academic and non-academic jobs. There, I’ve outed myself. Both worlds seem appealing, each for its own reason, which I’ll go into some other time. The point here is that even this simple declaration is something that could get me in trouble if some hiring committee happens to read it…I’ve seen enough job searches to realize that one person asking “Is he serious about an academic job?” or “Maybe we should focus on other candidates who’re more devoted to academia?” could mean the difference between being short-listed (or at least long-short-listed) and the circular file. There’s a part of me that feels that I’m in a precarious position, straddling multiple possible disciplines (I might apply to departments from History to Sociology, Communication to American Studies, not to mention the Writing in the Disciplines positions or the possibilities in Information Technology areas, and those are just the academic jobs!) – that part of me reasons that I’d be better off micro-managing my identity, tailoring it to each job like a cover letter.

On the other hand, there’s a small part of me that thinks, essentially, screw it. Let’s have some fun with this, and put it all out there. Let any potential employers/departments/etc. who decide to look up my website or Google my name come across all the different hats that I wear over the course of a different day, all the different projects I work on and all the different interests that I pursue. I wonder if that would make me more appealing or less so.

In the end, of course, any such move toward “openness” would just be one more attempt at identity-construction – rather than being the social historian of technology, or the web coder, I’d just be the guy who’s interdisciplinary, and who flaunts it in order to distinguish himself from the rest of the pack. Either way, this blog is another way to try and market myself to employers. No way around that…the question is how I can make it work in my favor, rather than making me seem like a dilettante.

Alex also writes:

But most of academic life proceeds on the assumption that you already DO know everyone you need to know. The indices of social and professional status are very well-understood: they’re pedigree, publications, public performance, and buzz. As a graduate student, your identity gets defined by where you’re doing your Ph.D., who you’re working with, what you’re working on, and a general sense of how good your work is.

The last sentence is definitely true – though there are several different ways I can spin myself, my committee is still made up of Ron Kline, Bruce Lewenstein and Trevor Pinch, and I’ll have the same conference papers and publications. On the other hand, it’s the quality at the tail end of the preceding sentence that seems relevant here: “buzz“. The sociology of the academic job market would be a fascinating study in its own right, and one chapter would most definitely be on “buzz”: who’s the hot candidate this year, who’s promising, who’s got the inside track on the most-coveted job (this seems particularly relevant in a field like science studies, where there are maybe a handful of jobs posted in the discipline itself any given year). So, I wonder, how might a blog be used to create buzz?

Interestingly, this is much more obvious outside the academy – my friend Kevin Smokler has talked about how one can use the web (and blogs in particular) to build and enhance one’s reputation as a writer, &tc: in short, to create buzz. While I’d agree with Alex that academics “live in a small world that’s already very efficiently sorted and classified its members,” I’d argue that one might benefit from shaking that world up by importing strategies from other cultures (in particular something like freelance writing) rather than strictly playing along with its norms. I’ve had this on the brain tonight: I’m reading Rosalind Williams’ Retooling, which deals quite a bit with issues of professional identity and technological change that seem to bear on the notion of blogs and academia.

In the end, I don’t have any answers yet, so I’ll throw the question out to any academics/postacademics/nonacademics reading this: short of getting Instapundited or Slashdotted, how do you think I should use this blog as I’m applying for jobs and figuring out what to do post-graduate school?

As for me, I’m going to go get some sleep. More on this in the next few days, as I mull it over myself…