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<TITLE>Re: [csaa-forum] the ivory ceiling</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Hi Mel et al,<BR>
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perhaps there is not one “ academy”, and I would hope that no one would feel rejected by “it” as a whole - in fact, the academy has always been divided, fractious and indeed just generally palpably unfair ... and perhaps one will always be taken both seriously and not, whatever one’s position, history and so forth ... yet perhaps not being taken seriously sometimes in the academy could be sometimes taken as a positive (as unfortunate as the indications of this might be) ... and perhaps one is taken seriously within and without the academy sometimes when one least expects it. (I have to say on a personal note that I often feel I’ve been denied opportunities I deserved, but at the same time, I’ve been given quite a few I felt I might not have deserved! Things are never “smooth”).<BR>
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Here I’ll gratuitously throw in a lovely quote from Isabelle Stengers -<BR>
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“Cosmopolitics defines peace as an ecological production of actual togetherness, ecological meaning that the aim is not an unity beyond the differences, reducing those differences through a goodwill reference to any kind of abstract principles of togetherness, but the creation of concrete interlocked, asymmetrical and always partial graspings. To take the very example of what Deleuze calls "double capture", a concept Whitehead would have loved, the success of an ecological invention is not having the bee and the orchid bowing together in front of an abstract ideal but having the bee and the orchid both presupposing the existence of the other in order to produce themselves.”<BR>
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This “presupposing the existence of the other” seems to me to be a core problem, even assuming as I do, that academies are fractured. And, although I completely acknowledge Graeme’s point about how things were, there might also be a problem with the over-professionalisation of the academy today – precisely in such areas as refereeing, evaluation, focus on outcomes, and the general filling in of forms, WebCT, etc etc ... the general understanding of technics as allowing for the new “audit culture” (to use Marilyn Strathern’s term). ... I liked it a lot when “proper process came in”, but now it’s often become an excuse for all the things someone like Whitehead (and after him, Stengers) hated about professionalisation (he saw professionals as actually well-intentioned people caught up in a technical system that was sweeping a lot of good things away). In short, process can be used as a form of exclusion as much as anything else – if not more so. (Maybe Cultural Studies could question this a bit more than it perhaps does at the moment).<BR>
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What’s the answer? – well, lists like this perhaps, for a start – conversation, in general presupposing the existence of the other .... I don’t know... perhaps Welsh beaches ... that does sound like an interesting consolation..<BR>
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best, Andrew<BR>
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On 11/8/04 10:01 AM, "m.campbell3@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au" <m.campbell3@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT SIZE="1"><FONT FACE="Monaco, Courier New"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:9.0px'>> Add in a little journal attack not dissimilar to Jeffrey Weinstock's post <BR>
> earlier this year (I'm still trying to recover from being 'glib', 'fatuous'<BR>
> and 'wrong-headed') and basically I'm just finding academia, well, it ain't<BR>
> no fun no more.<BR>
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Yeah, I'm interested that you brought up the Weinstock saga, because I had a bad experience with the marking of my thesis in which it seemed to me that one examiner in particular was revelling in using language in a deliberately denigrating way, while sheltering behind the anonymity that the academic refereeing process provides. (Apparently I do not practise "good cultural studies", and in my work, "the concept of discourse is being badly perverted". I still don't know who said this about me, although I have a reasonably good idea.)<BR>
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I know I am intelligent and capable of articulating complex and original ideas. But if you can't be taken seriously within the academy, how on earth will you be taken seriously as a freelancer? And the thing that scares me the most is that postgraduates are being taught, through 'mentoring' and simply by learning to survive in the system, to perpetuate these attitudes.<BR>
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I apologise if I seem bitter,<BR>
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mel. <BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>-- <BR>
"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast<BR>
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)<BR>
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Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer<BR>
School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052<BR>
web:<a href="http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/Staff/Murphie/">http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/Staff/Murphie/</a><BR>
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie@unsw.edu.au<BR>
room 311H, Webster Building<BR>
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