new website

So my last website design was a bit rubbish. I built it from scratch with my childhood HTML skills, but it just wasn't cutting it. So I dived into WordPress, wrangled with some MySQL database issues and finally figured out some permissions errors. Tada!

young people, space and conventions

Have a look at this little champion (iTr3vor) letting loose in an Apple store to a bit of Gaga.

Aside from his moves, what I find most interesting here is how the other people in the space pay very little attention to him. Does his youth allow him to transgress the conventions of a social space like this? (Or, would he be asked to leave if he was a bit older?) Or is the Apple store itself imbued with a different kind of social convention that allows for this kind of disturbance? (If this performance took place in another shop, would it have been allowed?) Or is it that this performance is directed at a screen and thus (presumably) intended for an audience other than those physically present that this kind of disturbance is permitted and, in some ways, ignored?

It's a PhD, not a Nobel Prize

In reading a recent post about getting some perspective on submission on the thesis whisperer blog, today I came across this wonderful article by Gerry Mullins and Margaret Kiley called 'It's a PhD, not a Nobel Prize'. The 2002 article is based on semi-structured interviews with 30 experienced Australian thesis examiners. The study considered a variety of dimensions in the examination of a thesis, including why examiners thought they were invited to assess theses, how long they spent on the task, what they considered an outstanding thesis to be and the extent to which they considered the broader context of PhD candidature beyond the thesis.

The two pieces of advice I found most resonant from the research are that a) most examiners want to pass students; and b) most examiners think of the thesis as a stepping stone rather than a world changing masterpiece. With this advice on board, perhaps I can pull this beast out of the woods without too much drama. I suppose now I should go and work on my thesis rather than construct metaphors around it.

This isn't my thesis, it's just a course reader I put together recently with a smiley face on the front.
ONE DAY MY PRETTY.

into the fray: orientation + erotics

Alright! So tomorrow is the beginning of orientation week, which will be particularly busy for me as this year I'll be serving as the first year advisor for my School, helping all the firsties settle in and transition to the big U. This year will also be my first year as a full time member of staff, convening two courses, along with being the year I'm planning to submit my thesis. So... no biggie, right? I'm actually looking forward to 2011. I'm up for a challenge, so let's see what happens.

This week I also dropped in on the Erotics conference hosted by my research centre, the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. It was a great few days filled with some excellent scholarship, a bit of fun and some new friends. Jack Halberstam's keynote on 'Going Gaga' was an absolute standout. Longest applause following a conference presentation I've ever seen. I've found myself recounting some of the arguments at parties and in conversations since then. There is an echo of it in this review, but damn: I wish I had recorded it!

The conference was seamless. Well done to my mate and idol, Jodie Taylor, who convened with a sharp sense of style and humour that only she is able to reproduce with what appears to be such little effort. Amongst many others, Fiona Patten from the Australian Sex Party was there, along with the delightful Alan McKee who reminded us of the importance of happy endings. On that note, adieu!

Alan McKee

i've got a website!

...like, a real one. With my own domain name: bradyrobards.com. Eventually I want to incorporate my blog and this site, but I think I'll keep this 'candidature blog' separate for now. Also, building a blog into a website (probably using Wordpress, or something?) would require some time and effort, both of which are in short supply at the moment.

Thesis update: blerg.

identity, integrity and educators

As I mentioned in the previous post, a delegate at the CSAA conference, Ruth Walker (Wollongong), asked me to submit some of my work on identity and integrity for a special issue of the International Journal of Educational Integrity dealing with new technologies. The only problem was that it was a tight deadline. Three working days, to be exact. But it only had to be a few thousand words, so I got stuck in. Wrote it on a Wednesday, it was edited on the Thursday and published on the following Tuesday.. I wish all my experiences with journals were like this! My experience with a certain A* ranked journal, on the other hand, has been long and arduous... like, going on two years. But the copy editor is having at it now! Progress.

Negotiating identity and integrity on social network sites for educators

CSAA 2010

A couple of weeks ago I was in Byron Bay at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) conference - 'A Scholarly Affair'. It was generally quite an enjoyable experience. The highlight for me was a plenary talk from Dr Katrina Schlunke who did an amazing job. I laughed, I cried. I tried to recall the specifics of her talk over dinner with some colleagues last week, but I failed miserably except to say something along the lines of "well there was this louse metaphor, and an observation that single beds are quite queer... and then she was fighting Engineers!" The resounding take home message was not to forget why we (people in cultural studies) do the things we do, and to go back to those motivations when we feel like giving it up or jumping ship. So, I'll leave it at that, because any further recollection wouldn't do it justice. Hopefully I can track down some reliable record of the talk

(Prof. Raewyn Connell - another wonderful talk)

Some other stand-out conference moments include a paper from Jenny Kennedy (Swinburne) who presented some really interesting and polished thinking, titled: 'Exploring social interactions in networked spaces'. I also enjoyed a paper from Daniel Marshall (Deakin) titled 'Life during wartime: sexuality, recruitment and reality television' where he explored the integration of Australian naval recruitment processes in the 'So You Think You Can Dance' television series. Penny Robinson (Sydney) also had some interesting things to say about how young Australian women engage with contemporary understandings of feminism mediated by popular culture in her paper '"I googled for feminism": creating a postfeminist methodology for cultural research'.

I missed a whole bunch of papers I would've liked to have seen, but you get that with concurrent sessions. It was also great to spend some time with many of my colleagues and friends from Griffith who were able to attend the conference given that it was just down the road.

I presented my paper titled 'Youth, identity and integrity on social network sites' which was a fairly casual kind of presentation where I discussed some of my findings more generally. I focussed on deploying my own data to resist Zuckerberg's singular model of identity and his insistence that privacy is dead. Good discussion, good suggestions. I was also delighted to contribute part of my argument from this paper to a special issue of a journal - the topic for another post!

Drop the "the". Just "Facebook". It's cleaner.

I went and saw the 'The Social Network' (2010) last night. It's a great film with a strong story-line and solid acting. I'm sure most of it is heavily dramatised, but the part I found most interesting was the deeper social and cultural sentiments the story points towards: we're such social creatures, even when we're bad at communicating with people and full of our own insecurities, which is how Zuckerberg is portrayed.

New technologies and new modes of engaging with eachother have always made this human condition seem more complex, from the advent of language (which probably took a bit longer than six years to hit 500 million adopters) through to the internet. Facebook does articulate, formalise and record these social interactions though, which is pretty awkward. We're definitely still getting used to that.

I'd thoroughly recommend seeing it!

Also, this:

K.C.: Seven different people spammed me the same link. 

KC's Friend: What is it? 

K.C.: I don't know, but I'm really hoping it's cats that look like Hitler 'cause I can never get enough of that. 

don't quote me on that!

Subtitle: Some musings on youth/the interblags/the facebook inspired by a student journalist.

Because my research is on a sexy hot topic, I often get approached by journalists to talk about young people and the internet. More often than not, it's really just about Facebook. I find it incredibly awkward to do this kind of thing, and I'm constantly living in fear of misrepresentation or saying something stupid on the phone or live radio. Maybe I'd be more comfortable if they were asking about the deployment of Goffman's dramaturgical framework to consider identity construction in online social spaces. They never do though! Weird, right?

I guess it's part of the job though, and at least people are actually interested in my research - or the terrain my research finds itself in. Resist the ivory tower and all that stuff. Anyway, I also get approached by lots of student journalists because journalism is taught in the school I work for, so my colleagues love to fwd students to me.

I decided to record some answers to some typical questions I was asked recently, so that a) I can refer future student journalists to this helpful post; b) so I can justify the time-sink; and c) because this particular student journo actually got me thinking about some things I don't usually think about.

Read on for vague anecdotal musings and lots of "I reckon!"

Being in the navy was my other career choice. This blends my social realities. (Stock from fawkmee)

strange audiences = greater clarity

I've done a few guest lectures in unlikely contexts this year, including in the Griffith Business School and more recently in the Queensland College of Art. The QCA one yesterday was in a web design/web studies course for photography students, so as a sociologist of youth and new media presenting a lecture on 'online identity', I was a bit worried about how I'd pitch the content. I went for the safe, 'keep it general' approach (managed to smuggle my man Goffman in) which seemed to work. It was a relatively small group but some interesting discussions came from it. It's also nice to have to articulate yourself to a new crowd with a different background. It's also nice to be reminded that the research and thinking that I'm doing is transferable and relevant, something you can easily forget when you have your thesis blinkers on.

Actual horse with real blinkers focussed on finishing her PhD (image source, c/o nancymesaaz)

Next random lecture will be at the Institute of Modern Art in November, which will be another audience yet again. Hopefully I'll be able to smuggle Erving in there too.