“The Rise of the ‘Edupunk’

The Rise of the ‘Edupunk’

At TIAA-CREF conference, higher ed braces for a new breed of tech-savvy students who won’t play by the old rules. more

When Social Media Is Irrelevant

At Sloan-C, academics discuss when fostering social intimacy in the online classroom environment is necessary, and when it might distract from more basic student needs. more

Stephen King Made $80,000 From Digital Short Story

Steven King’s “Ur” novella was written exclusively for the Kindle. The bestselling author told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that the 2009 experiment has made him around $80,000 so far.

Bourdieu vs. ?The Total Intellectual?

Guest Author: Kerim Friedman

The culture that Europe needs, for itself and the world, and particularly the world?s third estate, will not emerge from the negotiations of experts or the discussions of technocrats. The question is to make the rigorous use of reason, and thus of language, a political virtue, indeed the first of all political virtues, and thus to give intellectuals the sole power that they have a right and a duty to claim, that of exercising a ceaseless and effective vigilance against the abusive words ? and grand words most of all.

? Bourdieu, Political Interventions. 2008. p. 219

??Culture of Poverty? Makes a Comeback:? New York Times

In the 18 October New York Times, Patricia Cohen writes that the idea of a ?culture of poverty,? first introduced by the anthropologist Oscar Lewis and popularised in a famous 1965 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is making a public comeback in the US after several decades of being ?shunned?

The many globalizations of Christianity

Globalization, Chalmers Johnson says, is just a new word for what used to be called imperialism. He is partly correct, but I do think there are some differences. Cultural globalization, at least, is what the world looks like from the point of view of an imperium in decline.

Dissecting global civil society: values, actors, organisational forms, Marlies Glasius

The rare and intriguing beast, let us say it is an elephant, called global civil society was defined in the first Global Civil Society Yearbook published in 2001 as  ?the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organisations, networks, and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies.?

The re-emergence of ?trafficking?: sex work between slavery and freedom

Activists find that sex work is considered a less legitimate occupation today than it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. They now confront representations of sex workers as victims, sold and bought across national borders and reduced to the status of things. In this climate, labour rights seem irrelevant. Recent shifts in the language of consent and compulsion in the UK are explored in the light of historical parallels in order to suggest a general ambivalence towards all forms of work. Is it possible to experience freedom or only subjugation at work? What is the role of gender in differentiating these polar opposites?

weak and strong definitions of digital humanities

I was thinking about this question today and then Ian Bogost tweeted a similar question pushing me over the edge into writing about it.

The weakest definition of digital humanities is that all humanities are already digital. What kind of humanistic research or teaching takes place without computers, word processing software, email, database searches, etc? None. But no one believes that definition. No one wants to believe or see that the humanities are already changed and only remediating their historic practices of article and monograph writing.

on the digital turn in digital humanities

This is partly a continuation of the last post, maybe more like a variation on the theme. It’s also inspired by Gardner Campbell’s recent post on the New Media Seminar for faculty and staff that he’s been doing. The question here is, “what happens when a humanist becomes a ‘digital’ humanist?”