.... about my absence of late ....

At the beginning of the semester, I had begun this blog as an effort to work on my writing. More precisely, I created this as a forum to make some occasionally complicated ideas about film, media, culture as a whole a bit more manageable for myself, to "do cultural theory" in more of a vernacular as culture "happens" around me. In order to meet this personal goal, I had intended to write two posts a week (at least).

Obviously, something has gone awry in my plan lately. I've become increasingly swamped in my reading list for exams and in my teaching obligations. More of the latter than the former, really. (Which is generally a good thing, because I feel that, as an academic, my role as a teacher is significantly more important socially than my role as a researcher into the minutiae of the everyday.) I've also been bogged down with an interdisciplinary grad student conference I was co-organizing here at IU. The whole conference seemed much more time-consuming this year than last, but I'm just making excuses at this point. The conference itself was a huge success, and it had the strange effect of renewing some of my lost faith in the profession, of allowing me to make some important connections in my own mind about how our teaching, our research, and our extra-curricular projects (such as this blog) can all move toward a similar exploratory purpose. It was enervating, but, more importantly, it was also energizing in all the right ways.

Point is: Now that I've had about a week to process everything, I'll be writing a couple of posts on the conference, because it raised for me some issues that have some relevance to the issues I've been exploring on this blog up to this point (it will also, hopefully, push me in new directions, to discuss professionalization and teaching in a more personal and open manner).

The first post will be an attempt to synthesize the ideas that circulated the conference across disciplines, some of the touchstone concepts for research in the humanities (and, as we'll see, in other disciplines as well) right now. In a sense, this will be an attempt to tap in to the current academic zeitgeist and to examine what new directions this offers. This will hopefully also be an attempt to chart some of the political implications of what we do as scholars.

Which leads nicely into the next post, about the profession and the weirdness of organizing conferences and watching other scholars read their work aloud. This post will touch on how scholarship "works" (or doesn't) across academic disciplines (and specifically across departments) and the ideal practices of conferences themselves.

Beyond the conference, I have a whole host of things to write about in relation to everything that I've been reading for my exam lists the past few months. In other words, there will be a lot of book reviews of classic texts from the Culture Wars about canon formation and about trans-media adaptation. There will also be some examination of the history of how scholars have conceived of "culture" as a concept, as a model for society, and as the basis for an academic discipline (it can't be called a methodology, really). Beyond reviewing individual books, I hope to synthesize a lot of this information in a forum which demands clarity and conciseness (two things that will make me a better scholar as I move into the dissertation). Truth be told, I should have been doing this all semester instead of using this blog as an excuse to troll through my RSS feeds. I think I've touched on some valuable ideas up to this point, but that will all have to be put on hold for a while as I cram a hundred books' worth of theory into a two-week-long exam next month......

In any case, keep on the lookout for new posts!