| How hard can it be? - Jeremy Clarkson, philosopher
:-P | |
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| My Wednesday was evenly split between the three mysteries of academic labor: research, teaching, and service.
I spent the morning in the university library, reading other students' submitted doctoral theses and making some hard decisions about the writing up of my own. (Surprised, incidentally, that none of the theses I saw were printed on cotton rag paper.)
I spent the afternoon shadowing my supervisor while he was supervising undergraduates and taking notes on teaching practices. This is a part of a 9-month teacher training course offered by the University.
Finally, I spent the evening doing odd jobs related to my position as Co-Convenor of the British Sociological Association. I emailed the BSA office, emailed my fellow convenors (way too many emails, to be honest!), and hung posters advertising the annual conference all around the department and so-called Graduate Attic.
It was a ten hour work day, no joke. And of course I'm also in Week 4 of my Monster Cold and am now coughing till I see stars while I type.
In sum? Just another ordinary day in the life. | |
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| I'm not usually in the habit of developing crushes on aging male-to-female transsexuals, but... ( Read more... ) | |
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| AX 2011 Anime and Manga Studies Symposium
(Los Angeles, California, July 1 - July 4, 2011)
Friday, July 1
2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Keynote Address: Prof. Ian Condry (Comparative Media Studies, MIT)
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Roundtable Discussion 1
Theoretical perspectives on Japanese visual culture
* Samantha Close (University of California, Irvine)
* Amanda Landa (University of Texas at Austin)
* Gino Zarrinfar (University of Hawaii Manoa)
8:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Open Session 1
Andrea Gilroy (University of Oregon)
* This place is a nightmare: Globalization as horror in Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu
Casey Brienza (University of Cambridge)
* Manga Revolution or logical evolution? Field theory on the rise and demise of Tokyopop's U.S. publishing programme
Saturday, July 2
12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Open Session 2
Sandra Alagona (Claremont Graduate University)
Sherrie Bakelar (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
* Between Yasashii and Bushido: The balancing power of warrior mothers in anime
Annie Manion (University of Southern California)
* Modernity and pre-war Japanese animation
* Deborah Scally (Southern Methodist University)
Cogito, ergo anime: Some thoughts on using anime and manga in the classroom
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Open Session 3
Paul Cheng (University of California, Riverside)
* History, memory and aesthetics in animation: Isao Takahata's Grave
of the Fireflies
Kukhee Choo (Tulane University)
* "Cool Japan": Soft power in the 21st century
Gino Zarrinfar (University of Hawaii Manoa)
* The Guyver and societies of control
Sunday, July 3
10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.
Open Session 4
Samantha Close (University of California, Irvine)
* Real ninjas make AMV's! Anime through the eyes of vidders
Northrop Davis (University of South Carolina)
* Title to be confirmed
Forrest Greenwood (University of Southern California)
* "Past fungibility": Examining the speculative value of history in the doujin works of Takeshi Nogami
Alex Leavitt (University of Southern California)
* "Open-source culture"" and the cult of Hatsune Miku
3:30pm -4:30pm
Roundtable Discussion 2
Teaching, writing and thinking about anime/manga: New directions, new opportunities
* Northrop Davis (University of South Carolina)
* Druann Pagliassotti (California Lutheran University)
* Kim Rudolph (University of Oklahoma)
* Deborah Scally (Southern Methodist University)
4:30pm - 5:00pm
Closing Remarks: Lawrence Eng (Anime and Manga Research Circle)
* Writing about otaku: Lessons from fandom, academia, and beyond | |
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| Why I am against the cuts to UK higher education: Tuition fees with big sticker prices hurt the working class, not the middle class. Middle class families will figure out how to work the system, while working class families take one look at the sticker price and figure there's no way they can afford that. Yes, debt distorts the life-chances of all but the most affluent, but the middle class will pony up. You'll see.
Also, to UK commentators who seem to have no clue how US higher ed actually works: So-called "private" colleges and universities in the United States still receive an important indirect public subsidy. They receive tax breaks if (as all the reputable ones are) they are registered non-profit organizations, and everybody, for-profit and non-profit alike, qualifies for federally-backed student loan money. (This, by the way, is the US version of the for-profit scandal. Why should the student loan system subsidize some corporation's capitalist accumulation?)
By the way, you shouldn't be using the THE rankings to assess anything about universities in the US, most especially not undergraduate education. Harvard ain't Cambridge. Most SLACs and regional institutions, where the best undergraduate teaching happens, do not appear on the list because their primary mission is teaching, not research. That said, I am a liberal arts college graduate and would be the first to line up in support of the foundation of a real US-style liberal arts college in the UK. (But New College of the Humanities ain't it.) | |
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| Three things related to the academic world have been fighting for the (tragically finite) real estate of my brain lately. Honestly, I'm not yet sure what I think.
1) Multinational universities, a.k.a. NYU Abu Dhabi, Yale-NUS College
2) Elite research universities; should they exist, and under what conditions?
3) The relationship between teaching quality and research activity for professors | |
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| [T]he real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is often tomorrow's hot field. - Gregory A. Petsko, Genome Biology | |
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