Chasing Dragons

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 198

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The "Avalanche of Change" in Higher Education Must be Contextualised in Terms of the Government's Broader Neoliberal Policies' by John Holmwood at the LSE Politics and Policy Blog

• 'Tweet, Tweet: 7 Conference Tweeting Tips for Delegates' by Matt Gleeson at stonetreeharmreduction

• 'Tweet, Tweet: 5 Conference Tweeting Tips for Presenters' by Matt Gleeson at stonetreeharmreduction

• 'Canonical Image of a Drone is a Rendering Dressed Up in Photoshop' by Alexis C. Madrigal at theatlantic.com

• 'The Myth of the Cowboy' by Eric Hobsbawm at guardian.co.uk

• 'Traditional Values and the Public University' by Fred Inglis at timeshighereducation

Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: rahuldlucca

Culture, Security, Identity: A Blog From Newcastle University

I am excited to announce that I will be a member of a blogging collective for the CSI-Newcastle blog hosted by e-ir.info. The blog itself will focus on the themes of culture, security, and identity in world politics. These represent three of the areas in which the International Politics research cluster at Newcastle University has demonstrable research strengths.

The groundwork for this project has been many months in making. It is no mean feat to be able to identify unifying threads across diverse research agendas and for a group of researchers to then reach a consensus that particular themes define their collective identity. Credit must go to Simon Philpott, who as the coordinator of the cluster, pushed us all to articulate what makes Newcastle an interesting and exciting place for world politics research.  

In the CSI-Newcastle blog's introductory post, Simon foregrounds the ethos of our research as a central part of our collective identity:

We are deeply interested in the critique of dominant narratives and discourses of international relations but eschew doctrinaire approaches that are blind to the particular, to issues of race, class and gender, or that insist upon the deployment of simple problem-solving theories. Our critical ethos entails on-going investigations into the underlying assumptions that underpin mainstream analyses of international relations in our attempts to understand the workings of power and domination. We recognise that high and low politics, like high and low cultures, are all zones of political contestation and draw no distinctions between them in terms of their relative importance.

Too often, public understandings of international relations are shaped--and constrained--by the discipline's close association with the 'kitchens of power'. Thus, through the CSI-Newcastle blog, we are looking forward to showcasing the contributions that heterodox analyses can make to a deeper understanding of world politics. 

Photo credit: Creativity103

Related articles

Call for Papers: Popular Culture and World Politics v. 6

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 187

Call for Papers: Popular Culture and World Politics v. 6

Popular Culture and World Politics Conference v. 6

Pirating the Popular

Stockholm University, September 13-14, 2013

Call for Papers

Abstracts should be submitted to 

abstractspcwp@statsvet.su.se.

Please indicate in the subject box in your email message

 "Abstract for PWPC". 

This will ensure proper handling of your abstract.

Keynote speeches by

Siva Vaidhyanathan, Robertson Family Professor 

University of Virginia

and

Elisa Kreisinger, well-known activist and artist 

Conference deadlines

• Suggestions for panels and performances – May 1, 2013
• Paper abstracts – June 1, 2013

Please note that there will be a modest conference fee. 

More information later.

The study of world politics and popular culture is now an 

established area of interest for many disciplines in the 

social sciences, humanities and the arts. Popular culture 

relates to contemporary politics in numerous ways: It can 

offer expression that soothes and humours the soul. It can 

satirize and play off cultural resonance to resist powerful or 

repressive forces. And it can stimulate political or 

community engagement, as demonstrated clearly in the role 

that music and performative satire played in the Arab 

Uprisings and  in the Occupy activities around the world.

This conference addresses the multiple ways in which popular 

culture engages with world affairs. It  takes as its starting 

point the observation that we live in an age of interregnum - 

a time where the old institutions and old rules no longer 

function sufficiently and new ones have not yet taken their 

place. 

Ours is an age where processes of globalisation are 

contributing to the ‘divorce’ of politics from power, 

resulting in what  Zygmunt Bauman identifies as a 

‘liquid modernity’ of endemic uncertainty.’ This 

uncertainty about authority and interpretation - 

compounded by ubiquitous connectivity and audio-visual media - 

gives rise to power struggles, problematizes the ability to 

judge relationships between cause and effect, provides new 

opportunities for political engagement and changes the 

foundations on which authority rests.

Hosting this conference in Stockholm seems particularly 

timely given Sweden’s various, if not contradictory, 

interventions in the ambiguous world of popular culture: 

from the foundation of The Pirate Bay to the Wikileaks case, 

from a culture of  ‘free viewing’ to Spotify’s corporate  

entrepreneurialism, from strongholds in Marxist media theory 

to Facebook’s Swedish server farms, and many more.

The general theme Pirating the Popular covers a broad range 

of practices concerning the complex, dubious and dynamic 

nature of popular culture in world politics. We welcome

 proposals for papers, panels, performances and screenings 

addressing the many different aspects of world politics and 

popular culture that are evoked by the metaphor of piracy.

Themes for papers and panels could include:

• The politics of consumerism and commercial exploitation
• Labour policies and regulation in popular culture industries
• The role of popular culture in protest movements and ‘non-movements’
• The militarization of popular culture (militainment)
• The role of popular culture in nation-branding
• Surveillance and the securitization of the digital landscape
• Popular culture and the politics of citizenship
• The role of popular culture in the MENA region before, during and after the Arab spring
• Cultural globalisation: mediated control and resistance
• Illegal trafficking or migrating media?
• Transnational media witnessing
• Transnational news and popular culture
• The politics of local and regional popular cultures
• Music and politics
• Visual culture and globalisation
• Methodological approaches to popular culture and world politics
• Popular culture and political scandals

Conference conveners:
Michele Micheletti (Lars Hierta Chair of Political Science) 

michele.micheletti@statsvet.su.se

Kristina Riegert (Professor of Media and Communication 

Studies), kristina.maj.riegert@ims.su.se

The official conference website can be found here

Photo credit: Adobe of Chaos

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 181

Yes, I missed my usual Sunday deadline. But there was a really good reason as I was attending the Popular Culture and World Politics Conference v 5.0 at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

Kevin Dunn, the conference organizer, put on an excellent event, including four outstanding keynote speakers: Legs McNeil, Anne Elizabeth Moore, The Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, and Elisa Kreisinger. Thus, drawing from the keynote speakers, here is this week(end)'s reading roundup:

• 'Johnny Rotten: No More Mr. Nice Guy!' by Legs McNeil at pleasekillme

• 'Authenticating the Inauthentic' by Anne Elizabeth Moore at truthout.org

• 'Sandy Stops Our Shopping' by the Reverend Billy at revbilly.com

• 'Resources' by Elisa Kreisinger at popculturepirate.com (everything you need to know to get started on making your own video mash-ups and remixes)

Have a good week!

Video credit: 'Mad Men: Set Me Free' by @marcfaletti and @popcultpirate

Journal Turnaround Times in Political Science and International Relations: Some Issues to Consider

Recently the peer review process in academic publishing has been under increased scrutiny. While many issues have been raised, one of the ongoing sources of complaint for colleagues is the amount of time that the process can take and the lack of publicly accessible information about journal turnaround times. As a first step in beginning to address the lack of information in the disciplines of political science and international relations, Justin Greenwood has established reviewmyreview.eu , a blog that compiles journal turnaround times for a first decision and their acceptance rates.

As someone who is the co-editor of Politics, an associate editor of Critical Studies on Security, and a member of an editorial team for the Popular Culture and World Politics Book Series, I am in favour of greater transparency regarding turnaround times and acceptance rates. Access to better information is particularly important for early career researchers who are under considerable time pressure to have publications in hand when entering the job market. I also hope that being aware of this data might improve the performance of editorial teams and peer reviewers. So, for me, the principle is generally sound.

At the same time, I do have some reservations about how this information is being interpreted by colleagues and how it is shaping perceptions of the peer review process.

First, means are not particularly good at capturing the full spectrum of experience across a process. Beyond the distorting influence of outliers at either end, a focus on the mean, as compared to say a disaggregation of the review process with turnaround targets at each stage, does not tell people much about how the review process is operating. Are there desk rejections and what percentage of submissions are rejected in this way? How many reviewers are selected to review each submission? What percentage of submissions are accepted, rejected, or given a revise and resubmit through the peer review process? Who makes a final decision on the basis of reports? 

Second, I fear that increasingly colleagues--as reviewees--are viewing the peer review process as a burden to be endured rather than as a process that can potentially make their work better. Yes, it doesn't always work out that way. I have had papers get rejected where the feedback was completely unhelpful, and in some cases brutally so. I have also had papers get accepted where the feedback was equally banal. But, in the vast majority of my experiences, regardless of the final outcome, peer review made my work better. Reducing the peer review process to mean turnaround times potentially jeopardizes the recognition that it can provide benefits, beyond the speed of decision.

Third, editing a journal, like any other process, takes place inside of a context. Most journal editors are volunteers who are taking on the responsibility to shepherd a significant volume of submissions through the peer review process. For major disciplinary journals in political science and IR that have high ISI rankings, the numbers can range from around 250-1000 submissions a year. Some institutions may grant a reduction in workload for editing a journal but many do not. Very few editors--if any--receive any direct compensation for undertaking this role. In some cases, a publisher and/or disciplinary association may provide resources to hire an editorial assistant to help with the day to day operations of the journal. Even then, this is most often a part-time position. While the under-resourced and volunteer nature of editing a journal doesn't excuse waiting nine months to acknowledge receipt of a submission--or other forms of unprofessional behaviour--it does help to explain why things may not necessarily go as planned in terms of turnaround times. Other aspects of one's working life sometimes do interfere.

Finally, there is an assumption that editors have far more control over the review process than we often do. The primary consumer of time in any review process is finding appropriate reviewers and receiving their reviews. This is not exactly a secret. There are good reasons why it can take time to find suitable reviewers (e.g., difficulties in securing the services of specialists who are able to review within the proposed deadline). There are also good reasons why it may take a few weeks for reviewers to review; as unpaid volunteers, they also have other commitments and responsibilities. And, despite what some colleagues seem to think, journal editors are not passive when it comes to enlisting reviewers. If a reviewer does not respond to a request to review quickly, we won't sit around for two months waiting for a response. What slows down the process more than anything else are the following two scenarios. The first is when a reviewer provides a review--often one or two lines--that is completely unusable because the judgement offered is not grounded in the text itself. The second is when a reviewer agrees to review a submission, a deadline is agreed, the reviewer never delivers, and then does not respond to any further attempts at communication. In all of these instances, editors can find themselves, through no fault of their own, back at square one in the review process after a considerable amount of time has passed.

So, in sum, the temporal dynamics of peer review involves several variables that are not always under the direct control of journal editors. There are things that editors can do to mitigate some of the risks when given the proper resources to do so, but there are also problems that arise to which one can only react. When things do go wrong, it is important to keep in communication with authors.

Hopefully, increased transparency about all aspects of peer review will help to improve the process. For colleagues who would like to see improved turnaround times for journals, taking heed of the best practices for peer review is a good place to start.

Photo credit: Alan Cleaver

Copyfight and the Great Transformation

 

Last week I was asked by Cinema Politica Newcastle to give a post-screening talk on copyfight after a showing of RIP: A Remix Manifesto. With the extreme weather, attendance suffered and thus a retreat to the pub for an informal conversation amongst a small dedicated group of cinephiles seemed more appropriate than delivering a formal presentation. But I thought it might be worth posting my remarks here.

What RIP: A Remix Manifesto does extremely well is show what becomes possible when changes in technology and accessibility are harnessed by human creativity to catalyse a shift from what Lawrence Lessig has called a ‘read only’ culture--where one is limited in the ways in which they can engage with artefacts--to a ‘read/write’ culture where the ways that we interact with our cultural worlds are bound primarily by the limits of our imagination.

And what the film also does extremely well is to point to the contemporary imbalance between property rights--for some property owners--on the one hand and creative expression, innovation, and common-sense on the other. If we operate on the basis that read/write cultures are something to be fostered because they stimulate innovation, development, and cultural vibrancy, Lawrence Lessig reminds us that this means embracing amateur creativity including placing limits of the reach of copyright regulation. The point is that creativity and innovation, forces that bring together elements of existing work in novel ways, requires leaving amateur creativity free from draconian forms of regulation that can stifle cultural expression and its social transmission. As the philosopher Henri Bergson argued, freedom itself is the ability to create the unforeseen, an ability that seems to me to be harnessed through our creative capacities.

Thus, at a time when one would think that creativity would be encouraged--after all, isn’t innovation the key to the knowledge economy?--it is actually being hemmed in by material constraints. These constraints are imposed by a legal regulatory system that has been designed to force a return to a read only culture of times past that probably only really ever existed in the imaginations of media company executives and Lars Ulrich from Metallica.  So despite the human capacity for ingenuity, the presence of myriad technologies that are able to harness this capacity in exciting new ways, and the potential for these to combine to create cultural products and artefacts with positive social potential, we instead have a system that produces:

• legions of copyright trolls who extort money from the unsuspecting public by threatening lawsuits based on allegations of minor infringements;
• terms and conditions for items that one purchases that exceed the length of some of Shakespeare’s greatest works;
• channels of distribution for cultural products that attempt to create artificial scarcity;
• byzantine and draconian limits on the freedom of cultural expression;
• copyright asset stripping and predatory speculation;
• the imposition of forms of intrusive surveillance and monitoring of the general public paid for with public money;
• the premise of guilty until proven innocent;
• and proprietary systems and digital rights management that limit choice and innovation by attempting to circumvent the research and development powers of the crowd that arise through modifications, home brewing, and hacking.

So the question for me then is how can we position the contemporary pathology historically? One place to start is by turning to the work of noted economic historian Karl Polanyi and his classic text The Great Transformation. Although first published in 1944, it provides excellent insight into the contemporary imbalance between markets and property rights on the one hand and society and the public interest on the other.

Polanyi argued that for most of human history, markets--those places where distribution and exchange took place literally and figuratively--were embedded into societies. In part, this meant that they were a means to dispose of surplus and regulated in ways--sometimes formally, sometimes through cultural custom--such that their most potentially deleterious effects could be mitigated. But beginning with the rise of capitalism in Europe, he argued markets began to be understood as self-regulating entities. The policy prescription therefore was to treat markets as a separate entity apart from both society and from politics (i.e., markets had their own technical logics and natural tendencies that one must adhere to or suffer the consequences).  This change in governing logic meant that satisfying markets, not society, became a primary focus for government. Yet, so-called ‘free markets’ require inordinate amounts of legislation, rules, and laws in order to ‘self-regulate’.

So the dis-embedding of markets necessary for capitalism wasn’t a project that could arise spontaneously.  It required a strong state to intervene in order to impose market logics onto societies that regulated themselves through a different form of moral economy. Moreover, the state was needed in order to enforce new property regimes. Paradoxically, the initial success of this project turned into its biggest failure. As Polanyi documents, the effects of the transformationto market dominated socieities were so socially corrosive that the state and other institutions had to intervene almost immediately to mitigate the devastation that ensued. He referred to this oscillation as the double movement.

Unfortunately, over the past four decades, most societies have completely forgotten the lessons outlined in the Great Transformation about the importance of protecting social and cultural institutions in the wake of markets. While one might want to argue that markets have produced historically high levels of wealth overall, the intellectual property rights underpinning copyright and the forms of lawfare associated with them have become a way of embedding the material privileges of the wealthy (e.g., large media conglomerates, big pharma, big tech, big food), sustaining business models that would otherwise be unviable, and encouraging unproductive forms of rentierism as opposed to innovation and development.  And as we are experiencing first hand, this comes with significant social and cultural costs that are borne by the general public, much like those Polanyi documented in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

On a final note, the next time you hear a media company stooge, vacuous politician, or Lars from Metallica harping on about the negative consequences of file-sharing, limited copyright provisions, remixing, sharing , hacking, home-brewing, or making, look at how their arguments are structured. The appeal is always through notions of private property, revenue losses, the need for economic incentivization, and spurious analogies--for example, that file sharing is like stealing from a shop--that reinforce the idea that culture should be subordinate to market logics. It then follows that if culture refuses to be subordinate, the state must implement, by any means necessary, measures to ensure that specific market principles (i.e., property rights) dominate. They never present arguments that show the cultural or social benefits of constraining amateur creativity or forms of innovation that arise by limiting the collective ingenuity that can develop through crowd sourcing. This is because they don’t have any. Moreover, the idea that someone might design, code, tinker, write, or rock out because they see creative expression as a fundamental part of the human condition to be experienced, enjoyed, and SHARED regardless of the potential market benefits that might accrue by artificially creating scarcity is completely alien to them. Thus, the problem is more broadly based than the particulars of copyfight itself. It requires finding the means and measures of catalysing the social protections against the marketization of everyday life that are so desperately needed.

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 160

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Why the World's Most Perfect News Tweet is Kind of Boring' by Megan Garber at theatlantic.com

• 'Posh Dosh for the Posh Boys' by GMB@Work at gmb.org

• 'Which Pop Culture Property do Academics Study the Most?' by By  Daniel Lamett, Aisha Harris, Natasha Geiling, and Natalie Matthews-Ramo at slate.com

• 'Why Our Food is Making Us Fat' by Jacques Peretti at guardian.co.uk

• 'Taco USA: How Mexican Food Became as American as Apple Pie' by Gustavo Arellano at reason.com

• 'Economists Demonstrate Exactly Why Bank Robbery is a Bad Idea' by John Timmer at arstechnica.com

• 'Ice T's 10 Rules of Public Speaking' by Joseph Barracato at nypost.com (many of these tips apply to lecturing as well)

Have a good weekend and happy father's day!

Photo credit: shutterbusterbob

Call for Papers: Networked World? The Politics of Cyberspace and Social Media

The new editoral team at POLITICS--of which I am a member--has made a commitment to providing a venue for timely research-led contributions that analyse contemporary political dynamics. To this end, we have issued a call for papers that examine the politics of cyberspace. Please see below for further details.

Call for Papers: Networked World? The Politics of Cyberspace and Social Media

Digital media are having a profound effect on politics and international relations. States and organisations are increasingly investing in defensive measures to stave off cyber attack. Less malicious uses of social media are no less prevalent; during the Arab Spring, e-technologies provided a medium that enabled and encouraged protesters to challenge their governments; politicians rely on Facebook, blogs and Twitter to help their election campaigns; and the proliferation of these technologies has led to a wide-ranging debate on the storage and use of personal information.

Politics invites articles for a Special Issue on the broad impact of social media, cyberspace and digital technologies on politics and international relations. Submissions may address broad themes relevant to the topic, including, but not limited to,the following:

• cyber warfare and cyber security;

• politics of hacking and cyber crime;

• attempts to control the Internet in both authoritarian and democratic states;

• role of social media in revolution and democratic transitions;

• role of social media in elections and campaigns;

• e-governance and the application of information and communication technology for delivering government services;

• debates over privacy and data sharing;

• issues of fairness and access to the emerging digital economy.

Articles may be in either of the formats accepted by Politics:

• short form: up to 4,000 words maximum;

• longer research feature: up to 6,000 words maximum.

Deadline for submission is 1 December 2012.

Further information on how to contact us or where to submit a paper can be found here.

Image credit: Patrick Hoesly

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 153

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'Digital Delights' curated by Ana Cristina Pratas at scoop.it (an incredibly valuable resource for all things digital in higher education and beyond)

• 'Dr. Seuss' "Yertle the Turtle" Considered Too Political for BC Classroom' by Wendy Stueck at theglobeandmail.com

• 'FY2009-2034 Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap' by the US Department of Defense at www.acq.mil (the next three decades of US military planning in relation to drones)

• 'Who Has the Right to Fly a Drone Above Your Head? Finally, There's a List' by Alexis Madrigal at theatlantic.com (universities are the single largest sector!)

• 'South L.A. Twenty Years Later' by E. Tammy Kim at guernicamag.com

Have a good weekend.

Photo credit: DieselDemon

The (In)Direct Benefits of Blogging and Twitter for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

A couple of months ago I was asked to make a short presentation at Newcastle University about how my use of blogging and twitter have contributed to my teaching. In some respects this was a difficult assignment. While blogging and twitter offer possibilities for communication, distribution of  materials, and even assessment,I have not used either platform directly for learning and teaching. My initial objectives for these platforms had been in terms of promoting my research and my own research profile. Yet, the more I thought about, the more I realised that this distinction between my online research activities  and teaching and learning was not sustainable. As is the case in the physical lecture theatre, there was considerable cross-over taking place. Here were some of the points I raised in my presentation:

1. Blogging and tweeting have been invaluable in terms of being able to find material that illustrates compelling contemporary examples across media formats for lectures and the seminar room. In particular, one of the benefits of crowd sourcing is the potential to gain access to materials--and sources of material--that one might never find otherwise.
2. Blogging and tweeting have served as archival systems for material that often gets used at a later date for teaching. Moreover, having an active online presence has made me more conscientious about instituting a research radar that helps to me source, record, archive, and redistribute material. I am by no means the most diligent archivist in the world, but I have come a long way from combing through ambiguous bookmarks across several computers...
3.  My areas of research interest are highly politicized and contain sensitive material. In this context, critical positions are prone to being mis-characterized. Blogging has helped in terms of being able to think through how I might present contemporary examples while teaching so that the analysis is accessible, thoughtful, and less likely to be misunderstood.
4. The use of online platforms has also helps in terms of allowing lecturers to appear more human in the eyes of students. We can inadvertently seem like very imposing figures standing at a lectern in front of a room of 250 students. But blogging and twitter can help to reveal what is behind that persona. It has also been valuable in communicating other aspects of the job including the important role of my research with regards to what I teach.
5. I am not a big fan of the word 'community' but I do feel that blogging and twitter can make a contribution to an academic community of lecturers and students in a department. Students who might not otherwise wish to communicate with me have sometimes stopped me in the hall to comment on something that I have blogged or tweeted. In other instances, I have had students email me with things that they thought I might be interest in given a recent blog post or tweet. These lines of informal communication about relevant material that extends beyond the seminar room is a good thing I think.
6. While I have no definite data to back this up, I  think that blogging and tweeting can only help in terms of recruiting undergraduate and postgraduate students in what has become a very competitive market.

Of course, every silver lining has its own cloud. And while I feel that blogging and tweeting have had a positive impact on teaching and learning in my case, there are some caveats that must be taken into account.

1. There is a significant time cost to blogging--though less so with twitter--especially when one is first starting out. Unfortunately, the only thing rarer than money in the current UK higher education environment is time.
2. If you are going to blog or tweet, do it for yourself. Moreover, neither expect or rely upon institutional support for these activities. An online presence is primarily about you, not your institution. It is important to maintain total control over what you do, how you do it, and when you do it rather than having these dictated to you by an employer who may have a very different set of objectives than you do.
3. If I were going to establish an online presence all over again, I would definitely look to blog as part of a collective with colleagues as opposed to trying to maintain a single-author blog as I do now. It can be very time consuming and is often the last thing on my to do list during a typical 60 hour work week. I would still continue to tweet in a personal capacity though.
4. One needs to think very closely about how much one is willing to make public and the barriers that should be maintained with students. For example, I will not follow undergraduates on twitter--as it is often used as a platform to reveal things that are personal-- but I am happy for them to follow me. I am not on facebook for a very similar reason; the line between the personal and professional is very difficult to maintain on that platform for a whole host of reasons.
5. If you are going to directly incorporate online platforms into teaching (e.g., a twitter stream to facilitate asking questions during lectures) or as a form of assessment (e.g., blog posts for a module), not all students are as technically adept as we think they are. Moreover, there is a big step from being a user of content to a creator. 

Photo credit: joehardy