academic capitalism

Below is a partial transcript of the introductory remarks I gave at the Technoscience as Activism Conference held in Troy, New York and hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from June 26-28, 2012. The conference was funded by the NSF’s GK-12 Fellowship Program. 

I almost never read my presentations but we’re short on time and there’s a lot of stuff that I want to share with you and I don’t want to miss anything. Publicly reading an apology for reading in public is an apt metaphor for what this conference is about, or more precisely what it is a response to. When I approached Dr. Ron Eglash about putting on this conference I told him I only wanted to do it if I could make the conference reflect the kind of politics espoused in the presentations. I don’t want to invite a bunch of brilliant people to Troy, who want to talk about democratizing science and technology, and keep them in a single room all day. Troy should benefit from some of your unique experiences, and the people of Troy have done some amazing things that I think the visitors will enjoy and appreciate. more...

Theorizing the Web 2012 was great. Everyone involved did a bang-up job. I certainly learned more in a single day than I usually do at weekend-long establishment conferences. I have said a lot about conferences (here, here, and here) as have fellow cyborgologists (Sarah, Nathan, and PJ). All of these posts have a common thread: academia is changing, but conferences seem out of date in some way. They are needlessly insular, they rely on hefty attendance fees that are increasingly cost-prohibitive,  and they rarely take advantage of social media in any meaningful way. The relative obduracy of conference styles come into high relief once they are compared to the massive changes to institutional knowledge production. Universities have adopted many of the managerial practices of private companies. They are also acting more like profit-seeking enterprises: putting massive resources into patenting offices and business incubators, hiring less tenure-track teaching staff, and employing armies of professionalized managers that run everything from information technology services to athletic facilities. Conferences, on the other hand, have seen few innovations beyond what I call Tote Bag Praxis.  more...

It seems as though Congress, having grown tired of pissing off large swaths of the country, are now opting to write bills that anger a very particular group of people. Almost a month ago, on December 16, 2011, California Republican Congressman Darrel Issa introduced the “Research Works Act” which would kill government-assisted open-access journals. As PJ said before, journals (especially the closed private ones) are the dinosaurs of academia and as Patricia Hill Collins later noted, more...

In my Theorizing the Web presentation last April, I gave a presentation entitled Practical Cyborg Theory: Discovering a Metric for the Emancipatory Potential of Technology. I wanted to develop a cyborg theory that helps us understand the emancipatory potential of a given technology or technological system. My formal hypothesis was an addendum to Haraway’s definition of a cyborg in the Cyborg Manifesto:

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, who’s existence and emancipatory potential is constructed as a function of the temporal and social environment within which it operates.

more...