knowledge resistance

In economic and political terms, our funding and public validation come from being seen to hit targets set by increasingly detailed performance indicators. These criteria include the assessment of the frequency, volume and influence of our publications as well as our universities’ international standing and where we sit in national league tables. There is, furthermore, in the shape of the impact agenda, an intensifying officially policed obligation to help public agencies, commerce, business and industry, and also voluntary and charitable bodies, to operate knowledgeably in a democratic society … this is a necessity-driven, demand-led model. Ideal-typically, you produce research and engage in knowledge exchange in line with what is requested in order to justify your existence. Public intellectuality, therefore, is wanted but only on certain, quite instrumental, terms.

Schlesinger, Philip. 2013. “Expertise, the academy and the governance of cultural policy.” Media, Culture and Society 35(1): 27-35 (34).

Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers

Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers.

(via the Cultural Studies CultStud-L Mailing list @ http://comm.umn.edu/~grodman/cultstud/)

Ahoy.

Link: http://www.pirateuniversity.org

The Pirate University is a new on-line service for students and scholars who search for certain (academic) articles which are unavailable in their own institutes’ library. Users post well described notices of the academic material searched for, for example journal articles, publications. Other users, persons with (privileged) access to the material requested, reply by sharing the requested resource with a few mouse clicks. The service relies on the willingness of students with access to well-stocked libraries to regularly look up articles and share them with less privileged students from around the globe. Please forward this link announcement to other relevant academic networks.

Slow scholarship, slow theory, and slow pedagogy

The most recent edition of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies contains Yvonne Hartman and Sandy Darab’s ‘Call for Slow Scholarship’. They argue that

the kind of higher order thinking that is a critical part of the scholarly endeavor requires nurture through the provision of sufficient time, unpressured by other demands. This article examines one case of ‘‘speedy scholarship’’ in an effort to shed light on the phenomenon of time pressure and its effect in the contemporary university. We attempt to explain how this is an artifact both of a certain form of governmentality, as well as a new temporality, operating on a global scale. In so doing, we hope to show how pedagogical practices become a site of contest in an unequal power relation where students are the absent partners and scholarly endeavor is eroded. Such a critique leads us to draw upon the discourse of the slow movement in an attempt to invoke an alternative vision.

Maze of PhD-land courtesy of slapsista.

brain death

Analysis of a field test of new instruments for measuring electrodermal activity reveals flatlining student brain activity during lectures and classes on par with watching TV.

Via Lisa Wade @ Sociological Images and Joi Ito, & Boing Boing.

Students brains flatlining during classes