I have hit the books again, and I’m alternately working out ideas and culling stuff from my draft, so no more word counts for a while. When they do return they’ll just show how many words I’ve written that day, too, no more of this mythical ‘total’ word count business.

Like much of my writing, this sentence needs to be turned into at least 6 sentences, but at least it’s neater than my notes pages on cultural citizenship:

I use the concept of ‘vernacular creativity’ to describe the everyday practices of material and digital creativity that serve cultural citizenship, where cultural citizenship is understood, not as the static possession (or dispossession) of rights or obligations, but as a variegated continuum of participation in the cultural public sphere.

I’m using or arguing with (in no particular order) Murdock, Rosaldo, Miller, McGuigan, Stevenson, Uricchio, Hartley, Couldry, Hermes – feel free to shout out “you should read…” if something closely connected to that list comes to mind.

And here’s another sentence I wrote today:

Questioning the widespread idea that the availability of tools and platforms for participatory media somehow in itself enables universal cultural enfranchisement, I go on to examine the often implicit constraints on participation in digital culture, paying especially close attention to the socio-technical construction of literacies and ‘user’ subjectivities in specific contexts.