creativity/machine

Category: cultural studies

  • more on the ‘get a mac’ ads and stereotypes

    In response to a bit of discussion going on about the ads reinforcing stereotypes, mainly started by Jill, who kindly linked to my last post on the topic: The Mac is one sort of instantly recognisable, vaguely urban, effortlessly cool white American guy, the PC is another, deeply unattractive, old economy nerd sort of (much…

  • Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices: Out Now!

    My friend and colleague Melissa Gregg’s book Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices is out now. Having already read it, I can tell you it’s a seriously significant contribution to cultural studies scholarship, and it’s got a beautiful cover to boot. Blurb: In a series of encounters with key figures in the field of cultural studies, this…

  • freedom and control in social media

    From Deleuze via Glen Fuller: “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.”…

  • Inside a story there are no mistakes, only the living through of mistakes: Berger on Grass

    In response to the recent controversy around Günther Grass‘s membership of the Waffen SS as a young man, John Berger writes on ethics and experience in The Guardian: The denial of true reflection […] These thoughts come to my mind as I read the macabre denunciations being levelled today against Günter Grass. About him as…

  • readings in cultural citizenship and popular culture

    A couple of things I’ve read this morning: In a special issue of IJCS on ‘The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption’ William Uricchio compares the relationships between creativity (mainly viewed as work within or work that benefits the ‘creative industries’) and cultural citizenship in the US and Europe: Creative activity – and, by implication, the…

  • Mica Nava on ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’

    In the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on Cosmopolitanism – (19.1-2): Cosmopolitan Modernity : Everyday Imaginaries and the Register of Difference Mica Nava Debates about cosmopolitanism in the spheres of political philosophy, sociology and postcolonial criticism have on the whole ignored specific histories of the cosmopolitan imagination and its vernacular expressions in everyday…

  • Deuze in conversation with Bauman, plus Cosmopolitan Cultural Citizenship and Flickr

    Mark Deuze has been thinking, writing, and exchanging ideas with Zygmunt Bauman about liquid modernity, ‘community’ and the Internet, and I’ve been following along with Mark as he works through his ideas. This is the latest Bauman quote, in context here:

  • grappling with cultural citizenship

    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,…

  • Counter-Heroics

    Hurrah – the Counter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies Special Issue of Continuum, which grew out of the ‘Fields of Uncool’ panel at the CSAA conference way back in 2004, is now out! Thanks so much to Mel, Kris, Jane and Will for one of the most energising and productive collaborations I’ve been involved with…

  • unAustralia (Call for Papers)

    unAustralia: Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, Canberra, 6-8 December, 2006. If things are ‘un-Australian’ it must be because they come from UNAUSTRALIA. Where is it? Who lives there? How does it come to be? What is its past and what is its future? While raising some very local questions of critique and desire,…