I've set up my blog, called Tamarisk and Terebinth over on Blogger. The name comes from The Lord of the Rings, and for the nonce, I'll be posting there about poetry, my graduate poetry class, the sources i've found for the poetry class online (and feel free to share any sites you find useful--I'm not looking so much for individual publication webpages as links/resources for poets online--I'm not assigning a textbook this time!), and reflecting about poetry (my first and earliest writing love).

The past few months have been some of the busiest of my life:  completing the encylcopedia was supposed to make things a little easier, but I had multiple conferences, three online writing classes, and a backlog of things that were sort of delayed because of the encyclopedia. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel of the spring term, and while I'm still behind, I may survive.  I have been thinking long and hard about online teaching issues, as I finsh my second year of fulltime online teaching. 

The IT department has had new hires, and are doing wonderful things in getting out to talk to faculty and supporting innovative ways of online teaching. In theory, the new version of eCollege which is coming is supposed to address some of our concerns. They are looking into wikis, specifically hosting wiki software on the university's servers. I am going to get some training in a program that will allow real time talking through the computers to students: I think that will address the major gap in the online class environment when it comes to "library labs." I can answer their research questions directly. My graduate creative writing poetry class which will be taught online this summer for the first time will not have a paper textbook: instead, I am researching good resources for poets online which I'll assign students. I'll also ask them to find some good sites for a small percentage of their grade, and they can share those with their classmates.  While I plan to keep all the workshopping in the protected environment of eCollege, I am moving toward assigning reflective/reading journals online, rather than in eCollege where only I can respond to them. I have used LJ for this class work in the past, but am irked by the removal of the basic/ad-free accounts (very irked), and am thinking of using Blogger (recommended by a colleague who has her students blogging in her courses).

And that means I might actually find myself having a blog instead of only LiveJournals!   

THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF AUDIENCE AND FAN STUDIES

 

Audience and Fan Studies are fields of scholarship that have developed  in a number of traditional academic areas, including but not limited to anthropology, communication, composition/rhetoric, computer science, film studies, folklore studies, information technology studies, law, library science, literary studies, media studies, performance studies, psychology, sociology, television, studies, etc.

 

This new organization will promote cross-disciplinary communication, activities, and scholarship through traditional academic venues, including:

 

• Creation and management of a web page with forums for announcements and discussions for scholars in a range of fields;
• Creation and management of an e-mail listserv to serve the interests of scholars in the field;
• Publication of an online newsletter;
• Creation and management of interdisciplinary activities such as study days, mini-conferences, and, eventually, an online conference in Second Life;
• Creation and management of on-line academic journal;
• Other academic projects dictated by the interests of the membership.

 

Scholarship in any of the following areas can be considered to fall under the association's area of interest (although this list is selective not comprehensive):

 

Audience Research

Conventions

Convergence Culture

Cosplay/Costuming

Fan Art, Culture, Fiction, Film, Vids

Filking

Folklore/myth/urban legend

Hypertexts

Memorabilia and Collecting

Music

Role-playing Communities

Trading Cards

Video gaming (online, console, PC)

Virtual and face-to-face communities and cultures

Viral Marketing

 

As new media technologies and the World Wide Web offer more venues for creativity, more new topics for scholarship will develop.

 

If interested contact:  iaafsorg@gmail.com

Yahoo Announcement List:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iaafs/

LiveJournal Community:  http://community.livejournal.com/iaafs/profile

 

Poll #1103304 Academic Conference Information
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Please check all that apply. How do you or have you learned about new conferences for the first time (i.e. in what medium is information best circulated for you)?

A great conference!  And a notice to my graduate students:  the graduate school has funding (you can be awarded up to $500 for a conference if you're a fulltime (9 hours) student; up to $300 if you're part time.

 http://www.amazon.com/How-Became-Middle-earth-Adam-Lam/dp/3905703076/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195036459&sr=1-1

A new anthology going on sale, New Zealand editors, publishers in Switzerland, and international group of contributors.

 

Update:  Queering the Fantastic
Edited by Robin Anne Reid and Jes Battis

New Deadline for essays on specified topics (listed below)

We have received a number of excellent proposals for this volume but would now like to solicit proposals for essays to fill gaps in the collection.

We need essays on children's/ya fantasy, fanfiction, graphic novels, horror, and cinema, as well as theoretical pieces on the fantastic itself as a queer medium. [We were just surprised to receive only one proposal in the fanfiction area!]

We are seeking scholarly essays (20 pgs max) that explore the links between the fantastic and queer studies.

Email abstracts (1000 word max plus Working Bibliography) to: 

Professor Robin Anne Reid (Robin_Reid_AT_tamu-commerce.edu) AND Professor Jes Battis (jbattis_AT_gmail.com).  Please include a recent CV and short bio. 

Deadline for abstracts is December 15, 2007. 

Contributors will be notified within a week.

This volume will address all the fantastic in all media, focusing particularly on queer uses, adaptations, and reformulations.  Since its definition as "a hesitation between genres" by Tzvetan Todorov in the 1970s, the fantastic has often been compared to Freud’s ‘uncanny,’ or to the marvelous realms of the picaresque, the fairy-tale, and the medieval romance.  But the fantastic is not precisely any of these things, and, with this volume, we are interested in linking it to the ambivalent and charged position of ‘queer’ as a sexuality, a mode of life, a genre of literature, and even a type of impossibility.

Robin Anne Reid is currently professor of creative writing and critical theory at Texas A&M University-Commerce.  She has authored two books for Greenwood's Critical Companions Series (on Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury), and is currently editing an encyclopedia on women in science fiction and fantasy, also for Greenwood.  She has published essays on feminist science fiction, queer approaches to fan studies, and Peter Jackson's film of Tolkien's novel.  Her poetry has been published in a variety of small magazines and online. 

Jes Battis is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the City University of New York in Manhattan, and teaches as an adjunct instructor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at CUNY-Hunter College.  He has authored two scholarly books on fantasy and media:  "Investigating Farscape:  Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction," (Palgrave, 2007) and "Blood Relations:  Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel," (McFarland, 2005).  He also has a fantasy novel, "Night Child," forthcoming from Penguin USA/Ace in spring of 2008.

 Having read some news articles and had a student or two stumble into some unpleasant places on Second Life, I am thinking I need to develop a list of "Dos" and "Don'ts" for my students in future.  I'm sure there are lists out there that I will go look at for ideas later on, but right now, I'm brainstorming myself--and invite you all (especially my current students!) to add your own suggestions for what should go on such a list!  (This list may morph into more of a general internet safety sheet that can also apply to LiveJournal.)

I'm also thinking about ways to totally reformat eCollege, to make it work more like a faux web page instead of giving in to its default system (it automatically formats to 15 Weeks, each with a pre-loaded space for Lecture, Quiz, Exam!).  I am thinking there's something about the "Week" structure that can be confusing in classes structured around "process."  Such a move might also give students more autonomy in self-pacing.  The two classes this shift would apply to are my research/argument composition class and my technical communication class for next spring term.

The Tolkien class I'm team-teaching with my colleague in History is face to face.  Because, well, Tolkien!

So:

Do

Remember you can always leave SL by logging out
Remember that you have a great deal of flexbility in setting your preferences: you do not have to accept the default 
     Get some examples

Set up a free email account to have an email address for validation. 

Study any online community or space ("lurk") for a time before getting involved (friending, joining, etc.)

Read the FAQs, instructions, etc. first.

Do not

Automatically join a group just because someone sends you an invite.
Automatically friend someone just because they offer.
Post your personal contact information or birthdate in a public place or give them to someone you do not know.

Will add more later....

 

 I needed to clear a couple of things off my to do list, so here is my proposal for Slash Fiction Study Day 3.  (It will be revised and submitted for the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts as well:  for SFSD, I'll do more of the framing, written rhetorics; for ICFA, I'll do the Visual Rhetorics/icons section).

David Montgomery of The Washington Post wrote a great story on a recent stamp that the U.S. Post office issued to higlight the Mendez vs. Westminster case: Click here for story.

I've taught and studies multicultural American literatures since the early 1990s (my specialities are more Native American and African American literatures, especially contemporary women's writing), but I've taught Hispanic literature as well. I'd never heard of this case, one brought seven years before the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case which is the one that makes it into the basic History books.

The problem is that too much of the way history is taught in the U.S. is based on sort of a "great man/individual" focus, with the idea being a simplified narrative about Important People Who Change History! The need for simplified narratives and "heroes" leads to, well, a simple narrative of "progress" and change!

And the reality is that complex social changes come from multitudes of people and events in complex strands: so here's a good article on how Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez wanted to send their children to a "white school" in Westminster, California (not far from where Disneyland would soon be built). Gonzalo had moved with his family to escape the Mexican revolution, worked as a farmhand, then opened a cantina and became a respected member of the business community. He moved to Westminster to lease a farm from a family who were being interned during World War II, but the school there turned the Mendez children away.

The lawsuit (which the Mexican-American families won) helped to prepare for the eventual success of Brown (Thurgood Marshall submitted a brief in the Mendez case, and the governor of California at the time was Earl Warren who later became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).

Sylvia Mendez, who was 8 at the time the suit was filed, is still alive.

And here is a link to an image of the stamp and a commemorative event:
http://parent.unm.edu/?p=55

The stupidity! It burns!!

The military lowers its standards some more.

Criminal record?

OK!

No high school diploma?

No problem (and I do not mean to imply people who do not finish high school are stupid or failures--there are many reasons why people might choose to leave before finishing the requirements, but if until recently there's been a push to maintain that standard, well it's interesting that they're changing it now).

But an out gay or lesbian (or possibly? bisexual)?

Nope.

*favorites more links and meta on anti-Semitism in fandom to read for SFSD essay*

Fandom, ya know, it's darn nice of you all to keep giving me more stuff to write about, but, really, considering the issue is sort of boiling down to fans from dominant culture complaining about those mean fans who are members of an ethnic minority "harshing 'our [poor white people's]' buzz," it's not very....nice!

*shuts computer down and goes home for weekend*

Interesting article (Washington Post) on how SL can be part of physical therapy.

I think I'll send to some of the profs I know over in counseling and psychology!

So I am finishing up my bib entries and "further readings" for the last few authors, and cannot find any academic publication (scholarship in a peer-reviewed journal) on either Diane Duane or Elizabeth Lynn except for my first published essay (1994, wow, feeling old a moment). This essay grew from work I was doing in my doctoral program, thrashing around trying to pull together my first gender theory and my beloved sf/f while being grumpy that academic feminist scholarship (the sort I was reading in my classes, and that got referenced a lot) seemed to mostly exclude sf/f (except for Donna Haraway). I hadn't yet found most of the feminist academics doing sf/f, most notably Veronica Hollinger and Wendy Pearson, although I'd read Marleen Barr's first book (she was my first inspiration and model for putting feminist theory and sf together--I'm writing her entry for the encyclopedia, via editorial fiat--I remember reading the introduction to the book where she talks about the two horses of feminist theory and sf, and going, wow, I can do this stuff too!).

Lynn was doing amazing stuff with gay, lesbian, bisexual characters during the seventies; she has one novel with a practicing sadist that is SF (most of her work is fantasy), so she was like one of the first. (And for some of my friends from fandom: consensual brother incest is canon in The Dancers of Arun).

Duane has published in an amazing number of different storyverses (some of her own, some tie-in novels, which she always makes fantastic), but she won my heart with her "Tale of Five" series (not yet complete, sad sigh) with an alternate fantasy world (tinges of Tolkien!) where bisexuality is the *norm*! And her Young Wizard series is also pretty darned amazing (if you want to show any younglings you know that girls can be the protagonists of wizarding fantasy novels, hand 'em Duane's series. Cats too--cat wizards!).

(Fannish enthusiasm or academic passion? What is the difference? I've never been able to figure it out.)

I know one basic reason: not enough academics doing work on the fantastic (and a lot of the stuff on the fantastic is scholarship on sf/f in new media which is cool, I do some of it myself, but still--Duane! Lynn! other authors!). Luckily both of these are authors I plan to deal with in my Slashing the Fathers project, so yet another reason to re-read their books (which I mostly have in somewhat battered paperback in original copies!)

( bib info on my article and some links to sites about Lynn and Duane are behind the cut )

I've been working nearly non-stop editing the Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia the past few days and finally hit the *brick wall* where I can no longer look at one more encyclopedia entry until after a good night's sleep. Good progress is being made; I will get this project off my desk soon, but I needed to take a break from encyclopedia discourse, so to speak. Most academics I know work on multiple projects at different stages (presentation papers, articles, books, often interconnected), and I am a big fan of what I call creative procrastination (which I stole from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education some years ago. We will procrastinate, this brilliant gentleman said, so the secret is procrastinating by doing other work. I can say the process works well.

And, as I've said recently, I've decided to post about my various steps in the project I'm developing through two presentations (one which will be submitted for Slash Fiction Study Day, the other for the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts conference.
I've posted on the topic before (I have tried to tag the entries, so won't try to link now), and here's ( an update on what I've recently done in small dribs and drabs over the past month or so )

I've been doing more in Second Life this week: I have begun to build things. So far, I have a strange green and white twisted rock sculpture, a green hassock, a purple satin couch, and a couple of Stonehenge style uprights (the two upright columns joined with one across the top, also slightly green-ish granite). (My favorite colors are green and purple--can you tell?) All these are extremely basic, the single prim shape modified. I've learned to link, but that's about it, nothing in terms of sculpting.

I've joined the Real Educators group: was members 2500 something, so it's a large group. At least one Linden Lab employee's job is working with educators who want to work in SL. I also told a colleague in French that SL might give students conversational opportunities in French, and brainstormed with another colleague how an advanced writing class could be "shaped" around the concept of "places" in Second Life.

I can definitely see how this activity becomes addictive.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

They are one source that regularly covers U.S. university hiring and related issues via statistics. Here are links to information on a large number of American universities in regard to diversity:

http://chronicle.com/indepth/diversity/?250E

Statistics on race and ethnicity at universities (wish they'd meld with gender some time!):

http://chronicle.com/premium/stats/race/2007/

Interesting piece (for me as ever-single woman): making more room for singles (moi!) not in terms of hiring but in research in disciplines that have assumed marriage as the default for happy normal people!:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i05/05b04401.htm

(Links supplied by one of my doctoral students--I might embarass her if I posted her name, so I'll just say thanks!)

A male academic has shown up in the latest discussion to chide the angry white women for not talking about race and ethnicity.

Here, I return to my efforts to make a series of personal attacks on innocent white male academics who are really nice guys and have lots of female friends and of course would never intentionally exclude women, really they wouldn't.

My response is mixed. I agree with him, but I find his timing undercutting the rhetorical force of his argument for two reasons. First, his comment comes after a number of female aca-fans expressed anger and disgust at the "tinhat" accusation made in the original post, and second, as far as I know he has not talked about the issues of race and ethnicity before (there was nothing stopping any of us about talking about any issue related to aca-fans, scholarship, fandom at any time. I may have missed his contribution, and asked him to link me if that was the case in which case I will apologize).

So since I agree with him, here's what I said in response (post is in moderation at Henry's place).

( because it's really really long! )

Latest round in aca-fan debate is up in Henry Jenkins' journal, and in fandebate.

I commented at Henry's, and will post links back to this post both places. The discussion is sort of slow at both places (I am sure it will pick up over the weekend), and I figured we might want to talk it over here as well.

First a reference back to a post I made July 1 with a range of links to fairly (I think) credible evidence about institutional sexism in academia which exists in tandem with institutional racism and homophobia, and the longer I hang around academia (and I am from a middle class background) I realize classism.

I have not been as actively reading the discussions posted since August because of workload, but I've been skimming, and was reading actively before then, and I am noting a real pattern of the male academics (not all but a majority) and some female academics deflecting any questions of institutional gender exclusion/marginalization that might affect us all, not to mention that it was about two years worth of ongoing (locked) discussions among women aca-fen talking about their experien of patterns similar to that we experience in other academic arenas (and by using that word, I mean to emphasize associations with gladiatorial games, yes, indeed, I do) that was the impetus to this whole project!

The latest male participant has sort of become the last straw for me when he implied that anybody claiming that marginalization exists is delusional (he references "tin hats" which is an insult in fandom (although many of us might use it of ourselves in an ironic manner).

Specifically, Josh Green said: I'm not convinced, however, that to point to that particular incident as evidence of a marginalization of female academic practice necessarily does anyone a service. While I think some good has come out of that moment, there was a particularly sour taste left all round, I think, with regard to the way the issue was raised which seemed sometimes to suggest an intent to exclude, or if you like tinfoil headwear, marginalize.

Exclusion was easier in some ways to handle: when universities had written policies excluding women. Those policies could be a focus for the activism. Women could think that when the policies/laws changed, then the problems would be solved.

Now, when universities can pat themselves on the back for being so inclusive (although that inclusion has primarily benefited white middle-class women rather than minority women), it's possible for individuals in the dominant group to protest they are really nice, and we're (meaning: women) insulting them for daring to suggest they might possibly *want* to exclude or marginalize women, even though, well, that's what they're doing, according to the women. As somebody who began her graduate work during the seventies, worked as an adjunct during the eighties, and got her Ph.D. in 1993, and had to fight attempts to deny me tenure and promotion at my university despite doing more than male colleagues at the same level (and seeing other women treated the same way here), I can attest: it can be crazy-making because in fact, these are all pretty nice guys. They're not Snidely Whiplash or Voldemort or even Darth Vader.

Their relative niceness or not is *not* the issue. Their intentionality is *not* the issue.

The results are what need to be looked at, in terms of what is being done or not being done.

The fact that nearly fifty years after the Second Wave of feminist movement began in this country academic men (generally considered to be more "liberal" than the general population in this country) are still so defensive about discussing their own male privilege strikes me, and I suspect a few others, as more than frustrating.

It also confirms my sense that building old girl networks is a much better strategy than trying to crash the old boy's network--because social change does not take years or decades; it can take centuries. And I am not going to spend a whole lot of my time teaching Feminism 101 unless I'm being paid for the class.

An article on sexism in philosophy departments and journals, summarizing a longer essay that will be coming out in a journal.

An article that reviews a book on Black women's experiences in academia (1850-1924), plus an interview with the author that covers contemporary issues as well.

Quote from article: Although black women dominate black men in the student ranks, black women’s faculty numbers are consistently lower than black men’s. Black women’s college enrollment has been higher than black men’s since the early 20th century, but by 1995, black men had earned 30,000 Ph.D.’s compared to black women’s 20,000. Moreover, this trend of black women holding fewer academic positions, while being relegated to junior ranks, and receiving tenure in lower numbers, is unyielding.

I must order this book for my university library!