Posts Tagged ‘Elysium’
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction has a pre-order page! Open your wallets! Contact your local librarian! Get your Hugo nomination ballots ready!
* It’s a shame about Joan Rivers. The documentary about her is great. She was good on the Nerdist podcast too.
* Amazing, astounding: The Eaton Collection just got a $3.5 million gift.
* Through its increasing corporatization in the last two decades, the university in the United States has implemented an organizational ideology that has created a climate unfavorable for women faculty. By overvaluing and intensifying managerial principles, the university in the United States has strengthened discursive masculinity and has worsened women faculty’s likelihood of professional advancement. Consequently, the adoption and implementation of managerialism in higher education in the United States is a question of gender equity for the academic profession. Feminist educational scholars have been relatively quiet on the growth of managerialism in the university and its impact on gender equity. In particular, feminist scrutiny of managerialism’s discursive masculinity and its effects on gender equity in the university has been lacking. This conceptual article presents a feminist analysis of managerialism and its implications for women faculty in the United States; it examines how managerial culture and practices adopted by universities have revived, reinforced, and deepened the discourse of masculinity.
* inconsequential research kills don’t inconsequential research today
* The future’s just a little bit janky: Awesome Home-Built Elysium Exoskeleton Lifts 170 Pounds Like Nothing.
* The Freedom to Starve: The New Job Economy.
* California is the state of sunshine, movie stars— and Supermax prisons.
* This 3D-rendered Spider-Woman will haunt your dreams.
* People don’t like Spider-Woman’s butt because of Islam, says illustrator.
* The coming student debt apocalypse.
* The arc of history is long, but: Rams Cut Sam, First Drafted Openly Gay Player.
* In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.
* When police catch “contagious shooting.” Even When Police Do Wear Cameras, Don’t Count on Seeing the Footage. Police Body Cameras Don’t Address the Real Problem: Police.
* Cop Charged With Sexually Assaulting Eight Women Under Threat of Arrest.
* All about how airlines cancel flights. Okay, but listen, I’m still mad.
* Headlines from the Anthropocene: Drought-Stricken California Makes Historic Move To Regulate Underground Water For The First Time. Are You Ready for a 35-Year Drought?
* Cataclysm in suburbia: The dark, twisted history of America’s oil-addicted middle class.
* The Moon Landing Went Far Better Than the Practice Landing.
* A previously unpublished chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Astronomers Discover A Planetary Impact Outside Our Own Solar System.
* And a radical communist provocation to shake your delicate sensibilities to the core: Shaking Down the Elderly for Student Loan Debt Should Not Be Allowed.
Tuesday Links!
* In case you missed it / in case you’re interested: syllabi for my courses for this fall, Postmodern American Fiction and 21st Century Science Fiction.
* Stylish bulletproof whiteboards for today’s academic-on-the-go. Available in pink, blue, and green!
* Mothers are not ‘opting out’ – they are out of options.
* What would happen if, at long last, women and especially mothers were paid the market rate for their services? To begin with, it might buoy the baseline value of such work above zero, so that rank-and-file nurses, cleaners, and child care workers moiling in the waged economy wouldn’t get such lousy pay. Rosler and Federici belong to a generation of leftists largely suspicious of economic rationality, but to extend it, rather than battle to incrementally reduce its influence, could do women good. Put a price on women’s work, they say. If that work suddenly seems too expensive, it should. Perhaps men — increasingly the sex without work — might just do “women’s work” at lower pay, as women have done men’s since the Industrial Revolution. And perhaps women, as studies have shown they do, will use their wealth to improve the quality of life of entire households, entire societies.
* Coffee bad for you again. Stay safe, academics!
* Big Smart Objects: Drone Culture and Elysium.
* Springsteen noir film series in Asbury Park.
* Simon Pegg, Marxist theorist.
Is it true that you wrote your undergraduate thesis on a Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses?
I did. The piece was actually called Base and Super Sucker which was a play on the phrase “Basic Super Structure”, which is a Marxist proposition, hegemony and consent in Star Wars and related works. Basically I was using Marxist modes of critical theory to address Star Wars. And the main thrust of it was that if you watch any kind of television or theatre or film that has certain kind of themes or opinions and you don’t critically recognize them, then you consent with them. So very simply put, if you watch a racist comedian and you laugh, then you are a racist. And there are various preoccupations and concerns that flow through popular cinema that reflect things that are going on in society, certain ideas and certain fears. The thesis suggested that by watching films like those you are participating in those fears and preoccupations.
He talked a little bit about this on WTF the other week.
* “In previous papers, ‘Financing the University – Parts 12-14’, I have demonstrated that there is a much larger constellation of management bureaucracy throughout UC, which has grown enormously over the past decade and is now estimated to waste some $600 million per year. The Senior Management Group, which you talk about here, is just the tip of that iceberg.”
Wednesday!
* Duke’s Jebediah Purdy has the solution to the problem of animal-rights muckrakers I blogged about yesterday:
Fairness and safety are real issues. So is transparency, and that is why we should require confined-feeding operations and slaughterhouses to install webcams at key stages of their operations. List the URL’s to the video on the packaging. There would be no need for human intrusion into dangerous sites. No tricky angles or scary edits by activists. Just the visual facts. If the operators felt their work misrepresented, they could add cameras to give an even fuller picture.
On what grounds could the slaughterhouse industry possibly object to that? Via DotEarth’s post on the personhood of non-humans.
* All told, over the last five fiscal years, the Education Department has generated $101.8 billion in profit from student borrowers, thanks to low borrowing costs for the government and fixed interest rates for students, budget documents show.
* Student loan interest rates are scheduled to double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Congress extended the lower rate on federal student loans for a year in an effort to control the nation’s formidable student debt crisis, but will now have to decide whether or not to cancel the interest rate hike once again. Interests Diverge on Interest Rates.
* Every meaningful resistance to neoliberalism must be a feminism.
* Now, however, the City College of San Francisco might pay a heavy price for its faculty-oriented ethos: being shut down.
* The L.A. Times pans the New University of California.
* Millions of Americans have grown up with a defining family immigration story. But while our families may have endured hardship coming to America, the simple fact is that most of our immigration stories would not be possible at all under today’s immigration laws. Great idea for a site.
* The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won’t linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed “gone.” It’s a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the future: Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium.
* Animated Renderings of America After 25 Feet of Sea Level Rise.
* They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.
* Trends in Instructional Staff Employment Status, 1975-2011.
* And xkcd considers the mise-en-Adobe.
Gerry Canavan 