November 16, 2012, 12:30 am
By Claire Potter
#2012ASA agreed to wait until after the election to deconstruct empire. Subsidize with tax dollars hasta pronto. Hillz
It’s very rare that I get a response to a post on academic conferences like this one. In the comment thread to yesterday’s post, archie_kelvin asks:
A long, long time ago, on the dear departed “Brainstorm” site, there was a long, long thread (in response to a post somewhat like TR’s) about attending an academic conference in a sunny clime, far away from the campuses of most attendees.
archie followed up with a bunch of questions, which I will attempt to answer (and yes, archie, my panel went very well today — thanks for asking.)
Aren’t these things just boondoggles, mini-vacations wholly or partly on somebody else’s tab?
All conferences, in all professions, are at least partly…
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October 21, 2011, 11:45 am
By Claire Potter
Cowabunga, Buffalo Bob!
Of course, ASA means something different as you age: it used to mean “Par-tay!!!” Now it mostly means jiggling a lot of appointments around the panel I am on so that I can do everything I need to do for my publishing life in fewer than two days. The restrictions on partying are fine since I no longer drink much and the closer I get to the Big Sleep, the more I need to practice on a nightly basis. My current conferencing style also means I am no longer using intellectual work to facilitate conference going, but just the opposite. Shrewder minds than mine understood this back in graduate school and they have the careers to prove it. In any case, there is only so much you can do over the interwebz and by conference call in the academic publishing biz : some stuff still requires the good old face to face, as Bertie Wooster might have put it. (more…)
March 12, 2011, 1:08 pm
By Claire Potter
Why do we tell young scholars to “network,” and what do we mean by it?
As I was finishing up Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) last night, I came across this gem of a quote on p. 138:
I feel that my career benefits regularly from the results of my networking. My ultimate take on networking is, however, this: No single event in the course of my career that I can cite has been directly caused by networking. Nevertheless, the results of networking have regularly smoothed, stabilized, and supported my career and made it more pleasant (there is that term again) than it would have been without it.
In general I would say (and I would say this to young writers particularly): Rarely if ever can networking make a writing career when no career is to be made.
Delany, as many of you know, is a queer science fiction writer who has also…
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January 5, 2011, 10:34 pm
By Claire Potter
 |
| I just want to say: gays were not involved in logo design or color choice. |
Last year there was quite a hullabaloo about the American Historical Annual Meeting out in San Diego. Doug Manchester, who owns the hotel the AHA chose, had given gobs of money to Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative. He also got a lot of that money by running a union-free work place. It was what you would call a lose-lose choice for the AHA, and resulted in a lot of people flying out there to picket, and a lot of other people having to give their papers by sneaking in and out hidden in laundry trucks. (No, not Really! That was a joke!) This year there are no worries: you can come into the hotel without worrying that you will have to cross a queer picket line, or worse, that the hotel bar is off limits to Good People. We historians are meeting in the People’s Republic of Boston, a city that is unionized …
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June 3, 2010, 2:14 pm
By Claire Potter
The Policy History Conference is in the Columbus Hyatt, which is also currently housing a bunch of men’s college rugby teams engaged in tournament play. For those of you who are at the conference but were unable to get a room at the Hyatt, this proliferation of apple-cheeked lads may explain the shortage of accommodations at a time of year when Columbus seems to be otherwise deserted. Because the rugby tournament headquarters are near the PHC book exhibit, this means that there are occasional moments when the public areas are full of (mostly male) academics in suits giving way to a flying wedge of sweaty, strapping and polite young men who have tiny shorts and legs of steel.
My first panel this afternoon was, as I promised, “Feminism: The Changing Status Of Women In The Age Of Eisenhower,” the Book Forum on Alan Petigny’s The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965 (Cambridge, 2008). …
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June 3, 2010, 2:24 am
By Claire Potter
So far I have been in Ohio for a day and a half, and I’m impressed. The little college town that was my first stop was a time-travel experience. People leave their doors open when they are away from the house for an errand or a stroll around the neighborhood. Children walk home from the school bus. Slightly older children ride their bikes around town, walk to the main shopping area, go from house to house, finding their friends and hanging out in a generally unsupervised and benign way.
People seemed happy and relaxed.
Between Cleveland and Little College Town is farmland; when I left LCT today to drive to Columbus (about a hundred miles due south), I passed more gorgeous farms, many of which are run by Amish people. The road rolled gently up and down hills, and was lined on both sides with nicely painted white fencing and the occasional family dairy operation. I drove by several…
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February 21, 2010, 2:56 pm
By Claire Potter
“Hey, Amy” (Wait For It) “Where You Going/With That GunInYourHand?” For the most complete summary to date of the Amy Bishop Case, the University of Alabama-Huntsville prof who murdered and wounded her colleagues execution-style, go to today’s New York Times. As we all know by now, Bishop’s post-tenure denial rampage was not her first killing. However, today’s story raises a pointed question. The 1986 “accidental” fratricide in Bishop’s childhood home was immediately followed by Amy, then a college student, not calling 911 as one normally would in an accidental shooting, but demanding a vehicle from a car dealer, at gun point, claiming that she was being chased by an angry husband. Why did not someone, anyone, at least have her evaluated by a psychiatrist at some point after this and many other, less fatal, episodes of grandiosity? More than one person in Bishop’s life was clearly no…
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January 17, 2010, 2:56 pm
By Claire Potter
In an effort to post more consistently and also to celebrate the Lord’s Day in a traditionally Protestant way (what the Lord actually meant by “resting” was that he would get some work done on his Book), I am hereby inaugurating the Sunday Radical Roundup. Following a practice that is common in the blogosphere, but most expertly performed by Ralph Luker in his daily series of Notes at Cliopatria, every Sunday I will produce a series of short items, old and new, that I want to bring to the attention of my loyal readers.
Additions to the Tenured Radical sidebar links include The Book, a new book review blog that has been launched by The New Republic; The Book Bench, its predecessor at The New Yorker; and Constitutionally Speaking, a blog written by South African Constitutional scholar Pierre de Vos of the University of the Western Cape.
Registration is now open for Reblaw 2010, February …
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February 3, 2009, 4:31 pm
By Claire Potter
The Radical received in her inbox this morning (from colleague Frank Graziano, chair of Hispanic Studies at Connecticut College):
CALL FOR PAPERS & PREREGISTRATION: Undocumented Hispanic Migration: On the Margins of a Dream. Connecticut College, New London, CT 06320 / October 16-18, 2009. A multidisciplinary conference featuring presentations by Peter Andreas, Linda Bosniak, Leo R. Chavez, Jorge Duany, Nancy Foner, Judith Adler Hellman, Juan F. Perea, Alejandro Portes, and Saskia Sassen. Also includes presentations by immigrants; by educators, social-service providers, and attorneys who work with undocumented Hispanics; and by border-enforcement officials. Preregistration is now open. The deadline for paper and panel proposals on migration, border enforcement, and undocumented life in the United States is April 1, 2009. For further information contact Prof. Frank Graziano,…
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