Practise what you preach: Engaging in humanities research through critical praxis

Adema, Janneke

doi:10.1177/1367877912474559

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus "experimentation", alongside other ethical values such as "collaboration" and "openness", becomes a key element of the DH curriculum (Spiro 2012;Scheinfeldt 2010). And practices facilitated by the digital, such as "remix" (Kuhn and Callahan 2012;Adema 2012) and data-mining (Manovich 2012;Hayles 2012), are celebrated in a concomitant general call for understanding coding as a literacy (Vee 2013;Berry 2012;Digital Humanities Manifesto 2009;Galloway 2004). Finally, this technological pragmatism transfers most of the digital values of its ethos, such as experimentation and collaboration, to the digital tools from which it draws them.…”

Section: "Hack" Vs "Yack": Towards a (Techno-)pragmatic Critique Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (Combined PDF of all articles)

Allmer¹,

Bulut

2018

tripleC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Modern universities have always been part of and embedded into capitalism in political, economic and cultural terms. In 1971, at the culmination of the Vietnam War, the Chomsky-Foucault debate reminded us of this fact when a student asked: "How can you, with your very courageous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?" (Chomsky and Foucault 2006, 63). Chomsky responded dialectically, but also had to admit that the academic institution he is working for is a major organisation of war research and thereby strengthens the political contradictions and inequalities in capitalist societies.Edward P. Thompson (1970), one of the central figures in the early years of British cultural studies, edited Warwick University Ltd in the 1970s. Thompson was working at the University of Warwick then and published together with colleagues and students a manuscript that discovered, as the title suggests, the close relationship of their university with industrial capitalism. The book also revealed some evidence of secret political surveillance of staff and students by the university, which was uncovered by students occupying the Registry at Warwick at that time.In a more recent context, the renowned Marxist geographer David Harvey faced an interview question about managerialism and the pressure to raise external funding at his university, City University of New York: "I had a dean saying to me that I wasn't bringing in any money. You're worthless, he said, as far as we're concerned. So I asked what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to set up an Institute of Marxist Studies funded by General Motors? And the dean said, 'Yes, that's a good idea. I'll support you if you can do that'" (Taylor 2010).The relationship between state control and global capitalism has intensified in the last decades. With the collapse of the welfare state and the drop of public funds, universities are positioning themselves as active agents of global capital, transforming urban spaces into venues for capital accumulation and competing for profits derived from international student populations. In this environment, students have to pay significant amounts of tuition for precarious futures. Similarly, teaching and research faculty across the globe have to negotiate their roles that are often strictly defined in entrepreneurial terms. Increasingly, the value of academic labour is subject to new forms of control, surveillance and productivity. As the recent cases of Steven Salaita (USA), Academics for Peace (Turkey) and the crackdown against students in India reveal, academic labour and academics in general are also facing immense challenges in terms of state control and freedom of speech.Situated in this economic and political context, the overall task of this special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital media, and capitalism. The artic...

show abstract

Section: "Hack" Vs "Yack": Towards a (Techno-)pragmatic Critique Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (Combined PDF of all articles)

Allmer¹,

Bulut

2018

tripleC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: "Hack" Vs "Yack": Towards a (Techno-)pragmatic Critique Of mentioning

confidence: 99%

Manual Labour, Intellectual Labour and Digital (Academic) Labour. The Practice/Theory Debate in the Digital Humanities

Magis¹

2018

tripleC

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:Although it has not been much considered as such, the digital humanities movement (or at least the most theoretically informed parts of it) offers a critique "from within" the recent mutation of the higher education and research systems. This paper offers an analysis, from a Critical Theory perspective, of a key element of this critique: the theory vs. practice debate, which, in the digital humanities, is translated into the famous "hack" vs. "yack" motto, where DHers usually call for the pre-eminence of the former over the latter. I show how this debate aims to criticise the social situation of employment in academia in the digital age and can further be interpreted with the culture industry theoretical concept, as a continuance of the domination of the intellectual labour (i.e. yack in this case) over manual labour (hack). I argue that, pushing this debate to its very dialectical limit, one realises that the two terms are not in opposition anymore: the actual theory as well as the actual practice are below their very critical concepts in the current situation of academic labour. Therefore, I call for a reconfiguration of this debate, aiming at the rediscovering of an actual theory in the academic production, as well as a rediscovering of a praxis, the latter being outside of the scientific realm and rules: it is political.

show abstract

“…The concept of "open ethics," which originated decades ago in media and journalism studies with the emergence of online communities, has increasing relevance today when almost everyone has a smart phone and can easily both upload and access material that may never have originally been intended to be seen publicly. For background on the concept from several different perspectives, see, for exampleAdema (2013),Henderson (2012),Ward and Wasserman (2015).10. InDecember 2018, the ACRL published the Primer for Protecting Sensitive Data in Academic Research, available at https://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/archives/16710 11.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%