Last fall I began teaching the “Media, Technology & Culture” undergraduate course at UMass Amherst. I decided to run a “flipped classroom,” wherein students would listen to many (though not all) of the lectures outside of class and we’d spend our time in person discussing the material. In addition to opening up lots of class […]
My friend and colleague Mark Hayward and I have been working on an essay entitled “Working Papers in Cultural Studies, or, the Virtues of Gray Literature,” which we’ll be presenting at the upcoming Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference in Paris. We’ve been drafting the piece publicly on one of my websites, The Differences & Repetitions […]
Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, spoke recently with UK newspaper The Guardian in which he stated that “very power forces [have] lined up against the open Internet on all sides and around the world.” Brin levies this charge against the restrictive policies of certain governments, the entertainment industry’s efforts to address piracy, and walled […]
It seems that the pot is starting (or have already started) to boil over. The role of academic publishing houses in the dissemination of knowledge has attracted the attention of people outside academia. And, certainly, it has attracted the attention of our blog. Mary Gray, Chris Boulton, and Zachary McDowell have chimed in with some important ideas about the philosophical […]
Fighting for Fair Use and Author Rights – Christopher Boulton Over the last four years, I’ve sparred with three academic publishers over copyright and permissions policies, once with Pearson and twice with Taylor & Francis. The results were mixed, ranging from hard-fought victory to stalemate and withdrawal. So, in the interest of recruiting allies, I […]