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Posts from the ‘Neoliberal Patterns’ Category

Oct 26

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Scholarly Communication and the Occupation of Everything

In the current context of global protest, economic failure and political transformation, anthropologists of many backgrounds are finding their voice and addressing the critical issues of the moment. For those with jobs that are being given the speedup treatment, it is hard to keep up with all of the thoughtful and provocative work being created and shared (especially online) right now. The evocative opening line of Jason Antrosio’s recent essay “Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto” hints as the gestalt.

A spectre is stalking Capitalism–the spectre of Anthropology. All the Powers of Capitalism have bound themselves in a crusade against this spectre: the Florida Governor and the U.S. President, Dominique-Strauss Kahn and the IMF, Wall Street and Congress.

My thanks go to everyone who is tracking, discussing, fostering, and hosting these discussions. I hope other key nodes in the conversation will forgive me if I single out the Neuroanthropology bloggers Daniel Lende and Greg Downey for their vital work.

Open Access Week and Occupy Everything both continue and I still cannot muster time to read or say much. Rex Golub at Savage Minds is right when he observes that I always bury my lead. He might also note that I say everything too obliquely. So, for tonight, here is a restatement of my previous post in less opaque language.

Going forward from here, if your anthropological research tells you that large corporations are part of the problem, then please do not publish your discoveries or your proposals on this point in books and journals published by large corporations.

 

Oct 24

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Open Access Week + Occupy Scholarly Communications #occupyscholcomm #oaweek

My job is eating my lunch at present so I have not yet had time to engage properly with open access week, which began today (well, yesterday since it just passed midnight where I am). Learn more from the Open Access Week website here ( http://www.openaccessweek.org/ ) and by searching “Open Access Week” on the open web and by looking for “open access week” and “#oaweek” on Twitter. Thankfully many good folks are working hard to get the word out.

If you think that the Occupy Wall Street (etc.) folks have anything like a point in their concerns about the unsustainable nature of the status quo or the need to acknowledge the influence that a small number of large corporations have in our lives and work, then the open access movement, together with the critique of, and efforts to reform, the scholarly communications system are for you. Above and beyond discussions of open access, a taste of the Occupy Scholarly Communications conversation can be found in Heather Morrison’s October 23, 2011 post “High Profits for Commercial Publishers-or Jobs for Academics Let’s #occupyscholcomm”

Next year, when open access week comes again, lets hope that some of the most vocal, articulate, and visible scholars working on questions of income inequality and corporate power will not have published their sophisticated accounts of emergent phenomena such as the Occupy movement with publishers like Polity (people Polity effectively = Wiley) and Palgrave-Macmillian or in journals owned wholly by Sage or Taylor and Francis. Our doing this occasionally is ironic and even kind of funny, but its starting to suggest that we actually do not get it, even when we get it.

Oct 10

#OccupyWallStreet Discussion at the American Folklore Society Meetings (#AFS11)

#OccupyWallStreet Discussion at the American Folklore Society Meetings (#AFS11)

Saturday, October 15
12:30-1:15 p.m.
Alumni Hall
Indiana Memorial Union

Want to process the current moment of social protest and global revolution? Want to discuss the prospects for a human economy? Have stories, questions, fears or hopes to share? Does this moment speak to the concerns of our field? Does our field have something distinctive to offer those seeking social and economic change?

Interested folklorists are invited to gather for a lunchtime discussion of such themes. In the spirit of the current protests, we’ll find our path to open-ended conversation in an informal way. Think of it as a potluck, but for ideas, comments, and questions. Everyone is welcome, even those who just want to listen. Bring a box lunch if you want more than food for thought.

This gathering has been organized quickly, informally, and unofficially, but has been put together in consultation with leaders of the AFS and in collaboration with its Politics, Folklore, and Social Justice Section.

Questions:

Jason Jackson: jasonbairdjackson@gmail.com or @jasonjackson2
Christina Barr barrchristina@gmail.com or @barrchristina

Oct 7

AAA Renews its Co-Publishing Arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell

In the most recent issue of Anthropology News, Deborah Nichols and Oona Schmid confirm what was expected, that the AAA Executive Board has entered into a new five-year c0-publishing agreement with Wiley-Blackwell. The aspect that scholarly communications watchers were most interested in was the matter of terms. Nichols and Schmid report that the agreement (through 2017) is “under identical terms” to the current arrangement.

See:  Deborah Nichols and Oona Schmid (2011) The Present and Future of AAA Publishing. Anthropology News. 52(7):15.

Sep 28

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Gabrielle Berlinger Reports on the Latest Housing Protests in Israel

While, after inexcusable delay, the U.S. media finally start covering the Wall Street protests here in the United States, my colleague and IU doctoral researcher Gabrielle Berlinger continues to be one of the few people positioned to report in English on the continuing housing protests in Israel. As the protests connect directly with the community in which she is living and working and because they relate closely to her research, her reporting is rich in ways that journalistic accounts never could be. Her latest account, of a protest outside the home of the Minister of Housing in Jerusalem, is here.

Sep 26

“Your royalty share will be 0%”

Thanks to the amazing Laura Gibbs for pointing me to this new video.

Sep 15

On “Visualizing the Uneven Geographies of Knowledge Production and Circulation”

Last night I had a chance to attend the Richard Bauman Lecture, a wonderful annual event in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University that honors one of my teachers-turned-colleagues Richard Bauman. This year’s lecture was delivered by anthropologist (and friend of folklore studies) Don Brenneis of the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. I hope to reflect more on his lecture soon, but some visualization graphics published in today’s issue of Inside Higher Education relate closely to his talk, which dealt broadly (and critically) with current transformations in knowledge work and higher education. He had come critical things to say about the growing hegemony of such processes  (recently discussed here, on Savage Minds, and elsewhere) as Impact Factor analysis, journal rankings, etc. Subject to the kind of critique that Brenneis was offering in his talk, the three images published today in IHE also speak to the transformations that he was describing.

Most relevant here is the way that the third graph (shown above) pictures the scale and centrality of the big five commercial publishers that I also discussed in the recent post that has gotten so much attention from readers (thanks all). Everyone should look at the original images in IHE, but the one shown in a small format above is the third of the three. The five largest rectangles represent Elsevier (upper left corner), Springer (to Elsevier’s right), Wiley (middle left), Taylor and Francis (bottom left) and Sage (on the inner corner adjacent to Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley). These are the same five who between them control just under half of the anthropology journals tracked and ranked by Thompson Reuters for such metrics as Impact Factor and Half-Life. I point to the image here because it speaks to the dominance of these large firms over all of scholarly publishing. Burying the lead again, I’ll just say that I resist rather than stand with these publishers.

Visualizing the uneven geographies of knowledge production and circulation – Inside Higher Ed.

PS: I should have noted that the IHE gleaning comes originally from a full report:

Graham, M., Hale, S. A., and Stephens, M. (2011) Geographies of the World’s Knowledge, London, Convoco! Edition.

I consulted the original version of the image shown above to see who some of the smaller publishers shown are. Not-for-profits who are large enough to be labeled include Annual Reviews and the University of Chicago Press (about the same size) and slightly smaller, MIT Press and Johns Hopkins University Press. Chicago, MIT, and JHU are among the largest of the university press journal publishers. It is in the nature of the visualization that the many smaller publishers are represented with squares/rectangles that are too small to label.

Sep 12

When Ads Attack

Sometime last week I happened to see what my website looks like when I am not logged in and I discovered the new [or new to me] feature in which wordpress.com serves up ads to [not-logged-in] wordpress.com visitors. As the WP folks note: “At WordPress.com, we sometimes display discreet AdSense advertisements on your blog to help pay the bills. This keeps free features free!”

I appreciate the service that wordpress provides to me but I also do not wish to have ads on my website, thus happily I discovered today that I can pay a yearly fee to remove the ads from the site. I have done this and hopefully this step will keep the ads away going forward. I apologize for the ads that have been present in recent weeks (months?). I did not see them on my side or I would have taken care of this sooner.

While it was already newly arrived on my radar, thanks go to Adam Fish for noticing this phenomena and highlighting the discordance of the ads in the context of my website given the kinds of open access, open source, public-interest topics that I often reflect on here. As a specialist in the cultures of media and media production, Adam would be better prepared than I am to reflect on the wider implications of the “discreet AdSense advertisements” (to use WP’s language) that are now a part of the wordpress ecology.

I value many services that are supported through underwriting and advertisements so I am not against ads in a wholesale way. Its just not what I want here and I am very glad that I have the option of paying to make them disappear.

WP.com users can learn more here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/no-ads/

Sep 10

The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest

It has been several years now since I last taught my seminar on intellectual and cultural property issues in folklore and ethnology and I have not succeeded in keeping up with recent developments. In this context, I am especially glad that so many of my favorite colleagues have taken up work in this area. Thanks go to one of them, Alex Dent (Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University and Associate Editor of Anthropological Quarterly [a awesome not-for-profit journal in its 84th year]) for calling to my attention the The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. I have signed the statement as an expression of my basic values in this realm and I support the project. Even if you feel differently, reading the declaration is a valuable learning experience. I urge folks with concerns about where we are and where we are going to take a look. Here is an excerpt.

The next decade is likely to be determinative. A quarter century of adverse changes in the international intellectual property system are on the cusp of becoming effectively irreversible, at least in the lives of present generations. Intellectual property can promote innovation, creativity and cultural development. But an old proverb teaches that “it is possible to have too much of a good thing,” and that adage certainly applies here. The burden falls on public interest advocates to make a coordinated, evidence-based case for a critical reexamination of intellectual property maximalism at every level of government, and in every appropriate institutional setting, as well as to pursue alternatives that may blunt the force of intellectual property expansionism.

Find the whole document in its organization, institutional, and policy context online at http://infojustice.org/washington-declaration. Thanks Alex!

Sep 9

‘Abelard to Apple’ – Inside Higher Ed

‘Abelard to Apple’ – Inside Higher Ed.

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