Abstract
What social, economic and material conditions prompt innovations in academic writing? How does the university create time and space for research, reflection and composure? Is a campus environment the only place where writing has such an important role in creating a measure of professional status? Can academics engage with the world beyond the conference circuit and classroom? This chapter is an attempt to answer these questions that have preoccupied my writing over many years, both within and outside the university. I document changes that transpired from my doctoral research and early blogging experiments through to the book publications that enabled me to move careers and countries. Throughout, academic writing is shown to be the primary way I have expressed and transcended the constraints of specific professional locations. Reflecting on this history, the chapter concludes with observations on the role of academic writing in the high-pace technology industry.
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- 1.
By 2013, I’d moved from high school to college, PhD to postdoctoral positions all around Australia only to return to teach at the same department where I did my doctoral research.
- 2.
The second is one of the editors of this volume!
- 3.
I use this phrase as a nostalgic reference to my first book, and Stuart Hall’s reading of Ernesto Laclau as described therein. “No necessary correspondence” was a hallmark phrase of New Left skepticism regarding the inevitability of class consciousness and revolution. As Hall explains: ‘there is no law which guarantees that the ideology of a class is already and unequivocally given in or corresponds to the position which that class holds in the economic relations of capitalist production’ (1985, p. 94).
- 4.
“Inventory of Shimmers” is the introductory essay of The Affect Theory Reader. The phrase is also taken from Barthes, in the collected lectures published as The Neutral (2005).
- 5.
Axel Bruns and Jane Jacobs’s (2006) collection, Uses of Blogs, is a representative publication from this period, emerging from a conference held at Queensland University of Technology. Adjacent to these activities, while a postdoctoral fellow at the neighbouring University of Queensland, I started a cross-institutional meetup of Media and Cultural Studies practitioners based in Brisbane – “Monthly MACS” – where many similar conversations took place. Ten years later, it is striking that academics are now expected to publicize their work on social media as part of routine scholarly publication methods and marketing. Citation counts harvested by services like Google Scholar deploy data metrics pioneered by earlier website and blog hosting technologies assessing web traffic.
- 6.
I remember being reprimanded in a staff meeting for showing students recent data on PhD completions relative to job opportunities. This information was deemed too demoralizing for our candidates and damaging for maintaining enrolments.
- 7.
Music for Deckchairs, a blog by University of Wollongong academic Kate Bowles, is a moving archive of these discussions. http://musicfordeckchairs.com/
- 8.
Editors’ comment – this is based on one orientation of the globe.
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Gregg, M. (2019). Technical Female: A Gender Studies Academic in Silicon Valley. In: Thomas, L.M., Reinertsen, A.B. (eds) Academic Writing and Identity Constructions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01674-6_9
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