Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

This Week In Teaching

My summer intensive survey of critical theory at SFAI over in the City finished up last week, although I still have a pile of finals to work through, and this week is the last of my three-day marathons of three-hour lectures on the Rhetoric of Interpretation at Berkeley. Today is Donna Haraway, tomorrow is Bruno Latour, Thursday is Judith Butler, every one a joy to read and to talk through, but also dense and difficult to capture in a lecture, especially for students who at this point tend to feel as though they've spent a month in the trenches of theoryhead boot camp and can no longer remember their childhoods. It's been a truly exhausting couple of months.

Next fall my teaching load lightens considerably (as will, scarily, my paycheck), presumably to make time for writing and publishing. I haven't taught fewer than three separate courses (and usually it's been four) for a single term, including summers, since I got my PhD half a decade ago and I haven't been able to write anything but these scattered speculations on my blog. I have outlines for seven books gathering dust (one a refurbishment of my dissertation on the techno-politics of privacy/secrecy, two on futurological discourse, one emphasizing environmental issues the other more general, one on Hannah Arendt and p2p politics, one on the anti-politics inhering in "design" discourses, one on the anti-democratizing rhetoric of the canon of post New Deal market fundamentalist pop-economics, and one on the politics of human/nonhuman animal demarcations), and it seems the time has arrived to get at least one of the blasted things out of my system.

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