It is 7:30 on a Monday morning and I have already had to report a plagiarist.

Alert: Friendly fire in European Academia

You have to understand the self-awareness of the joke, because this is from a 400-pages book by a German Scholar that is very much "Das Konzept der Europäische Gesellschaft (The Concept of European Society) and the guy has not talked to anyone flesh and bone person for that.

October 2023: I was so productive but, boy (gn), was it a stressful month!

tip for undergrads: if your instructor can't understand your paper, that is not a good sign

signed, very tired grad student

jack of all trades master of arts AND science (with distinction)

while i understand the benefit of writing historiographical reviews i also think i should be exempt from writing them on account of the fact that i absolutely fucking hate them

the sokal affair was fucking hilarious actually and i dont trust anyone who disagrees. if i ever get to TA a course (i dont care what the course is on) im assigning that paper as a reading with no context and the seminar topic will be critical thinking and media literacy

blorbo (from my archives)

Transformative Works and Culture journal new issue out!

The editorial reflects on the directions the journal intends to take. To us, Fanhackers, one sentence inmediately seems relevant.

(…) we continue to resist the tendency within fan studies’ spaces, both casual and academic, to speak about fandom as if it’s a contiguous whole rather than encompassing an enormous variety of people, cultures, practices—and conflicts.

Fanhackers’ own mission is to connect fandom studies that is casual with the one that’s academic. The journal’s focus falls not necessarily connecting these discussions but to expand what academic fandom studies can cover by

(speaking) with potential authors over the past year, including especially those who may not think of what they do as fitting into the field because of who and what they are studying

In the editorial, this expansion is related to an important statement.

It is not uncommon to hear or read words such as “fandom has a whiteness problem,” or “fandom has a race problem,” but neither of those statements are true. There are and have always been Black fandoms, and Indigenous fandoms, and Latinx fandoms, and Asian fandoms, and fandoms of and for people whose identities exist outside of Western-dominant racial formations. Fandom does not have a whiteness problem. White fandoms have a whiteness problem. 

I like, therefore, to say that it is white fandom studies that has a whiteness problem, oftentimes, though, discussion doesn’t name fandom studies as such and scholarship that doesn’t center whiteness the same way might not be included in histories of fandom studies. Then, this expansion needs not only to include new scholarship but by rethinking what our scholarship includes.

In this, the efforts of fandom and fandom studies should be connected.

one of my favourite excerpts from alexander g. weheliye’s habeas viscus: 

alt ID: Building on Hortense Spiller’s distinction between body and flesh and the write of habeas corpus, I use the phrase habeas viscus-- “you shall have the flesh”-- on the one hand, to signal how violent political domination activates a fleshy surplus that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality, and, on the other hand, to reclaim the atrocity of flesh as a pivotal area fro the politics emanating from different traditions of the oppressed. The flesh, rather than displacing bare life or civil death, excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds. 

The online class I am teaching has been open for less than 24 hours, and the first AI-generated pseudo-essay has already been submitted. It isn't even responding to the assigned text.

Enjoying the first glimpses of spring and slowly trying to get back into regular PhD work 🌼

you all wish you were going to the rare books library with my class today

[stumbles into my supervisor's inbox with a blood-smeared document] please can i get feedback on this abstract

always hilarious how every systematic review is like 'we screened 120283948 studies, assessed 728 for eligibility and finally only 12 studies met inclusion criteria' and the funnel graph is horrific like academia and research is so full of SHIT scholarship <3