Sianne Ngai’s concept of minor aesthetic categories was developed to think about “aesthetic experiences grounded in equivocal affects”. I worked to think through the concept of ‘meta’ as it circulates in popular culture as a similar minor aesthetic category. Like Ngai’s three examples — the cute, the zany, and the interesting — ‘meta’ is characterised […]
Category Archives: Cultural Studies
Rough Notes on the Techno-Aesthetics of Cattle
Other permutations of the title of this post could have been techno-aesthetics of ‘living standards’ or techno-aesthetics of ‘the future’. Mike Konczal’s piece in The New Inquiry on the work of ‘standardization’ in processes of ‘financialization’ was shared across my social networks the other day. In it he suggests that financial markets have in part […]
Valorising Research, Teaching and the Research Hole
My (recently) ex-colleague Jason Wilson has published an insightful piece on self-funded research. We’ve had a number of chats about this over the last year. The examples I raised of ‘self-funded’ research were of cultural studies scholars in the 1980s who did not receive ‘funds’ for research and even included those (for example, like Meaghan […]
CSAA Conference Final Plenary Panel
My ‘mobile phone’ notes on the final plenary panel session of the 2012 CSAA conference http://www.csaa2012.org/ All panelists addressed the question: What matters for cultural studies? GT Few would describe it as a discipline. Training in a disciplinarity Teaching downgraded. Conduct in everyday life. Don’t believe surrendering the space to solving problems of business. Critical pedagogic […]
Working paper seminar series
Below is the title and abstract of a paper I shall be presenting this Friday as part of our working papers seminar series. It is based on about the first third/half of a paper I am trying to finish about the garage-assemblage. Actual paper does not really engage with Summernats. Title: “Show us your tits”: Summernats, […]