State of the Industry conference - Genevieve Bell presentation

Second presentation from from the State of the Industry conference at the University of NSW, hosted by the Cultural Research Network is from Genevieve Bell, who heads the first social science oriented reserach team at Intel, the User Experience group in the Intel Home Group. She was also identified as one of the 50 Most Creative People by Fast Company in 2009, as well as an Adelaide Thinker in Residence for the South Australian government.

Genevieve Bell

• PhD in anthropology at Stanford University after a very diverse and eclectic childhood and upbringing - has struggled to "fit" with either the university or the industry environment;
• Was going to take up an academic post, but was in Palo Alto in 1998 and was offered a job (again, in interesting circumstances) at Intel;

(Hope this is podcast, as its a great talk, in ways that can't quite be captured in a blog).

• Challenge between the very predictable path of academic tenure track employment and jobs that are not defined at Intel;
• She was hired out of the "irrational exuberance" at Intel in 1998, and being "the only woman who didn't cry" at the day-long interview;
• Job was to be in charge of "women" and "Rest of the World";
• Working with people from maths, sciences and IT backgrounds from an arts/humanities background requires disrupting dominant logics within Intel (e.g. everyone wants to be American), but they often relapse (graphic of three generations of white people watching TV together);
• How to mobilise stories about the "messiness of everyday life" to talk back to dominant understandings within Intel - this generates sharp debates, and forces a willingness to stand up for what you know in the face or arguments and scepticism;

Research Questions

1. There is no single trajectory through which technologies are adopted or no single pathway for the Internet - the "feral Internet", which is a very Australian interpretative concept (Internet as undomesticated, like feral animals in the Australian desert);
2. How technologists imagine technologies as being perceived? How to unpack underlying notions of the body, space etc., but privacy is becoming less of a core concern than what can be called reputation - telling other people about every aspect of your identity. Contrast between "messiness' of identities and desire for seamless personas among technology developers - image, authenticity, reputation more than trust, risk;
   
3. Concerns for policing behaviour: what it is devices want and what people need? Devices that work better when "always connected" versus desire of people for discrete moments of engagement/non-engagement;
4. How people talk about their lives as technologically engaged citizens? What are the "overheads" of everyday life in a technological age, and how do people struggle to deal with them? Don't map easily onto existing sociological categories (age, gender etc.) or life stages.;
5. Contributing theory in unexpected places. All kinds of people can do good fieldwork, but the caapcity to make sense of it requires exposure to a rich array of theoretical resources. Sometimes theory is taught to Intel engineers e.g Adrienne Rich on "compulsory heterosexuality" and why engineers should know about this. What seems to be "internal tools in the academy" can be used outside of the academy e.g. Foucault on bodies and power.

There are a lot of people doing work of this nature in various areas of high-tech industry, who are using the intellectual tools learned in the humanities academy for other purposes.

Implications

1. Increasingly complex trajectories for cultural researchers, and thinking about how people with PhDs may move in and out of industry, academy etc. Also how to see work done outside of the academy as rigorous, engaged etc. There are a lot of lacunae in the higher education sector about this, especially in the US academy. Australia can avoid this. They recruit people who do not come out of the Intel industry template model, but you need to know how to talk with them without thinking you have to sacrifice your theoretical training - not "dumbing down" training, but expanding horizons and career possibilities;
   
2. Finding the questions and asking them, and new jobs to be created. Development of a National Broadband Network in Australia will require cultural knowledge that Australia is not good at developing, as well as engineering knowledge which it is good at - how to you concretise the "digital economy" into everyday life? How to get beyond "putting the 'e' in front of everything" to the more complex questions of socio-technical questiosn of citizenship, identity, inclusion etc. The critique from within the academy is important, but so too is the scope to insert ourselves and our own positions into the government agencies, consultancies, companies etc. that are actively engaged in these decisions?
3. How can Australian cultural reserachers be global drivers of theory and analysis of the changing socio-cultural environment? Australia can be an incubator of new ideas, that can then be "talked back" to the rest of the world.
   

State of the Industry Conference - Graeme Turner presentation

Live blogging from the State of the Industry conference at the University of NSW, hosted by the Cultural Research Network.

Professor Graeme Turner, Convenor, Australian Research Council Cultural Research Network, and University of Queensland

• Problem of how to replenish the academic labour market as up to 50% of "baby boomer" academics retire over the next decade;
• The market will be increasingly internationally competitive - arts & humanities generate a lot of PhDs, but there are slower completion rates, higher attrition rates and more discontent with casualisation of work than in other Faculties/disciplines/sectors;
• This will be approached as "the university's problem" but it is increasingly one for government;
• The myth of "lots of jobs in the near future" has been around "since Graeme was 25" - beware of that mantra, although it may be more true this time.

Issues that need addressing and their attendant causes:

1. Perpetuation of casual/sessional appointments - originally designed to eliminate "exploitative" contract employment, but is itslef more exploitative;
2. Collapse of discipline-based departments;
3. Exploitative behaviour by unviersities and departments and resultant loss of trust;
4. Low level of PhD stipends and effects on personal living conditions esp. for those with families;
   
5. The end of the Masters degree as a PhD training ground - requires too much to be done with inexperienced PhD candidates;
6. Anti-intellectualism in Australia and disapraging of people in universities;
7. Increasing vocationalisation of universities, and use of "interdiscplinarity" to develop economies of scale by forcing disciplines together;
   
8. Marketisation of univerisites and short-term responses to shifts that see wholesale disappearance of disciplines and departmentsesp. outside of metro universities and G8 universities (seen in ERA exercise, soon to be public);
9. Poor advice from research offices and other entites trying to "second guess" where the funding will be e.g. whole Faculties being told to submit ARC grants.

Such factors influenced the decision to set up the CRN. Aims were to:

• link up senior reserachers with PhDs and ECRs;
• enable grassroots development of research ideas;
• build collaborations across disciplines and build multidisciplinary teams;
• address problems associated with professional development and lack of institutional mentoring for ECRs;
• liberate researchers from constraints of their particular institutions and departments by linking up to a wider communtiy of scholars.

Issue of how not simply to draw attention to constraints but build capacity for collective agency c.f. presentations by Simon Marginson and Staurt Cunningham on Day One of State of the Industry conference.

Whta are the consequences of loss of capacity in the humanities generally over the last 15 years and the unevenness of critical strength across the sector? Capacity was largely built in the sciences, particularly during the Howard years.

Ongoing arguments about how to get government to take our claims seriously. Poor results in first round of Future Fellowships an illustration of the problems arising. Can become a "vicious cycle" since governments respond to evidence of results rather than special pleading for more cash.

Maintain a focus on the quality of your work, and not on short-term exigencies of research offices e.g. first-tier journals after ERA.

Will Higher Education be a GFC Casualty?

Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne predicts that Rudd Government promises on higher education will be a casualty of the budgetary deterioration from the global financial crisis (GFC), and the worsening budget deficit. Marginson points out how this involves a significant breaking of promises, and a failure to reverse the patterns of the Howard years.

He also points out how underfunding of Australian universities has driven behaviour, espeically

in relation to research and international student enrolments.

The real story is the education export industry and what drives it. This is a key weakness in policy, that began in the Hawke and Keating years, worsened under Howard and has now trapped the Rudd Government.

Since the late 1980s, when there were 25,000 international students, Australian education exports have grown by leaps and bounds. Last year there were 543,898 international students, half in higher education. They generated $15.5 billion in export earnings through tuition fees, accommodation, food, living expenses and entertainment. Education was our third largest export sector in dollar terms, behind only coal and iron ore.

Education earns more than wheat, beef, wool, gold, tourism and other staples. The growth of commodity exports has been slowed by the recession but education exports will grow in 2009 and look recession-proof, for the time being at least.

The Government does not want to do anything that would hurt education exports. Therein lies the problem.

What has driven the remarkable growth of education exports is not the fabulous quality of Australian education but its under-funding, the very under-funding that Kevin Rudd has promised to correct.

Australia was the only OECD country to reduce total public spending on higher education in 1995-2005, while student numbers grew by 30 per cent. Rudd used these facts repeatedly in the 2007 election campaign.

In universities, only about 70 per cent of the real costs of government-supported research projects are funded. Teaching is also funded below real cost levels. And the Government's subsidies for teaching are not fully indexed for cost increases.

Three things follow from this "structure of financial incentives", as the business management literature calls it. One, universities lose money on every local student and on most of their research. Two, each year the gap between funding and costs gets wider. Three, each year the universities need more non-government revenues to fill the gap.

For more read here.

Nuttiness on the Left, Nuttiness on the Right

The question of whether the Internet can help to develop a more deliberative public sphere, or whether it promotes greater polarisation between people and groups, is a recurring one. In contrast to the optimism of many, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has wondered whether the Internet worsens what he term the 'law of group polarisation' and the 'echo-chamber effect', where people with right-wing views only listen and discuss issues with others with right-wing views, and people with left-wing views do the same with their own kind.

There is certainly no shortage of nuttiness on the Internet. In the US, someone like Larry Sinclair can get a gig at the National Press Club by continually posting tendentious claims about Barack Obama. Similarly, if you think that 30 years as a ZANU-PF functionary trains you to be a productive Zimbabwean farmer, and that Robert Mugabe's basically a misunderstood anti-colonialist whose policies for the country are on the right track, then the Net is the place where you have the right to say it, and keep saying it regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

But there is nuttiness that doesn't matter, and nuttiness that might. And I've come across two cases this week where nuttiness on the Net seemed to be worth commenting upon.

Clive Hamilton's recent public denunciation of 'climate change denialism' on On Line Opinion strikes me as having elements of nuttiness on the left. Like Clive, and like OLO editor Graham Young, I am not a scientist or an expert on climatology.

I may be a good citizen and download and read the Garnaut Report on Climate Change this weekend, or I may be a lazy citizen and read what everyone else says on the Net. I think there's a real issue, and I understand the 'precautionary principle', although I worry about how every instance of abnormal weather is attributed to climate change.

For example, there were a lot of storms and tornadoes when I was in the US mid-west recently, and every CNN anchor would ask whether it was evidence of climate change, even though they would be reminded that the US land-mass lends itself to wild weather in the mid-west, as there is a cold Northeast and a hot Southwest and the two fronts often collide in the middle.

But it was how Clive Hamilton announced his refusal to write for OLO that struck me as tending towards nuttiness. First of all, there is the need to noisily announce that you are no longer going to write for a publication, rather than just not publishing with them. Its like all those op-ed writers in The Australian furiously and continuously writing about how they are being silenced by the left wing chattering classes.

Second, Hamilton equates 'climate change denialists' - the word "denialist" is used in an interesting way here - with conspiracy theorists more generally:

According to the line of argument about balance, it would be perfectly acceptable for On Line Opinion to carry a series of articles repudiating the link between AIDS and the HIV virus. (Try googling AIDS denialism.)

The AIDS denialists have to account for the fact that the overwhelming weight of medical and epidemiological evidence is against them, so they must invent fanciful theories about colonialist plots and gay capture of science to compensate for the lack of hard evidence to support their beliefs.

This is exactly what the climate change denialists do, and each time On Line Opinion runs one of their pieces it is, inter alia, endorsing their view that Australia's most eminent climate scientists are frauds and liars.

Would Graham Young argue that the interests of balance demand that On Line Opinion give space to the claims of creation science? Would it give space to the conspiracy theories about 9-11 being a CIA plot, or the Larouche delusions about the Royal Family being in cahoots with global Jewry to run drugs? Balanced, yes, but loopy and deceptive too.

There is a technique being used here to delegitimise contrary voices by equating their positions with the loony fringes of conspiracy theory. People on the left would be familiar with the technique of calling someone a communist in order to devalue their argument. I suspect the same is happening here.

It is worth noting that Graham Young does something similar in his reply to Hamilton, suggesting that people who disagree with him are "postmodernists", and therefore out of step with the Enlightenment tradition of rational thought:

The idea that truth is relative has taken over some areas of the humanities through postmodernism, theory and forms of Marxist analysis. That's the school that Clive's argument on global warming comes from. Reading his article, and the comments on the article thread, they really don't cut it in the outside world. We instinctively know that things do have objective reality and are not power constructs. That it doesn't matter how many people say it is true if it isn't. It's in that place in the intellectual debate that On Line Opinion fits. We're not in demise or denial. We're just starting to come into our own.

The final point to be made is that, for Clive Hamilton, the intellectual debate on climate change is over, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply proffering an excuse for inaction, or action as a shill for corporate vested interests.

The denialists have conspicuously failed to generate contrary evidence that can be published in refereed journals and instead devote themselves to creating doubt by exaggerating, exploiting and twisting the various uncertainties and unexplained phenomena that naturally characterise a body of science as complex and emergent as climate change science.

There is enough material in the history of ideas, and the sociology of knowledge, to suggest that evidence of a consensus on an issue is not the same as its being established as irrefutable fact. C. Wright Mills could barely get his argument heard about The Power Elite in 1960 when he wrote the book. Ten years later, it had become an orthodoxy of sociological thought. Milton Friedman was completely on the margins of economics in 1962 when he wrote Capitalism and Freedom. By 1976 the situation had changed dramatically. And there are many other examples of how the weight of orthodox thought in a discipline changes over time.

Given that professional journalists and journalism educators routinely claim that their profession is differentiated by what happens on line by the lack of ethics on the Internet, the Hamilton-Young debate could be a good case study in media and journalism courses on how differences of opinion play themselves out in the online environment. I think it points to what has been called the "noisy" public sphere, but this may prove Sunstein's point about the impossibility of getting consensus on the Net in light of so many conflicting opinions.

The question then is one of how do we conduct conversation in the absence of consensus. I don't think that noisily denouncing an online publication for not toeing a preferred 'party line' is the way to do it, but if that's Clive Hamilton's call, then so be it.

A more concerning example of nuttiness on the right involves the Young Liberals' "Make Education Fair" campaign. This one could be dismissed as nutty, if slightly aggressive, student politicking until:

1. A Senate Enquiry into the matter was set up in the last days of Liberal-National Party control of the Senate;
2. You go to the section of the Web site under 'Research' marked 'Academic Watch'.
   

In relation to the Senate enquiry, it would be hard to go past the observations of Andrew Norton - hardly an enemy of liberalism or the Liberal Party - on his blog that indicate why this will almost certainly generate a lot of heat but very little light. It is very hard for governments to legislate the content of university courses, and for a liberal, moving in this direction would point towards a slippery slope of government control of intellectual life. Moreover, given that the nature of the teacher-student relationship presumes that even the dumbest teacher knows more about their subject matter than the brightest student, the idea that course content is given over to a student plebiscite has a fell about it akin to Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution circa 1967, particularly when it is proposed that this be extended beyond universities to secondary schools.

It is the 'Academic Watch' page that I find particularly sinister. Norton's fears that the exercise could turn into "a witch-hunt for leftist academics" is confirmed when you go to this page. The site 'outs' 18 academics as 'radical leftists', even though they would appear to have little in common with one another except that they are at odds with whoever put together this page. My real worry here is that, one you go down this path, providing email addresses and phone numbers so that disgrunted students or whoever else can harass academics (or worse) is on the cards.

Given that the Liberal Party of Australia is not a minority Trotskyist sect, but rather seeks to govern on behalf of all Australians, such pogromic and quasi-McCathyist behaviour would seem to me to be very much at odds with the 'academic freedom' they ostensibly seek to champion. I would imagine that quite a few Liberals would be deeply embarrassed by the behaviour they see happening in their name on the 'Make Education Fair' Web site.