The Black Left Unity Network is seeking short essays (2,000 to 3000 words) on the theme “Black Left Unity: This Way Forward!” for the debut issue of our online publication, The Black Activist: A Journal for Black Liberation.
Essays should focus on the following issues/questions or related issues:
• An assessment of the current period and the necessity for black left unity
• Mapping the current black left. What are the various but fragmented manifestations of black left activism today and how can they be unified ?
• Defining a minimum black left platform that will ensure maximum participation
• What lessons we can learn from the history of our Freedom Struggles, e.g., resistance to slavery, the Haitian Revolution, Reconstruction, Garveyism, Pan African anti-colonialism, the civil rights, black liberation and empowerment movements of
of the 60s and the 70s, and the anti-apartheid movement, African liberation support activism, anti-police brutality activism, and Reparations activism of the 1980s and 90s.
Please feel free to forward this CFP selectively to potential contributors. We especially seek contributions from sister activists/analysts and young activists/analysts.
Please forward a note of intent to contribute and a half-page abstract no later than June 15th, and completed essay no later than August 15th. Abstracts and completed essays should be sent via email attachment to: blackactivistjournal@gmail.com .Inquiries may also be sent to this address.
Editorial Collective:
Ali Al-Sabbagh
Sam Anderson
Rose Brewer
Yusuf Nuruddin
Tony Menelik Van De Meer
Thursday, June 24, 2010
USU Dean search
POSITION ANNOUNCEMENT
Utah State University (USU) invites nominations and applications for a
significant academic leadership position as Dean of the Emma Eccles
Jones College of Education and Human Services. Utah State University
is a Carnegie doctoral-extensive (Research I) institution, and Utah's
land-grant and space-grant university. Founded in 1888, USU is the
oldest and largest public residential campus in Utah. The university
is experiencing a record setting enrollment of over 25,000 students
this year with approximately 10,000 of those in USU's regional and
distance programs including three regional campuses, 15 teaching
centers, international programs in China, and a large number of online
course offerings. In addition, more than 5,000 high school students
are enrolled in USU courses as part of an innovative statewide
concurrent enrollment program. As one of the top 20 land-grant
universities in the nation in the receipt of external research
funding, faculty at Utah State University acquired approximately $150
million in support of their research in the last fiscal year.
This position represents an extraordinary opportunity to lead the
renowned Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services to
new heights of achievement. The Dean is the chief academic and
administrative officer of the college and reports directly to the
Executive Vice President and Provost. The dean will provide
administrative and intellectual leadership for faculty, staff, and
students, effectively represent the college to the university, and
will have the experience and skills necessary to promote alumni
relations and be successful in advancement and fund-raising including
major campaigns. The ideal candidate will have a strong intellectual
background and possess distinguished academic credentials sufficient
for appointment to the rank of full professor. The dean will possess
proven and excellent leadership ability; articulate a broad and
comprehensive vision of the college based on its strengths and values;
and demonstrate a commitment to the land-grant mission of the
university that places high importance on partnerships and community
outreach. In addition, the successful candidate will value the
diversity of scholarly disciplines within the college, effectively
promote innovative growth in research and teaching, including its
regional campuses and distance education programs; and, enhance the
infrastructure to support and expand the college's thriving external
research funding base.
The position is available anytime after January 1, 2011 but should be
filled by July 1, 2011. Application review will begin August 16, 2010
and will continue until the position is filled. Applicants should
submit a letter describing their qualifications for the position and a
statement regarding their vision of the role and responsibilities for
a dean in a modern, research-intensive university that values both
undergraduate and graduate education. A current curriculum vitae and
contact information for a minimum of five references should be
included. To apply, go to:
https://jobs.usu.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=54514.
Nominations and inquiries should be sent to:
Dean Richard W. Clement, Chair
Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services Dean Search Committee
Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost
1435 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, Utah 84322-1435
Telephone: 435-797-2631
http://www.usu.edu/provost/employment/dean_cehs/
Utah State University (USU) invites nominations and applications for a
significant academic leadership position as Dean of the Emma Eccles
Jones College of Education and Human Services. Utah State University
is a Carnegie doctoral-extensive (Research I) institution, and Utah's
land-grant and space-grant university. Founded in 1888, USU is the
oldest and largest public residential campus in Utah. The university
is experiencing a record setting enrollment of over 25,000 students
this year with approximately 10,000 of those in USU's regional and
distance programs including three regional campuses, 15 teaching
centers, international programs in China, and a large number of online
course offerings. In addition, more than 5,000 high school students
are enrolled in USU courses as part of an innovative statewide
concurrent enrollment program. As one of the top 20 land-grant
universities in the nation in the receipt of external research
funding, faculty at Utah State University acquired approximately $150
million in support of their research in the last fiscal year.
This position represents an extraordinary opportunity to lead the
renowned Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services to
new heights of achievement. The Dean is the chief academic and
administrative officer of the college and reports directly to the
Executive Vice President and Provost. The dean will provide
administrative and intellectual leadership for faculty, staff, and
students, effectively represent the college to the university, and
will have the experience and skills necessary to promote alumni
relations and be successful in advancement and fund-raising including
major campaigns. The ideal candidate will have a strong intellectual
background and possess distinguished academic credentials sufficient
for appointment to the rank of full professor. The dean will possess
proven and excellent leadership ability; articulate a broad and
comprehensive vision of the college based on its strengths and values;
and demonstrate a commitment to the land-grant mission of the
university that places high importance on partnerships and community
outreach. In addition, the successful candidate will value the
diversity of scholarly disciplines within the college, effectively
promote innovative growth in research and teaching, including its
regional campuses and distance education programs; and, enhance the
infrastructure to support and expand the college's thriving external
research funding base.
The position is available anytime after January 1, 2011 but should be
filled by July 1, 2011. Application review will begin August 16, 2010
and will continue until the position is filled. Applicants should
submit a letter describing their qualifications for the position and a
statement regarding their vision of the role and responsibilities for
a dean in a modern, research-intensive university that values both
undergraduate and graduate education. A current curriculum vitae and
contact information for a minimum of five references should be
included. To apply, go to:
https://jobs.usu.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=54514.
Nominations and inquiries should be sent to:
Dean Richard W. Clement, Chair
Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services Dean Search Committee
Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost
1435 Old Main Hill
Utah State University
Logan, Utah 84322-1435
Telephone: 435-797-2631
http://www.usu.edu/provost/employment/dean_cehs/
One Year Postgraduate Fellowship in LGBTQ Youth Cultural Competency
The Q Center @ ACR, an LGBTQ youth center in Central New York & QuERI
– The Queering Education Research Institute, an affiliate of Syracuse
University School of Education
This is a One-Time fellowship, funded through a grant from the
Community Foundation of Central New York to The Q Center @ AIDS
Community Resources, Syracuse, NY. The Mission of The Q Youth Center @
ACR is to promote the health, safety and empowerment of LGBTQ young
people and the children of LGBTQ parents. We respect young people and
take a holistic approach to supporting their growth and development
through providing caring adult role models, information and education
on living healthy lives, issues of equality, and tools for
empowerment. We further strive to end all forms of violence and
harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity through
supporting legislation and educating the public. Through outreach to
the broader community, parents, guardians, religious institutions and
schools, we aim to make all spaces safer for LGBTQ youth, and children
of LGBTQ families. We work toward and have hope for a world where all
youth are safe and valued, regardless of their sexual identification,
HIV status, gender identity and expression, family structure,
educational enrollment, disability, race or ethnicity.
The Queering Education Research Institute is an independent think-tank
and research initiative formally affiliated with Syracuse University
School of Education. The purpose of the Queering Education Research
Institute (QuERI) is to bridge the gap between research and practice
in the teaching of LGBTQ students and in the creation of LGBTQ youth
serving programs. QuERI strives to foster change for LGBTQ youth
through:
• Utilizing research to support educators in the creation of affirming
learning environments for LGBTQ students in schools and in youth
serving social service organizations;
• Evaluating school policy and policy implementation in support of
LGBTQ students and proposing new policy and implementation practices
to improve school climate for LGBTQ youth.
• Developing research based youth programs to empower LGBTQ youth and
implementing those programs at the Q Center;
• Generating and disseminating research on the LGBTQ youth experience
and on models for creating change in the institutions that serve them
through publication, conference presentation, and workshop delivery;
• Providing opportunities for graduate students to research and teach
in the area of queering education.
This Post-Graduate Fellowship in LGBTQ Youth Cultural Competency is an
opportunity for a recent graduate at the masters or doctoral level to
develop content area knowledge in support of LGBTQ youth and a set of
applied skills including qualitative research, assessment, program
design, teaching and training. It offers opportunities for research
and collaborative projects with potential for publication.
Additionally, administrative experience in non-profit management,
grant writing and working with young people will be provided. The
position is full time.
Eligibility: Recent graduate of a masters or doctoral program in
education, social work, counseling,public health, sociology,
psychology or a related field. Course work and demonstrated interest
in diversity issues and social justice. Experience with youth and
marginalized populations preferred.
Experience with qualitative research, social theory,
sociology/cultural studies perspectives preferred.Back ground check.
Responsibilities: Develop and deliver LGBTQ youth competency training
units based upon empirical research and best practices for specific
populations of youth service providers. Assess the LGBTQ youth
cultural competence of area service organizations and support
implementation of change strategies. Collect qualitative and survey
data on the experiences and knowledge of youth service providers with
LGBTQ youth. Provide administrative and program support to the
operations of the Q Center @ ACR.
Compensation: $30,000 plus benefits. Access to Syracuse University
research library. May request audit of Syracuse University School of
Education courses. Additional opportunities are available for fellows
at the post- doctoral level.
To apply: Send letter of application; CV including a list of graduate
courses completed, teaching and research experience; names and contact
information for three references to :
Elizabethe Payne, PhD
Director, The Q Center @ACR
627 West Genesee Street
Syracuse, NY, 13024
– The Queering Education Research Institute, an affiliate of Syracuse
University School of Education
This is a One-Time fellowship, funded through a grant from the
Community Foundation of Central New York to The Q Center @ AIDS
Community Resources, Syracuse, NY. The Mission of The Q Youth Center @
ACR is to promote the health, safety and empowerment of LGBTQ young
people and the children of LGBTQ parents. We respect young people and
take a holistic approach to supporting their growth and development
through providing caring adult role models, information and education
on living healthy lives, issues of equality, and tools for
empowerment. We further strive to end all forms of violence and
harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity through
supporting legislation and educating the public. Through outreach to
the broader community, parents, guardians, religious institutions and
schools, we aim to make all spaces safer for LGBTQ youth, and children
of LGBTQ families. We work toward and have hope for a world where all
youth are safe and valued, regardless of their sexual identification,
HIV status, gender identity and expression, family structure,
educational enrollment, disability, race or ethnicity.
The Queering Education Research Institute is an independent think-tank
and research initiative formally affiliated with Syracuse University
School of Education. The purpose of the Queering Education Research
Institute (QuERI) is to bridge the gap between research and practice
in the teaching of LGBTQ students and in the creation of LGBTQ youth
serving programs. QuERI strives to foster change for LGBTQ youth
through:
• Utilizing research to support educators in the creation of affirming
learning environments for LGBTQ students in schools and in youth
serving social service organizations;
• Evaluating school policy and policy implementation in support of
LGBTQ students and proposing new policy and implementation practices
to improve school climate for LGBTQ youth.
• Developing research based youth programs to empower LGBTQ youth and
implementing those programs at the Q Center;
• Generating and disseminating research on the LGBTQ youth experience
and on models for creating change in the institutions that serve them
through publication, conference presentation, and workshop delivery;
• Providing opportunities for graduate students to research and teach
in the area of queering education.
This Post-Graduate Fellowship in LGBTQ Youth Cultural Competency is an
opportunity for a recent graduate at the masters or doctoral level to
develop content area knowledge in support of LGBTQ youth and a set of
applied skills including qualitative research, assessment, program
design, teaching and training. It offers opportunities for research
and collaborative projects with potential for publication.
Additionally, administrative experience in non-profit management,
grant writing and working with young people will be provided. The
position is full time.
Eligibility: Recent graduate of a masters or doctoral program in
education, social work, counseling,public health, sociology,
psychology or a related field. Course work and demonstrated interest
in diversity issues and social justice. Experience with youth and
marginalized populations preferred.
Experience with qualitative research, social theory,
sociology/cultural studies perspectives preferred.Back ground check.
Responsibilities: Develop and deliver LGBTQ youth competency training
units based upon empirical research and best practices for specific
populations of youth service providers. Assess the LGBTQ youth
cultural competence of area service organizations and support
implementation of change strategies. Collect qualitative and survey
data on the experiences and knowledge of youth service providers with
LGBTQ youth. Provide administrative and program support to the
operations of the Q Center @ ACR.
Compensation: $30,000 plus benefits. Access to Syracuse University
research library. May request audit of Syracuse University School of
Education courses. Additional opportunities are available for fellows
at the post- doctoral level.
To apply: Send letter of application; CV including a list of graduate
courses completed, teaching and research experience; names and contact
information for three references to :
Elizabethe Payne, PhD
Director, The Q Center @ACR
627 West Genesee Street
Syracuse, NY, 13024
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
CFP for Precious and Push
Call For Papers: "Precious" and "Push"--Black Camera Journal Issue (IU Press)
Black Camera invites submissions for a special issue or section of a future issue devoted to a critical assessment of the Film Precious and the Novel Push by Sapphire (upon which Precious is based) to be published in Fall 2012.
Almost 15 years ago, a reviewer described Sapphire’s Push as “a fascinating novel that may well find its place in the African American literary canon.” It has taken years for Push —disturbing, demanding, irrepressibly compelling—to edge appreciably into the ‘cannon’ and to begin to get the attention it deserves. But it has never been more center-stage than it is now with the making of the award-winning motion picture Precious, itself an undeniably captivating work. Precious has garnered several accolades, notable among them Oscars for acting and screen-writing and numerous distinctions for directing.
The editors invite essays from various disciplines and encourage intellectual provocations and arguments that address Precious and Push, either together or singularly, from a range of critical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. Essays that pivot between and extend beyond the formal frames of both the film and the novel and that stage intertextual and comparative dialogues with related works of film, literature, visual culture, photography, or theory are especially welcome. In this conjunctural approach, inspired partially by Stuart Hall’s conception of “articulation” as the dynamic interaction and mobilization of diverse forces at sites of historical struggle, we work from the premise that together and singularly Precious and Push incite a range of interpretations, meanings, and conversations based upon the critical and analytical fields into which they are inserted and resonate, as well as the specific practices of which they are considered indicative and with which they interact. In inviting essays from various disciplines and perspectives, we also work from the premise that there are no “innocent” or “pure” categories of film and cinema. Rather, there are ensembles of apparatuses as well as multi-scale contingencies and circumstances in and through which cinematic texts and their subjects are produced, rendered legible, deployed, and contested.
We seek contributions that navigate historical, material, thematic, technical and theoretical concerns and that address questions ranging from acting, directing, editing and performance, to audience reception, production, marketing, distribution and exhibition. In addition to essays that engage constructions, articulations, and representations of racialized gender, color, class, sexuality, subjection and transformation in Precious and Push, suggested areas of inquiry include but are not limited to the following: the Dialectics and/or Intertextualism of Film Adaptation; “Canonicity” and Critical Censorship; Comparative Approaches to Precious and Push that thread their relation to other projects with which they have been or can be aligned (The Color Purple, for example, is mentioned several times in Push as are several singers—Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Al B. Sure, Bobby Brown); Psychoanalytic dimensions of Precious and Push; Semiotics, Suturing and Memory; Analogization—Visual and Aural; Abstraction and the Fantastic; the Aesthetics of Cinematography and Musical Scoring; Set Construction.
Critical Accounts of: Sexual and Psychic Trauma; the Temporality and the Cinematic Temporalization of Trauma; Trauma’s Cinematic Configurations; Incest; Sexual Violence by Males and Females; Black Female Subjectivities; Motherhood; Mental Health; Melancholia; Displacement and Dispossession; Rape; Rage; Redemption; Redress, Resilience; Hope; Imagination; Constructions and Representations of Lesbian and Queer Identities and Desire; Homophobia and Heterosexism; Whiteness; Poverty; Literacy and Language; Governmentality, the Welfare State, and Black Female Bodies; the Management of Black Female Reproduction; HIV and AIDS in the 1980’s and the present; Death and Dying—social and somatic; Corporeality and Embodiment; Spirit Murder; Translation and Interiority; Harlem and New York City as ideas and geographical sites in Precious and Push; Harlem and Cinematic Spatialization; Sonic Scapes and the Sounds of Harlem; the Political Economy of the Processes of Film Production, Marketing and Distribution; Political Economy as it relates thematically to Precious and Push; Online Interpretive Communities—Sites of Print- and Video-Clip-based Discussions of Precious and/or Push; the Visual Politics and Aesthetics of the Film’s Posters.
Essays, book and film reviews, interviews, and commentaries will be considered. Essays should be 6,000-10,000 words, interviews 6,000 words, commentaries 1,000-2,000 words, and film reviews of
Precious and book reviews of Push should be 500-1,500 words.
Please submit completed essays, a 100-word abstract, a fifty-word biography, and a CV by October 25, 2011. Submissions should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition. Please see journal guidelines for more on submission policy:
http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/publication/blackcamera_contribute.shtml
Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to guest editors Suzette Spencer
(University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Carlos Miranda (Yale University) at PRECIOUSJOURNALISSUE@GMAIL.COM
Black Camera invites submissions for a special issue or section of a future issue devoted to a critical assessment of the Film Precious and the Novel Push by Sapphire (upon which Precious is based) to be published in Fall 2012.
Almost 15 years ago, a reviewer described Sapphire’s Push as “a fascinating novel that may well find its place in the African American literary canon.” It has taken years for Push —disturbing, demanding, irrepressibly compelling—to edge appreciably into the ‘cannon’ and to begin to get the attention it deserves. But it has never been more center-stage than it is now with the making of the award-winning motion picture Precious, itself an undeniably captivating work. Precious has garnered several accolades, notable among them Oscars for acting and screen-writing and numerous distinctions for directing.
The editors invite essays from various disciplines and encourage intellectual provocations and arguments that address Precious and Push, either together or singularly, from a range of critical, theoretical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. Essays that pivot between and extend beyond the formal frames of both the film and the novel and that stage intertextual and comparative dialogues with related works of film, literature, visual culture, photography, or theory are especially welcome. In this conjunctural approach, inspired partially by Stuart Hall’s conception of “articulation” as the dynamic interaction and mobilization of diverse forces at sites of historical struggle, we work from the premise that together and singularly Precious and Push incite a range of interpretations, meanings, and conversations based upon the critical and analytical fields into which they are inserted and resonate, as well as the specific practices of which they are considered indicative and with which they interact. In inviting essays from various disciplines and perspectives, we also work from the premise that there are no “innocent” or “pure” categories of film and cinema. Rather, there are ensembles of apparatuses as well as multi-scale contingencies and circumstances in and through which cinematic texts and their subjects are produced, rendered legible, deployed, and contested.
We seek contributions that navigate historical, material, thematic, technical and theoretical concerns and that address questions ranging from acting, directing, editing and performance, to audience reception, production, marketing, distribution and exhibition. In addition to essays that engage constructions, articulations, and representations of racialized gender, color, class, sexuality, subjection and transformation in Precious and Push, suggested areas of inquiry include but are not limited to the following: the Dialectics and/or Intertextualism of Film Adaptation; “Canonicity” and Critical Censorship; Comparative Approaches to Precious and Push that thread their relation to other projects with which they have been or can be aligned (The Color Purple, for example, is mentioned several times in Push as are several singers—Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, Al B. Sure, Bobby Brown); Psychoanalytic dimensions of Precious and Push; Semiotics, Suturing and Memory; Analogization—Visual and Aural; Abstraction and the Fantastic; the Aesthetics of Cinematography and Musical Scoring; Set Construction.
Critical Accounts of: Sexual and Psychic Trauma; the Temporality and the Cinematic Temporalization of Trauma; Trauma’s Cinematic Configurations; Incest; Sexual Violence by Males and Females; Black Female Subjectivities; Motherhood; Mental Health; Melancholia; Displacement and Dispossession; Rape; Rage; Redemption; Redress, Resilience; Hope; Imagination; Constructions and Representations of Lesbian and Queer Identities and Desire; Homophobia and Heterosexism; Whiteness; Poverty; Literacy and Language; Governmentality, the Welfare State, and Black Female Bodies; the Management of Black Female Reproduction; HIV and AIDS in the 1980’s and the present; Death and Dying—social and somatic; Corporeality and Embodiment; Spirit Murder; Translation and Interiority; Harlem and New York City as ideas and geographical sites in Precious and Push; Harlem and Cinematic Spatialization; Sonic Scapes and the Sounds of Harlem; the Political Economy of the Processes of Film Production, Marketing and Distribution; Political Economy as it relates thematically to Precious and Push; Online Interpretive Communities—Sites of Print- and Video-Clip-based Discussions of Precious and/or Push; the Visual Politics and Aesthetics of the Film’s Posters.
Essays, book and film reviews, interviews, and commentaries will be considered. Essays should be 6,000-10,000 words, interviews 6,000 words, commentaries 1,000-2,000 words, and film reviews of
Precious and book reviews of Push should be 500-1,500 words.
Please submit completed essays, a 100-word abstract, a fifty-word biography, and a CV by October 25, 2011. Submissions should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition. Please see journal guidelines for more on submission policy:
http://www.indiana.edu/~bfca/publication/blackcamera_contribute.shtml
Direct all questions, correspondence, and submissions to guest editors Suzette Spencer
(University of Wisconsin, Madison) and Carlos Miranda (Yale University) at PRECIOUSJOURNALISSUE@GMAIL.COM
Monday, June 21, 2010
State University of New York - Oneonta - Dissertation Fellow - African American History
Location: New York, United States
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Temporary
Submitted: Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Main Category: African American History or Studies
Secondary Categories: None
The Departments of Africana & Latino Studies and History at SUNY College at Oneonta invite applications for Dissertation Fellowship in African American History beginning August 2010. This is a one year, temporary appointment. This position grows out of the institution's belief in the educational value of diversity and a commitment to develop a more diverse faculty. SUNY Oneonta is a comprehensive institution located in New York about an hour from both Binghamton and Albany. More information about the College is available at http://www.oneonta.edu.
Duties: While working on his/her doctoral dissertation, the successful candidate will teach two small upper-level courses per semester: one survey in African American History and one course in the candidate's specialty. In addition to teaching duties, expectations include mentoring students, delivering two public lectures based on dissertation research, and participating in the life of the College and the community. Our highest priority expectation for the Fellow is the completion of the dissertation.
Qualifications Required: Applicants should be in the late stages of their doctoral programs. The area of dissertation research and the candidate's degree may be interdisciplinary, but the candidate must be also trained in African American History.
Remuneration: The successful candidate will be provided with a private office and computer/printer, office support, library privileges, employee benefits package and a research/travel allowance of at least $1,000. Expected salary: $43-45,000.
To Apply, Go To:
http://oneonta.interviewexchange.com/candapply.jsp?JOBID=19031. Upload cover letter, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and copies of graduate transcript(s). Please have three professional references send letters to: Drs. Neville Choonoo & William Ashbaugh, Department of History, 225 Netzer Administration Building, SUNY College at Oneonta, Ravine Parkway, Oneonta, New York, 13820. Questions regarding the fellowship may be directed to Dr. Ashbaugh (ashbauwb@oneonta.edu) or Dr. Choonoo (choonorn@oneonta.edu). Review of applications will begin June 18, 2010 and will continue until the position is filled.
For other employment and regional opportunities, please visit our website at: http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/humres/Employment_Opp/.
SUNY Oneonta values a diverse college community. Please visit our website on diversity at: www.oneonta.edu/navigation/diversity.asp. Moreover, the College is an EEO/AA/ADA employer. Women, persons of color, and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.
Contact Info:
Dr. Neville Choonoo and Dr. William Ashbaugh
Department of History
225 Netzer Administration Building
SUNY College at Oneonta
Ravine Parkway
Oneonta,NY 13820 Website: http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/humres/Employment_Opp/
Institution Type: College/University
Position Type: Temporary
Submitted: Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Main Category: African American History or Studies
Secondary Categories: None
The Departments of Africana & Latino Studies and History at SUNY College at Oneonta invite applications for Dissertation Fellowship in African American History beginning August 2010. This is a one year, temporary appointment. This position grows out of the institution's belief in the educational value of diversity and a commitment to develop a more diverse faculty. SUNY Oneonta is a comprehensive institution located in New York about an hour from both Binghamton and Albany. More information about the College is available at http://www.oneonta.edu.
Duties: While working on his/her doctoral dissertation, the successful candidate will teach two small upper-level courses per semester: one survey in African American History and one course in the candidate's specialty. In addition to teaching duties, expectations include mentoring students, delivering two public lectures based on dissertation research, and participating in the life of the College and the community. Our highest priority expectation for the Fellow is the completion of the dissertation.
Qualifications Required: Applicants should be in the late stages of their doctoral programs. The area of dissertation research and the candidate's degree may be interdisciplinary, but the candidate must be also trained in African American History.
Remuneration: The successful candidate will be provided with a private office and computer/printer, office support, library privileges, employee benefits package and a research/travel allowance of at least $1,000. Expected salary: $43-45,000.
To Apply, Go To:
http://oneonta.interviewexchange.com/candapply.jsp?JOBID=19031. Upload cover letter, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and copies of graduate transcript(s). Please have three professional references send letters to: Drs. Neville Choonoo & William Ashbaugh, Department of History, 225 Netzer Administration Building, SUNY College at Oneonta, Ravine Parkway, Oneonta, New York, 13820. Questions regarding the fellowship may be directed to Dr. Ashbaugh (ashbauwb@oneonta.edu) or Dr. Choonoo (choonorn@oneonta.edu). Review of applications will begin June 18, 2010 and will continue until the position is filled.
For other employment and regional opportunities, please visit our website at: http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/humres/Employment_Opp/.
SUNY Oneonta values a diverse college community. Please visit our website on diversity at: www.oneonta.edu/navigation/diversity.asp. Moreover, the College is an EEO/AA/ADA employer. Women, persons of color, and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.
Contact Info:
Dr. Neville Choonoo and Dr. William Ashbaugh
Department of History
225 Netzer Administration Building
SUNY College at Oneonta
Ravine Parkway
Oneonta,NY 13820 Website: http://www.oneonta.edu/admin/humres/Employment_Opp/
Saturday, June 19, 2010
THE ART OF GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE VIII
THE ART OF GENDER IN EVERYDAY LIFE VIII
A Multidisciplinary Conference
CALL FOR PAPERS
Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID
March 10 & 11, 2011
ABSTRACT POSTMARK DEADLINE: Friday, November 19, 2010
Gender is not a given. Its meaning and significance are constantly in flux.
This conference will explore the various ways in which gender is crafted, celebrated, endured, deciphered, expressed or, in short, the art of how it is lived on a daily basis.
ALL submissions related to the art of living gendered lives will be considered.
* Given our keynote speaker, Andi Zeisler, Co-founder of Bitch Magazine, the Committee is especially interested in submissions that address the following:
GENDER AND THE MEDIA
GENDER IN POPULAR CULTURE
GENDER AND THE ARTS (including: the presentation of gendered performances, films, etc., as well as academic papers)
* The committee is also interested in receiving submissions from graduate and advanced undergraduate students. The committee will hold a student paper competition and award prizes for the graduate and undergraduate submissions they select.
PRESENTATION FORMATS: Presentations may take several different formats, including: papers (resulting from group work or individuals); slide presentations; films; readings; and performances. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes in duration.
Complete panels can also be submitted. Panel submissions will only be considered, however, if the following information is included: cover sheets and abstracts for a complete group of four participants; and the specific question to be addressed.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submissions will be accepted BY POST ONLY.
POSTMARK DEADLINE: Friday, November 19, 2010
Please enclose the following items for the committee’s consideration:
1. an ABSTRACT of no more than 300 words
The title should appear clearly at the top of the abstract; the presenter’s name should not appear on the abstract. No changes to either the title or abstract can be made following submission.
2. a COVER SHEET with the following information: presenter’s name; presentation title; presentation format; institutional affiliation (including department) and academic status; phone number, street and email addresses; A/V needs; and a 50 word bio
3. a CD or DISK with both the abstract and cover sheet as Microsoft Word documents (as abstracts, affiliation, email addresses and bios will be reproduced in a booklet for all presenters)
4. a REGISTRATION FORM AND CHECK for the registration fee for each presenter made out to the Anderson Center; this fee will help us to cover conference expenses including meal costs and admission for both the keynote speaker, Andi Zeisler, and LUNAFEST.
PLEASE NOTE: If the abstract is not accepted, this check will be destroyed.
Send all materials to:
Anderson Gender Resource Center
Idaho State University, Stop 8141
Pocatello, ID 83209-8141
Attn: The Art of Gender in Everyday Life VIII Committee
PLEASE NOTE: Should your abstract be accepted, you will be required to provide a draft of your paper by NO LATER THAN JANUARY 28, 2011, so that your session discussant will have time to review your work.
Also, if your abstract is accepted, you will be subscribed to the listserv artofgender@mm.isu.edu, and you will receive all updates via email from that account.
QUESTIONS? Email us at: gndrctr@isu.edu or check out our website at www.isu.edu/andersoncenter
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A Multidisciplinary Conference
CALL FOR PAPERS
Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID
March 10 & 11, 2011
ABSTRACT POSTMARK DEADLINE: Friday, November 19, 2010
Gender is not a given. Its meaning and significance are constantly in flux.
This conference will explore the various ways in which gender is crafted, celebrated, endured, deciphered, expressed or, in short, the art of how it is lived on a daily basis.
ALL submissions related to the art of living gendered lives will be considered.
* Given our keynote speaker, Andi Zeisler, Co-founder of Bitch Magazine, the Committee is especially interested in submissions that address the following:
GENDER AND THE MEDIA
GENDER IN POPULAR CULTURE
GENDER AND THE ARTS (including: the presentation of gendered performances, films, etc., as well as academic papers)
* The committee is also interested in receiving submissions from graduate and advanced undergraduate students. The committee will hold a student paper competition and award prizes for the graduate and undergraduate submissions they select.
PRESENTATION FORMATS: Presentations may take several different formats, including: papers (resulting from group work or individuals); slide presentations; films; readings; and performances. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes in duration.
Complete panels can also be submitted. Panel submissions will only be considered, however, if the following information is included: cover sheets and abstracts for a complete group of four participants; and the specific question to be addressed.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: Submissions will be accepted BY POST ONLY.
POSTMARK DEADLINE: Friday, November 19, 2010
Please enclose the following items for the committee’s consideration:
1. an ABSTRACT of no more than 300 words
The title should appear clearly at the top of the abstract; the presenter’s name should not appear on the abstract. No changes to either the title or abstract can be made following submission.
2. a COVER SHEET with the following information: presenter’s name; presentation title; presentation format; institutional affiliation (including department) and academic status; phone number, street and email addresses; A/V needs; and a 50 word bio
3. a CD or DISK with both the abstract and cover sheet as Microsoft Word documents (as abstracts, affiliation, email addresses and bios will be reproduced in a booklet for all presenters)
4. a REGISTRATION FORM AND CHECK for the registration fee for each presenter made out to the Anderson Center; this fee will help us to cover conference expenses including meal costs and admission for both the keynote speaker, Andi Zeisler, and LUNAFEST.
PLEASE NOTE: If the abstract is not accepted, this check will be destroyed.
Send all materials to:
Anderson Gender Resource Center
Idaho State University, Stop 8141
Pocatello, ID 83209-8141
Attn: The Art of Gender in Everyday Life VIII Committee
PLEASE NOTE: Should your abstract be accepted, you will be required to provide a draft of your paper by NO LATER THAN JANUARY 28, 2011, so that your session discussant will have time to review your work.
Also, if your abstract is accepted, you will be subscribed to the listserv artofgender@mm.isu.edu, and you will receive all updates via email from that account.
QUESTIONS? Email us at: gndrctr@isu.edu or check out our website at www.isu.edu/andersoncenter
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Constructing Black Canada: "Becoming" Canadian
Constructing Black Canada: "Becoming" Canadian
Call for Papers
Southern Journal of Canadian Studies
Guest Editor: Amoaba Gooden (Kent State University)
For centuries, people of African descent and other people of colour have made their voices heard in Canada's national arenas. Throughout the nation, thousands of individuals, civil society organizations, and social movements participated in these struggles, working on a wide range of issues, from labour to the arts, from migration to health care access, from racism to the building of transnational networks.
In the last two decades, the presence of the African Diaspora in Canada has drawn increased attention from scholars. However, there is still a dearth of research relating to the Black Canadian experience. Most of this work acknowledges that as colonial or ex-colonial subjects, as migrants, and as members of the global African diaspora, the black Canadian population is diverse.
You are invited to submit abstracts for a special issue of the Southern Journal of Canadian Studies on the theme, "Constructing Black Canada: 'Becoming' Canadian" Papers will be peer-reviewed.
Papers will help map and navigate the theoretical, socio-economic and political forces set in motion by the Canadian nation-state in direct relation to its Canadian black population and/or prospective black immigrants. This special edition desires to advance the analytical and interrogative discourses that constitute the distinctive interdisciplinary field of Black Canadian Studies in the production of knowledge about the nature of the African Diaspora in Canada by exploring the different and complex meanings of being black in Canada. This call for papers fits into a conscious effort to move beyond particular national histories in order to grasp the complexities of the diverse articulations of blackness found in Canada.
Contributors are encouraged to explore being black in Canada through various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that touch on questions such as: What does it mean to be black in Canada? How have processes and dynamics of racialization and gendering of black subjects materialized and been contested? What are the historical legacies of being black in Canada? In what ways has blackness been constructed and negotiated across Canada? What strategies have been deployed by the Canadian nation to police, regulate and manage blackness?
Papers exploring the construction of identity within the Canadian nation state and or transnational identity are especially welcomed. Other possible topics include:
Geography and identity
Race/ethnicity/national/dual identities
Migration, settlement and diasporas, translocal/transnational communities
Place and space
Popular culture
Memory
Arts (music, photography, film, dance)
Gender, sexuality, and the black body
Diasporic economics and labour markets
The recognition of multiple origins and mixedness
The role of youth in relationship to diasporas, migration and
identities
Representation, performance, discourse and language
Writing blackness
Historical amnesia
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:
Please submit a working title and a brief abstract of 250-300 words, an abbreviated CV (2 pages), your full name, institutional affiliation, phone number, and e-mail address. The due date is June 30, 2010. Please send all materials electronically to:
Amoaba Gooden, PhD
Assistant Professor, African Diaspora Studies
Department of Pan-African Studies
Kent State University
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, Ohio, USA
44240
email: agooden@kent.edu
phone: 330 672-0149
fax: 330 672-4837
Decisions on accepted papers will be made by August 1, 2010.
Completed papers will be due by November 30, 2010.
Revised papers will be due by January 31, 2011.
The Southern Journal of Canadian Studies is a peer-reviewed, electronic journal of the Southern Association of Canadian Studies. For more information on the journal, please contact the editor:
Richard Nimijean
Assistant Dean (First-Year Programs)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Canada
K1S 5B6
(613) 520-2600 ext. 2029 (office)
(613) 520- 4481 (fax)
richard_nimijean@carleton.ca
www.sacscanada.org
Call for Papers
Southern Journal of Canadian Studies
Guest Editor: Amoaba Gooden (Kent State University)
For centuries, people of African descent and other people of colour have made their voices heard in Canada's national arenas. Throughout the nation, thousands of individuals, civil society organizations, and social movements participated in these struggles, working on a wide range of issues, from labour to the arts, from migration to health care access, from racism to the building of transnational networks.
In the last two decades, the presence of the African Diaspora in Canada has drawn increased attention from scholars. However, there is still a dearth of research relating to the Black Canadian experience. Most of this work acknowledges that as colonial or ex-colonial subjects, as migrants, and as members of the global African diaspora, the black Canadian population is diverse.
You are invited to submit abstracts for a special issue of the Southern Journal of Canadian Studies on the theme, "Constructing Black Canada: 'Becoming' Canadian" Papers will be peer-reviewed.
Papers will help map and navigate the theoretical, socio-economic and political forces set in motion by the Canadian nation-state in direct relation to its Canadian black population and/or prospective black immigrants. This special edition desires to advance the analytical and interrogative discourses that constitute the distinctive interdisciplinary field of Black Canadian Studies in the production of knowledge about the nature of the African Diaspora in Canada by exploring the different and complex meanings of being black in Canada. This call for papers fits into a conscious effort to move beyond particular national histories in order to grasp the complexities of the diverse articulations of blackness found in Canada.
Contributors are encouraged to explore being black in Canada through various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that touch on questions such as: What does it mean to be black in Canada? How have processes and dynamics of racialization and gendering of black subjects materialized and been contested? What are the historical legacies of being black in Canada? In what ways has blackness been constructed and negotiated across Canada? What strategies have been deployed by the Canadian nation to police, regulate and manage blackness?
Papers exploring the construction of identity within the Canadian nation state and or transnational identity are especially welcomed. Other possible topics include:
Geography and identity
Race/ethnicity/national/dual identities
Migration, settlement and diasporas, translocal/transnational communities
Place and space
Popular culture
Memory
Arts (music, photography, film, dance)
Gender, sexuality, and the black body
Diasporic economics and labour markets
The recognition of multiple origins and mixedness
The role of youth in relationship to diasporas, migration and
identities
Representation, performance, discourse and language
Writing blackness
Historical amnesia
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:
Please submit a working title and a brief abstract of 250-300 words, an abbreviated CV (2 pages), your full name, institutional affiliation, phone number, and e-mail address. The due date is June 30, 2010. Please send all materials electronically to:
Amoaba Gooden, PhD
Assistant Professor, African Diaspora Studies
Department of Pan-African Studies
Kent State University
P.O. Box 5190
Kent, Ohio, USA
44240
email: agooden@kent.edu
phone: 330 672-0149
fax: 330 672-4837
Decisions on accepted papers will be made by August 1, 2010.
Completed papers will be due by November 30, 2010.
Revised papers will be due by January 31, 2011.
The Southern Journal of Canadian Studies is a peer-reviewed, electronic journal of the Southern Association of Canadian Studies. For more information on the journal, please contact the editor:
Richard Nimijean
Assistant Dean (First-Year Programs)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, Canada
K1S 5B6
(613) 520-2600 ext. 2029 (office)
(613) 520- 4481 (fax)
richard_nimijean@carleton.ca
www.sacscanada.org
WHQ
Dear Colleagues;
HI. I am a Ph.D. Student at UC San Diego and I wanted to share a good
professional opportunity for all grad students.
I am serving on the Western History Association's (WHA) program committee
for their conference in Oakland in Oct. of 2011. In this position I am
soliciting grad student papers, panels, and workshops. I am also working
with the editor of the Western Historical Quarterly (WHQ) to take the
strongest of these presentations and turning them into a special issue.
The editor and I will work with authors to try and get their papers
through peer review, which publication depends upon.
The WHA + the WHQ are especially interested in public history,
transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary historical-type work on
the U.S. West (broadly conceived). My own agenda is a desire to bring the
"politics" back into Western and Borderlands history. A number of students
have already contacted me, and I have a number of emerging panels.
If interested, please email me with a brief summary of your proposed paper
presentation or ideas. Beginning in July, I will help organize student
panels and put individuals with similar research interests in contact with
each other to form their own panels/workshop proposals. All proposals are
due to the program committee Sept. 1, 2010. Please see the WHA's call for
papers attached below.
Please feel free to forward this email to any possible interested parties.
Mil Gracias,
Juliette Maiorana
2010 Predoctoral Ford Fellow
Ph.D. Student, U.S. History
UC San Diego
jmaioran@ucsd.edu
HI. I am a Ph.D. Student at UC San Diego and I wanted to share a good
professional opportunity for all grad students.
I am serving on the Western History Association's (WHA) program committee
for their conference in Oakland in Oct. of 2011. In this position I am
soliciting grad student papers, panels, and workshops. I am also working
with the editor of the Western Historical Quarterly (WHQ) to take the
strongest of these presentations and turning them into a special issue.
The editor and I will work with authors to try and get their papers
through peer review, which publication depends upon.
The WHA + the WHQ are especially interested in public history,
transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary historical-type work on
the U.S. West (broadly conceived). My own agenda is a desire to bring the
"politics" back into Western and Borderlands history. A number of students
have already contacted me, and I have a number of emerging panels.
If interested, please email me with a brief summary of your proposed paper
presentation or ideas. Beginning in July, I will help organize student
panels and put individuals with similar research interests in contact with
each other to form their own panels/workshop proposals. All proposals are
due to the program committee Sept. 1, 2010. Please see the WHA's call for
papers attached below.
Please feel free to forward this email to any possible interested parties.
Mil Gracias,
Juliette Maiorana
2010 Predoctoral Ford Fellow
Ph.D. Student, U.S. History
UC San Diego
jmaioran@ucsd.edu
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Journalism position
FACULTY POSITION POSTING FORM
Rochester Institute of Technology, College of Liberal Arts
Job Title/ Rank: Instructional Faculty/ Assistant or Associate
PC#9501 IRC38815
Department: Communication- Journalism
Job Category: Faculty, Tenure Track
Starting Date: Late August, 2011
DETAILED DESCRIPTION:
Rochester Institute of Technology's Department of Communication invites applications for an assistant or associate professor position in Journalism to being late August 2011. The successful candidates will teach from undergraduate courses including introduction to journalism, history of journalism, news-writing news editing, information gathering, eJournalism, reporting in specialized fields, and law and ethics of the press. Applicants also able to develop courses in web design, graphics, and rich media content are especially desirable. Additional assignments in area of specialty are possible.
We are seeking individuals who are committed to contributing to RIT’s core values, honor code, and statement of diversity.
The primary responsibility for this tenure-track position is teaching, with other expectations including research, student advising, service to the institution, and continuing professional development. Additionally, this position will provide the successful candidates the opportunity to work with other faculty in the Department's quickly evolving degree in journalism.
THE COLLEGE/ DEPARTMENT:
The Department of Communication is a dynamic department with an ambitious vision. The department offers the following degrees: a BS in Journalism, a BS in Advertising & Public Relations, a BS in Professional & Technical Communication, and an MS in Communication & Media Technologies.
RIT attracts students from all 50 states and more than 90 countries. RIT has been recognized on The Chronicle of Higher Education's “Great Colleges to Work For” list for two consecutive years. RIT was cited in six different categories: Professional/Career Development Program, Compensation and Benefits, Tuition Reimbursement, 403b or 401k (retirement plan), Disability Insurance and Life Insurance.
Rochester, located in Monroe County, is the 79th largest city in the United States and the third largest city in New York State. Five additional counties are included in the Greater Rochester Region: Genesee, Livingston, Ontario, Orleans and Wayne. The Greater Rochester region is inhabited by a little more than one million people
The Rochester area has a diverse population which includes African Americans (38% of the city and 14% of Monroe County) and Latin Americans (13% of the city and 5% of the county). In addition, more than 7% of the population is foreign born. It is also home to the largest Deaf community per capita in the United States. Rochester is ranked 7th among the “10 Best Cities to Raise a Family” by Child Magazine. Places Rated Almanac ranked Rochester as the 6th “Best Places to Live in America” out of 379 metropolitan areas. Expansion Management Magazine ranked Rochester as number one among metropolitan areas having the best Quality of Life in the Nation. Essence magazine ranked it among the “Top 10 Cities for Black Families,” Rochester was twice named one of America’s Friendliest Cities by American Demographics magazine.
QUALIFICATIONS:
REQUIRED: A Ph.D. in Journalism or communication
PREFERRED: Professional experience, successful teaching, a record or promise of published scholarly research. and an active research agenda are desirable qualities. Research interest in the intersection of journalism and digital media is considered a plus. Ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the college’s continuing commitment to cultural diversity, pluralism, and individual differences.
HOW TO APPLY:
Apply online at https://mycareer.rit.edu. KEYWORD Search: IRC38815. Please submit your cover letter detailing your technical, teaching and scholarship qualifications and achievements; a vita; a statement of your experience with and/or interest in RIT's core values, honor code, and statement of diversity; and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three references.
You can contact the search committee with questions on the position at:
Keith B Jenkins, Rochester Institute of Technology, 01-3182 George Eastman Building, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623-5604, e-mail: keith.jenkins@rit.edu; telephone: 585-475-6347, Fax: 585-475-7732
Applications will be reviewed immediately and continue until filled. Applicants are encouraged to apply by September 17, 2010. Interviews may also be arranged at the AEJMC Convention in Denver, August 4-7, 2010.
The Rochester Institute of Technology is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All individuals with the ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the university’s continuing commitment to cultural diversity, pluralism, and individual differences are encouraged to make application.
Thank you,
Alyssa Tesch
Office of Faculty Recruitment
Rochester Institute of Technology
05-1480
90 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623
Voice: (585) 475-2686
Fax: (585) 475-4480
Web Page: http://www.rit.edu/OFR
Click to become a Fan of our Facebook Page!
Rochester Institute of Technology, College of Liberal Arts
Job Title/ Rank: Instructional Faculty/ Assistant or Associate
PC#9501 IRC38815
Department: Communication- Journalism
Job Category: Faculty, Tenure Track
Starting Date: Late August, 2011
DETAILED DESCRIPTION:
Rochester Institute of Technology's Department of Communication invites applications for an assistant or associate professor position in Journalism to being late August 2011. The successful candidates will teach from undergraduate courses including introduction to journalism, history of journalism, news-writing news editing, information gathering, eJournalism, reporting in specialized fields, and law and ethics of the press. Applicants also able to develop courses in web design, graphics, and rich media content are especially desirable. Additional assignments in area of specialty are possible.
We are seeking individuals who are committed to contributing to RIT’s core values, honor code, and statement of diversity.
The primary responsibility for this tenure-track position is teaching, with other expectations including research, student advising, service to the institution, and continuing professional development. Additionally, this position will provide the successful candidates the opportunity to work with other faculty in the Department's quickly evolving degree in journalism.
THE COLLEGE/ DEPARTMENT:
The Department of Communication is a dynamic department with an ambitious vision. The department offers the following degrees: a BS in Journalism, a BS in Advertising & Public Relations, a BS in Professional & Technical Communication, and an MS in Communication & Media Technologies.
RIT attracts students from all 50 states and more than 90 countries. RIT has been recognized on The Chronicle of Higher Education's “Great Colleges to Work For” list for two consecutive years. RIT was cited in six different categories: Professional/Career Development Program, Compensation and Benefits, Tuition Reimbursement, 403b or 401k (retirement plan), Disability Insurance and Life Insurance.
Rochester, located in Monroe County, is the 79th largest city in the United States and the third largest city in New York State. Five additional counties are included in the Greater Rochester Region: Genesee, Livingston, Ontario, Orleans and Wayne. The Greater Rochester region is inhabited by a little more than one million people
The Rochester area has a diverse population which includes African Americans (38% of the city and 14% of Monroe County) and Latin Americans (13% of the city and 5% of the county). In addition, more than 7% of the population is foreign born. It is also home to the largest Deaf community per capita in the United States. Rochester is ranked 7th among the “10 Best Cities to Raise a Family” by Child Magazine. Places Rated Almanac ranked Rochester as the 6th “Best Places to Live in America” out of 379 metropolitan areas. Expansion Management Magazine ranked Rochester as number one among metropolitan areas having the best Quality of Life in the Nation. Essence magazine ranked it among the “Top 10 Cities for Black Families,” Rochester was twice named one of America’s Friendliest Cities by American Demographics magazine.
QUALIFICATIONS:
REQUIRED: A Ph.D. in Journalism or communication
PREFERRED: Professional experience, successful teaching, a record or promise of published scholarly research. and an active research agenda are desirable qualities. Research interest in the intersection of journalism and digital media is considered a plus. Ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the college’s continuing commitment to cultural diversity, pluralism, and individual differences.
HOW TO APPLY:
Apply online at https://mycareer.rit.edu. KEYWORD Search: IRC38815. Please submit your cover letter detailing your technical, teaching and scholarship qualifications and achievements; a vita; a statement of your experience with and/or interest in RIT's core values, honor code, and statement of diversity; and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three references.
You can contact the search committee with questions on the position at:
Keith B Jenkins, Rochester Institute of Technology, 01-3182 George Eastman Building, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623-5604, e-mail: keith.jenkins@rit.edu; telephone: 585-475-6347, Fax: 585-475-7732
Applications will be reviewed immediately and continue until filled. Applicants are encouraged to apply by September 17, 2010. Interviews may also be arranged at the AEJMC Convention in Denver, August 4-7, 2010.
The Rochester Institute of Technology is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All individuals with the ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the university’s continuing commitment to cultural diversity, pluralism, and individual differences are encouraged to make application.
Thank you,
Alyssa Tesch
Office of Faculty Recruitment
Rochester Institute of Technology
05-1480
90 Lomb Memorial Drive
Rochester, NY 14623
Voice: (585) 475-2686
Fax: (585) 475-4480
Web Page: http://www.rit.edu/OFR
Click to become a Fan of our Facebook Page!
Wire Anthology
Dear Colleagues,
The editors of the following collection are seeking additional essays about gender in "The Wire." The desired length is 80,000-90,000 words, and the firm submission deadline is September 15, 2010.
If you would like to submit an essay, please contact: Stephen Shapiro [s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk] or Liam Kennedy [liam.kennedy@ucd.ie].
Please feel free to forward this message to other potential contributors, too.
Urban Procedural: The Wire and the Neoliberal City
Eds. Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin)
and Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick)
Concept
Routinely acclaimed as the best drama television series of the past decade, The Wire (HBO, 2002-08) is an unusual and ambitious urban crime show in the perspectives and layers it brings to characterization and plotting, and in the nuanced portrayal of race conflict, city politics, and the moralities of urban criminality and policing. It references many other urban crime narratives - literary, cinematic and televisual - yet develops its own distinctive sub-genre, the urban procedural, a fabrication of urban spatial relations that intercuts worlds usually unrelated in political and social studies never mind television cop shows. The linking plots, connected in part by the technology of ‘the wire’, are fused chronotopes, mediating the distinctive temporal and spatial coordinates of neoliberal urban governance and its discontents. As they unfold, The Wire also unfolds the ideological and formal contradictions of the crime story as a template for understanding urban America in the twenty-first century.
More consistently than any other crime show of its generation, The Wire challenges viewers’ perceptions of the racialization of urban space and the media conventions which support this. The Wire reminds us of just how remarkably restricted the grammar of race is on American television and related media, and of the normative codings of race—as identity, as landscape—across urban narratives, from documentary to entertainment media. The typical mise-en-scene—of black kids dealing drugs on ghetto corners—is an everyday snapshot of the structural impoverishment and isolation of an underclass whose hypervisibilty in other media frames (including gaming) is either manifestly exoticized and pathologized or only momentarily made visible through instances of spectacular disaster, like Katrina, rather than as a long-standing, structural presence. While The Wire remains unsentimental about drug gang culture, it also respects it as an organizing prism for individuals, ultimately little different from any other (legal, educational) institutional apparatus that contours and administers the lives of urban Americans.
The show attempts to provide new narrative and media techniques to gain a many-windowed perspective (to use long-time Baltimore resident David Harvey’s terms) on the lived systems and institutions that contemporary capitalism creates, redefines, and leaves aside as obsolete. At the same time, The Wire is caught up in the conditions and contradictions of its own powerful social critique, and its appeal may in part be symptomatic of the urban voyeurism it critiques. If The Wire hearkens back to the classic, realist/naturalist narrative cycles, like Zola’s, do its efforts to render the city legible and give a “human body” to social inequality and poverty in the 21st century constitute a radical rethinking of documentary aesthetics and ethnographic ethics? Does the balancing and interweaving of a non-white lifeworld against that of an “ethnic” white one activate or gloss an analytical opportunity to critically apprehend how money and power circulate in a neoliberal city. Similarly, does it successfully balance the tension between a guarded celebration of a vanishing collective dignity involved in craft-like work conditions against entrepreneurial selfishness and the inertia of indifference that contemporary institutions manifest and reward? What kinds of intellectual and affective work does The Wire seem to desire and in actuality accomplish? Do the new modes of content delivery in a post-network age - provided by cable television series, the DVD box set, and internet piracy - indicate a changing demographics of taste and viewer pleasure that this show mirrors in its production qualities? How does the urban imaginary of this show travel?
Audience
Given the international popularity and critical acclaim of The Wire, we expect the collection to have a broad appeal within the academy, particularly within the fields of American studies, African-American studies, Ethnic Studies, Film, Television, and Performance studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as Urban Studies and Social Policy Studies. We also expect attention and readership from the non-academic community interested in cultural affairs. The collection will be written with an idea to broad appeal and seek to avoid language that would limit it to a specialist audience, either specifically within film and television studies or more generally to academic scholars alone.
While no other collection exists, we know of other collections in progress. We feel this collection is unique not only for the quality of contributors, but also for its attempt to be broadly inter-disciplinary and focus on the relation of the market, urban policy, and cultural representations.
Book
Table of Contents/Chapter Summaries
1. Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin) and Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick), “Introduction: Narrative, Capital, and Space: The Wire”
2. Dana Polan, (New York University), ‘Serial Sociology: Story Structure and Urban Analysis in The Wire’
This essay builds on a reflection by the author on the on-line site of the Museum of the Moving Image (http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/invisible-city-20080728) to look at the ways in which the multi-season format contributes to The Wire’s attempts to capture the complex politics of a contemporary urban environment. Where once cinema was imagined within moving image culture as the most promising form of popular culture -- with television as its formulaic, domesticated other -- it is now the television series extending over several seasons that seems to accomplish the most in terms of complexities of narrative perspective and sociological ambition. In the case of The Wire, however, the extension of its premise over multiple seasons is not about developing an overall narrative line in ways that might take on epic dimensions. Resolutely anti-epic, The Wire is bereft of a strong hero whose glorious tale it would chronicle; it uses each new season not so much to advance its story as to move synchronically to yet another dimension of the city that impinges on the lives of its inhabitants; it minimizes ongoing stories by dramatic interruption (key characters who get killed) and by cyclical substitution of new characters for old (so that it seems that the narrative doesn't advance so much as circle back on itself in ways that seem appropriate to the depiction of a city that seems caught in a rut of non-development even as its authority figures keep employing a rhetoric of progress and improvement).
3. Carlo Rotella (Boston University), “Regular-Guy Liberalism 3.0: Street Policing, the Box, and The Wire”
Crime stories are one of our handiest cultural tools for imagining cities and infusing them with meaning. They're particularly well equipped for the task by the procedural formula of investigating and/or planning a crime and the structural habit of tracing the roots of plot-driving surface crimes to discover the systemic wrongs of deep crime. In the past decade, television--or, rather, HBO--hit a high point in the genre's history. If The Sopranos is the American crime story at its operatic best, extending The Godfather's momentum by following the gangster story's deep crime all the way into the moral and psychological costs of suburban life, then The Wire is the American crime story at its analytical best, extending the momentum of realism by following its deep crime all the way into the workings of the American city. This talk considers The Wire's account of postindustrial urbanism by tracing the show's treatment of two of the police procedural's most important figures: street policing, which dominated the 1970s and early 1980s, and the Box (the interrogation room), which dominated the late 1980s and 1990s.
Assimilating and synthesizing these two previous main phases, and adding the figure of the wiretap to introduce a conscious element of structural analysis, The Wire both pieces together the relations of power that shape the city and takes apart the politics of the crime story. The Box is now subsumed by that structural analysis, so that even the cleverest interrogation ruse becomes implicated in what's wrong with the city. (As Bunk says at the beginning of Season 5 after working the old gag in which he pretended that a copier was a lie detector: "The bigger the lie, the more they believe it." The insight is presented as tragedy, not heroism.) And street policing, while it is valorized over the Box as an attempt to strike a civic bargain with the people who are policed, is also revealed to hold its own unpleasant meanings. The heroic-looking business of chasing bad guys down the alley and busting heads is part of the problem, too. The ideological name of that trap is Kojak liberalism, a stance in which liberals seek to "buy" the right to hold latter-day New Deal views by proving themselves "tough on crime." The Wire fingers and dramatizes the basic internal contradiction that is Kojak liberalism's fatal flaw: if being tough on crime means busting heads, mandatory sentencing, and cracking down on low-level streetcorner drug dealers and users, as it so often does, then it only makes worse the very structural problems that post-New Deal liberalism is supposed to address and ameliorate.
Drawing on the show itself, the scholarship of Christopher Wilson and other students of the police story, and interviews with the show's creators and writers (David Simon, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos), I'll talk about The Wire's attempt to imagine a New Deal liberalism appropriate to the postindustrial city in the 21st century--and its willingness to see such a liberalism as impossible to sustain. I'm not imposing this kind of political intent on the creators of The Wire. They're all left-of-center liberals who self-consciously pursue structural social critique while keeping at arm's length both Marxism and the "tough on crime" mythology. The Wire's rich political sensibility is connected to its rich sense of genre: in telling stories about street policing, the Box, and wiretapping, The Wire works out ideological and formal problems central to the genre.
4. John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck College), “Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire”
In this chapter I will focus on two aspects of The Wire. Firstly, I will set out the
compositional logic of the programme: I will suggest that it combines a realist
strategy of incorporating more and more of the social - via its institutions - so
as to produce an account of the criminal neo-liberalisation of West Baltimore
centred on the drugs business (and its kingpins and corner boys), with a
modernist epistemology that is aware of its own partiality (and partisanship) as
well as its own limitations as a work of detective-crime fiction. Its combination
of television segmentarity and cinematic montage produces what I will refer to
as The Wire's 'looping narrative'. Secondly, I will show how this 'looping' is
presented as a conflict of accumulation 'cycles' between street-level commodity
exchange (m-c-m'), on the one hand, and a process of financialization
associated with neo-liberalism (m-m'), on the other - as well as the violent
competition that sustains them on the streets and in the local polity. I will show
how 'finance capital' constitutes the limit of detection in The Wire; which is why
it returns to the streets to show the hegemonic and subjectivizing power of 'm-
c-m'.
5. Gary Philips, ‘Tracing the Wire’
Ann Petry, Robert Dean Pharr, Clarence Cooper, Jr., Herbert Simmons and Nathan Heard are a line up of what might be termed old school writers most white Americans, and for that matter, not a great deal of black Americans, know about or have read. K’wan, Vickie Stringer, Omar Tyree and Noire, among many others, conversely, are writers known and read by a generation raised on hip hop and video games, and generally despised by the black literati represented by the likes of Terry McMillan and Nick Chiles. From the old school chroniclers of the underside of black life to those nowadays spinning tales under the banner of what has come to be called Ghetto Lit - acknowledging too the Godfathers of this sub-genre, Donald Goines and Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim - The Wire, fittingly, brought to cable TV what these writers had been telling in prose.
The 1970s film Report to the Commissioner (based on the novel of the same name), and TV shows such as Miami Vice, EZ Streets and New York Undercover (even some aspects of the 1960s I Spy in its later incarnations when Culp and Cosby eschewed the suit and tie James Bondish secret agent look for Levis and tennis shoes) serve as pop cultural antecedents to The Wire. This essay will explore the prose and filmic roots of this cold ass episodic about cops and gangstas, and why a show about black and white relations on both sides of the thin blue line resonated so profoundly in an era of, as rapper 50 Cent intoned, “Get Rich, or Die Trying.”
6. Chris Chambers (Georgetown University), “Y’all got Honey Nut?”: Why Barack Obama and Damn Near All of Us Love Omar Little for the Wrong Reason”
Wrong reason: criminal anti-hero. Like “Prince,” Iceberg Slim’s pimp/drug dealer, or even Dublin’s Martin Cahill and any number of rudeboy yardie gangsters in London. Omar Little is the only “unconstrained” character in The Wire’s intricate storyarcs, but not in the facile fashion of: “He’s Obama’s favorite character”. Omar belongs to a new category: the “anti-anti-hero.” This generic category was mined inadvertently by Simon and his writers. They claim they place story above character, but that’s a lie. Without Omar there is no story, and the only character, casting as wide a net as possible, who is remotely close is Walter Mosely’s “Mouse” (masterfully translated from book pages to film through actor Don Cheadle). Omar is grim, banal, as the afrorementioned breakfast cereal, and utterly independent. We say we love him. We say he’s complex. No, he ain’t. We fear free agents. Unfettered. Everyone else in The Wire, from Season One through the end to McNulty surveying Baltimore in the last (and first, of course) scene in the last chapter of Season Five, is in a box. Anti-heroes smash and chew their way out of the box. Omar’s nowhere near a box. And when he does step into one, he dies.
7. Hamilton Carroll (University of Leeds), “Policing the Borders of White Masculinity: Labor, Whiteness, and the Neoliberal City in The Wire”
In the second season of The Wire (USA, 2003), the show turns its attention from the black drug dealers on which the first season focused to an examination of Baltimore’s white ethnic working classes. Constructed around a criminal investigation centered on the city’s moribund port, the show develops a season-long exploration of the corrosive effects of globalization on traditional forms of labor, the regional city, and their representation in U.S. popular culture. The show’s representations of white blue-collar labor—both police and dock-workers alike—highlight its attention to the transformations of the regional city under neoliberalism.
The show contrasts the highly mythologized worlds of masculine blue-collar labor—the police station and the union office—with the spaces of criminality that arise as the inhabitants of those worlds lose their franchise on the putative rewards of possessive individualism. As they attempt to understand their places in the altered landscape of the city, the show’s characters are required, sometimes literally, to construct new cartographies of urban space. In this chapter Carroll will analyze the show’s representations of the white male laboring subject alongside its concomitant representations of the spatial and technological transformations of the failing neoliberal city.
8. Ruth Barton (Trinity College Dublin), “Drinking with McNulty: Irish-American Identity and Space in The Wire”
On foot of The Wire’s evidently liberal attitudes, its famed gritty realism and its critique of American capitalism, it would be too easy to assume that its identity politics were equally enlightened. In this paper, Barton will argue that the depiction of McNulty (Dominic West), has its roots in a long history of representation of the Irish male on screen, from which it deviates little. She will also analyze the space of the Irish pub in the series and how it functions to sanction expressions of male friendship and performative aggression, and to facilitate mourning. This association between Irish ethnic masculinity and a volatile emotionalism is further highlighted by McNulty’s inability to maintain a harmonious domestic life (in this he is only rivalled by the African-American lesbian officer, “Kima” Greggs [Sonja Sohn]). In addition, the deployment of famed Irish drunk and member of the diaspora, Shane MacGowan (and the Pogues) on the soundtrack, emphasizes these connections. Her analysis will draw on histories of Irish-American representation and theories of diasporic space, notably those of Avtar Brah.
9. Michelle Aaron (University of Birmingham), ‘S’no Such Thing as Special Dead, s’just Dead’: The Ethics of The Wire and its (Queer) Political Project”
From the War on Terror to the election of the first African-American president, US-centric Western culture has to some extent undergone a shift in social consciousness about issues of racial identity and individual or national complicity in society’s, especially US society’s, ills. Through a discussion of its representation of death, I will argue that the HBO series The Wire can be seen as a response to this post 9.11 ‘altered global universe’ (B. Ruby Rich). In its break with racialised traditions of representation on television and within culture more broadly, and its exposing and confounding of normative social and familial connections, it offers a radical, and arguably, ethical interpretation of community and citizenship.
10. Paul Anderson (University of Michigan), “The Game is the Game”
This essay reads The Wire as something like a dialogical novel, a novel informed less by a single stable narrative voice (though there is that too) than by many distinct voices. Different characters present different interpretations of the world and the games played in its most relevant institutions. Sometimes, fragments of dialogue are passed along from one character to the next, and from one scenario to the next. Certain phrases, or near echoes of them, and certain practices (especially certain games and game-talk) accumulate new associations and layers of irony upon each new mention in the whorl of life that is The Wire’s five full seasons. The standard mode of allegory offers two distinct levels of signification: the narrative we see is what it is, but is also not what it is, or not what it appears to be. In the typical realm of allegory, we read or see a manifest or surface narrative that is often a repetition of a different latent narrative. David Simon is surely not the only relevant figure concerned with the possibilities and dangers of allegorical interpretation; some of the characters of The Wire are animated by an allegorical imagination as well.
11. Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), “’An Amorphous Series Detailing Society’s Ills’”: Reflexivity and Realism in The Wire.”
This essay explores the contrasting pulls of realist representation and reflexive satire within The Wire. Much of the show’s power and reputation comes from its realist glare into American institutions and environments; however, The Wire has always seasoned its main dish of gritty realism with the garnish of satirical humor. This satire, with a high degree of reflexive “writerly” commentary, plays a starring role in seasons three and five in ways that seem to run counter to The Wire’s commitment to journalistic authenticity and social realism. This essay discusses the ways that realism and reflexivity coexist in The Wire, and how they work to convey the dual goals of entertainment and social commentary. By examining the discourses surrounding the production and consumption of these seasons, as well as the show’s rhetorical strategies, the essay argues that much of the discontent with the show’s final season resulted from misplaced genre expectations and a lack of attention to how the season functioned as a critique of television storytelling itself.
Word Count: 80-90,000 words
Photography and Illustrations: we expect around 15-25 frames from the series
Contributor Biographies
Michelle Aaron. Lecturer, Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. Aaron is author of the forthcoming, Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I (Edinburgh UP, 2009) and has edited the collections involving lens media and sexuality, The Body’s Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh, 1999) and New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh, 2004). She also writes frequently on issues of ethnicity in film and television.
Paul Anderson. Associate Professor, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan). Anderson is author of Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke UP, 2001) and several articles on popular culture, race, and contemporary American expression.
Ruth Barton. Lecturer, School of Drama, Film, and Music, Trinity College Dublin. She is author of Irish National Cinema (Routledge, 2004) and of Acting Irish in Hollywood (Irish Academic Press, 2006) and co-editor of Keeping It Real: Irish Film and Television (Wallflower Press, 2004).
Hamilton Carroll. Lecturer, School of English, University of Leeds. He is currently at work on two studies of gender and race, Affirmative Reaction: White Masculinities and the Politics of Representation (forthcoming Duke UP) and Domestic Insurrections: Fictions of Citizenship at the Limits of the Nation.
Christopher Chambers. Professor, Program in Journalism, Georgetown University. In Chambers’ early career, he was the first African-American in Baltimore’s Law Review and served with the US Justice Department from 1994-1997. Since 2001, he has turned to crime fiction, having published several novels and collections of short stories. With co-editors Walter Mosley and Gary Phillips, he will publish a graphic/comic book short fiction collection called The Darker Mask.
Liam Kennedy. Professor and Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He is the author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (Manchester UP and St Martin’s Press, 1995) and Race and Urban Space in American Culture (Edinburgh UP, 2000), editor of Visual Culture and Urban Regeneration (Routledge 2000) and co-editor of Urban Space and Representation (Pluto, 1999). He is currently researching a monograph on photography and international conflict and preparing an edited book on urban photography.
John Kraniauskas. Senior lecturer, School of Languages, Linguistics & Culture, Birkbeck College, UCL. A founding co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, he has contributed essays to several collections and journals such as Boundary 2, New Formations, and Radical Philosophy. He is currently preparing three books: on transcultural and subaltern studies; crime form and the state in Mexico (in collaboration with Alberto Moreiras); and Eva Perón and the populist state.
Jason Mittell. Associate Professor and Chair of Film & Media Culture Department, Middlebury College. Mittell is author of Television and American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009) and Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004). He has written extensively on television and genre theory.
Gary Philips. Author and editor; born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. He is the author of the Ivan Monk and Martha Chainey private detective series as well as other stand-alone crime fiction and graphic novels that consistenly merge issues of race, urbanity, criminality, and social critique. Philips is the editor of editor of Politics Noir: Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power (Verso, 2008). He also writes frequently on non-fictional matters of politics and the “mystery” of race in contemporary America. His latest works include a short story in Black Noir: Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers from Pegasus, and Freedom’s Fight, a World War II novel from Parker Publishing.
Dana Polan. Professor, Tisch School of Cinema Studies, NYU. A former president of the Society for Cinema Studies, the professional society for film, and a former editor of its publication, Cinema Journal, Polan is the author of numerous books and articles including, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (UC Press, 2007): Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (Columbia UP, 1986); The Politics of Film and the Avant-Garde (U.M.I. Press, 1984); In a Lonely Place (BFI Film Classics, 1993); Pulp Fiction (BFI Modern Classics, 2000). He is also the author of the forthcoming The Sopranos and The French Chef (Duke UP) and has done several DVD commentaries, most recently, for The Third Man (Criterion Collection).
Carlo Rotello. Professor, Department of English, Boston College. Director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, Rotello has authored several books on American popular culture and writing: Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (University of California Press, 2002); and October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (University of California Press, 1998). He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and The American Scholar's prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and Cut Time was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Stephen Shapiro. Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. Shapiro is author of The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system (Penn state, 2008), and How to Read Marx’s Capital (Pluto, 2008). Series co-editor of How to Read Theory for Pluto Press, he has also completed co-editing four critical editions of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels for Hackett. He also contributed an essay to NYU’s Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
*******************************************
Meg Sweeney
Associate Professor
Dept. of English Language & Literature and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan
3187 Angell Hall
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
fax: 734 763 3128
e-mail: meganls@umich.edu
Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (UNC Press, 2010)
http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1730
________________________________________
The editors of the following collection are seeking additional essays about gender in "The Wire." The desired length is 80,000-90,000 words, and the firm submission deadline is September 15, 2010.
If you would like to submit an essay, please contact: Stephen Shapiro [s.shapiro@warwick.ac.uk] or Liam Kennedy [liam.kennedy@ucd.ie].
Please feel free to forward this message to other potential contributors, too.
Urban Procedural: The Wire and the Neoliberal City
Eds. Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin)
and Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick)
Concept
Routinely acclaimed as the best drama television series of the past decade, The Wire (HBO, 2002-08) is an unusual and ambitious urban crime show in the perspectives and layers it brings to characterization and plotting, and in the nuanced portrayal of race conflict, city politics, and the moralities of urban criminality and policing. It references many other urban crime narratives - literary, cinematic and televisual - yet develops its own distinctive sub-genre, the urban procedural, a fabrication of urban spatial relations that intercuts worlds usually unrelated in political and social studies never mind television cop shows. The linking plots, connected in part by the technology of ‘the wire’, are fused chronotopes, mediating the distinctive temporal and spatial coordinates of neoliberal urban governance and its discontents. As they unfold, The Wire also unfolds the ideological and formal contradictions of the crime story as a template for understanding urban America in the twenty-first century.
More consistently than any other crime show of its generation, The Wire challenges viewers’ perceptions of the racialization of urban space and the media conventions which support this. The Wire reminds us of just how remarkably restricted the grammar of race is on American television and related media, and of the normative codings of race—as identity, as landscape—across urban narratives, from documentary to entertainment media. The typical mise-en-scene—of black kids dealing drugs on ghetto corners—is an everyday snapshot of the structural impoverishment and isolation of an underclass whose hypervisibilty in other media frames (including gaming) is either manifestly exoticized and pathologized or only momentarily made visible through instances of spectacular disaster, like Katrina, rather than as a long-standing, structural presence. While The Wire remains unsentimental about drug gang culture, it also respects it as an organizing prism for individuals, ultimately little different from any other (legal, educational) institutional apparatus that contours and administers the lives of urban Americans.
The show attempts to provide new narrative and media techniques to gain a many-windowed perspective (to use long-time Baltimore resident David Harvey’s terms) on the lived systems and institutions that contemporary capitalism creates, redefines, and leaves aside as obsolete. At the same time, The Wire is caught up in the conditions and contradictions of its own powerful social critique, and its appeal may in part be symptomatic of the urban voyeurism it critiques. If The Wire hearkens back to the classic, realist/naturalist narrative cycles, like Zola’s, do its efforts to render the city legible and give a “human body” to social inequality and poverty in the 21st century constitute a radical rethinking of documentary aesthetics and ethnographic ethics? Does the balancing and interweaving of a non-white lifeworld against that of an “ethnic” white one activate or gloss an analytical opportunity to critically apprehend how money and power circulate in a neoliberal city. Similarly, does it successfully balance the tension between a guarded celebration of a vanishing collective dignity involved in craft-like work conditions against entrepreneurial selfishness and the inertia of indifference that contemporary institutions manifest and reward? What kinds of intellectual and affective work does The Wire seem to desire and in actuality accomplish? Do the new modes of content delivery in a post-network age - provided by cable television series, the DVD box set, and internet piracy - indicate a changing demographics of taste and viewer pleasure that this show mirrors in its production qualities? How does the urban imaginary of this show travel?
Audience
Given the international popularity and critical acclaim of The Wire, we expect the collection to have a broad appeal within the academy, particularly within the fields of American studies, African-American studies, Ethnic Studies, Film, Television, and Performance studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as Urban Studies and Social Policy Studies. We also expect attention and readership from the non-academic community interested in cultural affairs. The collection will be written with an idea to broad appeal and seek to avoid language that would limit it to a specialist audience, either specifically within film and television studies or more generally to academic scholars alone.
While no other collection exists, we know of other collections in progress. We feel this collection is unique not only for the quality of contributors, but also for its attempt to be broadly inter-disciplinary and focus on the relation of the market, urban policy, and cultural representations.
Book
Table of Contents/Chapter Summaries
1. Liam Kennedy (University College Dublin) and Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick), “Introduction: Narrative, Capital, and Space: The Wire”
2. Dana Polan, (New York University), ‘Serial Sociology: Story Structure and Urban Analysis in The Wire’
This essay builds on a reflection by the author on the on-line site of the Museum of the Moving Image (http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/invisible-city-20080728) to look at the ways in which the multi-season format contributes to The Wire’s attempts to capture the complex politics of a contemporary urban environment. Where once cinema was imagined within moving image culture as the most promising form of popular culture -- with television as its formulaic, domesticated other -- it is now the television series extending over several seasons that seems to accomplish the most in terms of complexities of narrative perspective and sociological ambition. In the case of The Wire, however, the extension of its premise over multiple seasons is not about developing an overall narrative line in ways that might take on epic dimensions. Resolutely anti-epic, The Wire is bereft of a strong hero whose glorious tale it would chronicle; it uses each new season not so much to advance its story as to move synchronically to yet another dimension of the city that impinges on the lives of its inhabitants; it minimizes ongoing stories by dramatic interruption (key characters who get killed) and by cyclical substitution of new characters for old (so that it seems that the narrative doesn't advance so much as circle back on itself in ways that seem appropriate to the depiction of a city that seems caught in a rut of non-development even as its authority figures keep employing a rhetoric of progress and improvement).
3. Carlo Rotella (Boston University), “Regular-Guy Liberalism 3.0: Street Policing, the Box, and The Wire”
Crime stories are one of our handiest cultural tools for imagining cities and infusing them with meaning. They're particularly well equipped for the task by the procedural formula of investigating and/or planning a crime and the structural habit of tracing the roots of plot-driving surface crimes to discover the systemic wrongs of deep crime. In the past decade, television--or, rather, HBO--hit a high point in the genre's history. If The Sopranos is the American crime story at its operatic best, extending The Godfather's momentum by following the gangster story's deep crime all the way into the moral and psychological costs of suburban life, then The Wire is the American crime story at its analytical best, extending the momentum of realism by following its deep crime all the way into the workings of the American city. This talk considers The Wire's account of postindustrial urbanism by tracing the show's treatment of two of the police procedural's most important figures: street policing, which dominated the 1970s and early 1980s, and the Box (the interrogation room), which dominated the late 1980s and 1990s.
Assimilating and synthesizing these two previous main phases, and adding the figure of the wiretap to introduce a conscious element of structural analysis, The Wire both pieces together the relations of power that shape the city and takes apart the politics of the crime story. The Box is now subsumed by that structural analysis, so that even the cleverest interrogation ruse becomes implicated in what's wrong with the city. (As Bunk says at the beginning of Season 5 after working the old gag in which he pretended that a copier was a lie detector: "The bigger the lie, the more they believe it." The insight is presented as tragedy, not heroism.) And street policing, while it is valorized over the Box as an attempt to strike a civic bargain with the people who are policed, is also revealed to hold its own unpleasant meanings. The heroic-looking business of chasing bad guys down the alley and busting heads is part of the problem, too. The ideological name of that trap is Kojak liberalism, a stance in which liberals seek to "buy" the right to hold latter-day New Deal views by proving themselves "tough on crime." The Wire fingers and dramatizes the basic internal contradiction that is Kojak liberalism's fatal flaw: if being tough on crime means busting heads, mandatory sentencing, and cracking down on low-level streetcorner drug dealers and users, as it so often does, then it only makes worse the very structural problems that post-New Deal liberalism is supposed to address and ameliorate.
Drawing on the show itself, the scholarship of Christopher Wilson and other students of the police story, and interviews with the show's creators and writers (David Simon, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos), I'll talk about The Wire's attempt to imagine a New Deal liberalism appropriate to the postindustrial city in the 21st century--and its willingness to see such a liberalism as impossible to sustain. I'm not imposing this kind of political intent on the creators of The Wire. They're all left-of-center liberals who self-consciously pursue structural social critique while keeping at arm's length both Marxism and the "tough on crime" mythology. The Wire's rich political sensibility is connected to its rich sense of genre: in telling stories about street policing, the Box, and wiretapping, The Wire works out ideological and formal problems central to the genre.
4. John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck College), “Elasticity of Demand: Reflections on The Wire”
In this chapter I will focus on two aspects of The Wire. Firstly, I will set out the
compositional logic of the programme: I will suggest that it combines a realist
strategy of incorporating more and more of the social - via its institutions - so
as to produce an account of the criminal neo-liberalisation of West Baltimore
centred on the drugs business (and its kingpins and corner boys), with a
modernist epistemology that is aware of its own partiality (and partisanship) as
well as its own limitations as a work of detective-crime fiction. Its combination
of television segmentarity and cinematic montage produces what I will refer to
as The Wire's 'looping narrative'. Secondly, I will show how this 'looping' is
presented as a conflict of accumulation 'cycles' between street-level commodity
exchange (m-c-m'), on the one hand, and a process of financialization
associated with neo-liberalism (m-m'), on the other - as well as the violent
competition that sustains them on the streets and in the local polity. I will show
how 'finance capital' constitutes the limit of detection in The Wire; which is why
it returns to the streets to show the hegemonic and subjectivizing power of 'm-
c-m'.
5. Gary Philips, ‘Tracing the Wire’
Ann Petry, Robert Dean Pharr, Clarence Cooper, Jr., Herbert Simmons and Nathan Heard are a line up of what might be termed old school writers most white Americans, and for that matter, not a great deal of black Americans, know about or have read. K’wan, Vickie Stringer, Omar Tyree and Noire, among many others, conversely, are writers known and read by a generation raised on hip hop and video games, and generally despised by the black literati represented by the likes of Terry McMillan and Nick Chiles. From the old school chroniclers of the underside of black life to those nowadays spinning tales under the banner of what has come to be called Ghetto Lit - acknowledging too the Godfathers of this sub-genre, Donald Goines and Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim - The Wire, fittingly, brought to cable TV what these writers had been telling in prose.
The 1970s film Report to the Commissioner (based on the novel of the same name), and TV shows such as Miami Vice, EZ Streets and New York Undercover (even some aspects of the 1960s I Spy in its later incarnations when Culp and Cosby eschewed the suit and tie James Bondish secret agent look for Levis and tennis shoes) serve as pop cultural antecedents to The Wire. This essay will explore the prose and filmic roots of this cold ass episodic about cops and gangstas, and why a show about black and white relations on both sides of the thin blue line resonated so profoundly in an era of, as rapper 50 Cent intoned, “Get Rich, or Die Trying.”
6. Chris Chambers (Georgetown University), “Y’all got Honey Nut?”: Why Barack Obama and Damn Near All of Us Love Omar Little for the Wrong Reason”
Wrong reason: criminal anti-hero. Like “Prince,” Iceberg Slim’s pimp/drug dealer, or even Dublin’s Martin Cahill and any number of rudeboy yardie gangsters in London. Omar Little is the only “unconstrained” character in The Wire’s intricate storyarcs, but not in the facile fashion of: “He’s Obama’s favorite character”. Omar belongs to a new category: the “anti-anti-hero.” This generic category was mined inadvertently by Simon and his writers. They claim they place story above character, but that’s a lie. Without Omar there is no story, and the only character, casting as wide a net as possible, who is remotely close is Walter Mosely’s “Mouse” (masterfully translated from book pages to film through actor Don Cheadle). Omar is grim, banal, as the afrorementioned breakfast cereal, and utterly independent. We say we love him. We say he’s complex. No, he ain’t. We fear free agents. Unfettered. Everyone else in The Wire, from Season One through the end to McNulty surveying Baltimore in the last (and first, of course) scene in the last chapter of Season Five, is in a box. Anti-heroes smash and chew their way out of the box. Omar’s nowhere near a box. And when he does step into one, he dies.
7. Hamilton Carroll (University of Leeds), “Policing the Borders of White Masculinity: Labor, Whiteness, and the Neoliberal City in The Wire”
In the second season of The Wire (USA, 2003), the show turns its attention from the black drug dealers on which the first season focused to an examination of Baltimore’s white ethnic working classes. Constructed around a criminal investigation centered on the city’s moribund port, the show develops a season-long exploration of the corrosive effects of globalization on traditional forms of labor, the regional city, and their representation in U.S. popular culture. The show’s representations of white blue-collar labor—both police and dock-workers alike—highlight its attention to the transformations of the regional city under neoliberalism.
The show contrasts the highly mythologized worlds of masculine blue-collar labor—the police station and the union office—with the spaces of criminality that arise as the inhabitants of those worlds lose their franchise on the putative rewards of possessive individualism. As they attempt to understand their places in the altered landscape of the city, the show’s characters are required, sometimes literally, to construct new cartographies of urban space. In this chapter Carroll will analyze the show’s representations of the white male laboring subject alongside its concomitant representations of the spatial and technological transformations of the failing neoliberal city.
8. Ruth Barton (Trinity College Dublin), “Drinking with McNulty: Irish-American Identity and Space in The Wire”
On foot of The Wire’s evidently liberal attitudes, its famed gritty realism and its critique of American capitalism, it would be too easy to assume that its identity politics were equally enlightened. In this paper, Barton will argue that the depiction of McNulty (Dominic West), has its roots in a long history of representation of the Irish male on screen, from which it deviates little. She will also analyze the space of the Irish pub in the series and how it functions to sanction expressions of male friendship and performative aggression, and to facilitate mourning. This association between Irish ethnic masculinity and a volatile emotionalism is further highlighted by McNulty’s inability to maintain a harmonious domestic life (in this he is only rivalled by the African-American lesbian officer, “Kima” Greggs [Sonja Sohn]). In addition, the deployment of famed Irish drunk and member of the diaspora, Shane MacGowan (and the Pogues) on the soundtrack, emphasizes these connections. Her analysis will draw on histories of Irish-American representation and theories of diasporic space, notably those of Avtar Brah.
9. Michelle Aaron (University of Birmingham), ‘S’no Such Thing as Special Dead, s’just Dead’: The Ethics of The Wire and its (Queer) Political Project”
From the War on Terror to the election of the first African-American president, US-centric Western culture has to some extent undergone a shift in social consciousness about issues of racial identity and individual or national complicity in society’s, especially US society’s, ills. Through a discussion of its representation of death, I will argue that the HBO series The Wire can be seen as a response to this post 9.11 ‘altered global universe’ (B. Ruby Rich). In its break with racialised traditions of representation on television and within culture more broadly, and its exposing and confounding of normative social and familial connections, it offers a radical, and arguably, ethical interpretation of community and citizenship.
10. Paul Anderson (University of Michigan), “The Game is the Game”
This essay reads The Wire as something like a dialogical novel, a novel informed less by a single stable narrative voice (though there is that too) than by many distinct voices. Different characters present different interpretations of the world and the games played in its most relevant institutions. Sometimes, fragments of dialogue are passed along from one character to the next, and from one scenario to the next. Certain phrases, or near echoes of them, and certain practices (especially certain games and game-talk) accumulate new associations and layers of irony upon each new mention in the whorl of life that is The Wire’s five full seasons. The standard mode of allegory offers two distinct levels of signification: the narrative we see is what it is, but is also not what it is, or not what it appears to be. In the typical realm of allegory, we read or see a manifest or surface narrative that is often a repetition of a different latent narrative. David Simon is surely not the only relevant figure concerned with the possibilities and dangers of allegorical interpretation; some of the characters of The Wire are animated by an allegorical imagination as well.
11. Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), “’An Amorphous Series Detailing Society’s Ills’”: Reflexivity and Realism in The Wire.”
This essay explores the contrasting pulls of realist representation and reflexive satire within The Wire. Much of the show’s power and reputation comes from its realist glare into American institutions and environments; however, The Wire has always seasoned its main dish of gritty realism with the garnish of satirical humor. This satire, with a high degree of reflexive “writerly” commentary, plays a starring role in seasons three and five in ways that seem to run counter to The Wire’s commitment to journalistic authenticity and social realism. This essay discusses the ways that realism and reflexivity coexist in The Wire, and how they work to convey the dual goals of entertainment and social commentary. By examining the discourses surrounding the production and consumption of these seasons, as well as the show’s rhetorical strategies, the essay argues that much of the discontent with the show’s final season resulted from misplaced genre expectations and a lack of attention to how the season functioned as a critique of television storytelling itself.
Word Count: 80-90,000 words
Photography and Illustrations: we expect around 15-25 frames from the series
Contributor Biographies
Michelle Aaron. Lecturer, Department of American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham. Aaron is author of the forthcoming, Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I (Edinburgh UP, 2009) and has edited the collections involving lens media and sexuality, The Body’s Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh, 1999) and New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh, 2004). She also writes frequently on issues of ethnicity in film and television.
Paul Anderson. Associate Professor, Program in American Culture, University of Michigan). Anderson is author of Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke UP, 2001) and several articles on popular culture, race, and contemporary American expression.
Ruth Barton. Lecturer, School of Drama, Film, and Music, Trinity College Dublin. She is author of Irish National Cinema (Routledge, 2004) and of Acting Irish in Hollywood (Irish Academic Press, 2006) and co-editor of Keeping It Real: Irish Film and Television (Wallflower Press, 2004).
Hamilton Carroll. Lecturer, School of English, University of Leeds. He is currently at work on two studies of gender and race, Affirmative Reaction: White Masculinities and the Politics of Representation (forthcoming Duke UP) and Domestic Insurrections: Fictions of Citizenship at the Limits of the Nation.
Christopher Chambers. Professor, Program in Journalism, Georgetown University. In Chambers’ early career, he was the first African-American in Baltimore’s Law Review and served with the US Justice Department from 1994-1997. Since 2001, he has turned to crime fiction, having published several novels and collections of short stories. With co-editors Walter Mosley and Gary Phillips, he will publish a graphic/comic book short fiction collection called The Darker Mask.
Liam Kennedy. Professor and Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He is the author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (Manchester UP and St Martin’s Press, 1995) and Race and Urban Space in American Culture (Edinburgh UP, 2000), editor of Visual Culture and Urban Regeneration (Routledge 2000) and co-editor of Urban Space and Representation (Pluto, 1999). He is currently researching a monograph on photography and international conflict and preparing an edited book on urban photography.
John Kraniauskas. Senior lecturer, School of Languages, Linguistics & Culture, Birkbeck College, UCL. A founding co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, he has contributed essays to several collections and journals such as Boundary 2, New Formations, and Radical Philosophy. He is currently preparing three books: on transcultural and subaltern studies; crime form and the state in Mexico (in collaboration with Alberto Moreiras); and Eva Perón and the populist state.
Jason Mittell. Associate Professor and Chair of Film & Media Culture Department, Middlebury College. Mittell is author of Television and American Culture (Oxford UP, 2009) and Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004). He has written extensively on television and genre theory.
Gary Philips. Author and editor; born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. He is the author of the Ivan Monk and Martha Chainey private detective series as well as other stand-alone crime fiction and graphic novels that consistenly merge issues of race, urbanity, criminality, and social critique. Philips is the editor of editor of Politics Noir: Dark Tales from the Corridors of Power (Verso, 2008). He also writes frequently on non-fictional matters of politics and the “mystery” of race in contemporary America. His latest works include a short story in Black Noir: Mystery, Crime and Suspense Fiction by African-American Writers from Pegasus, and Freedom’s Fight, a World War II novel from Parker Publishing.
Dana Polan. Professor, Tisch School of Cinema Studies, NYU. A former president of the Society for Cinema Studies, the professional society for film, and a former editor of its publication, Cinema Journal, Polan is the author of numerous books and articles including, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (UC Press, 2007): Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American Cinema, 1940-1950 (Columbia UP, 1986); The Politics of Film and the Avant-Garde (U.M.I. Press, 1984); In a Lonely Place (BFI Film Classics, 1993); Pulp Fiction (BFI Modern Classics, 2000). He is also the author of the forthcoming The Sopranos and The French Chef (Duke UP) and has done several DVD commentaries, most recently, for The Third Man (Criterion Collection).
Carlo Rotello. Professor, Department of English, Boston College. Director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, Rotello has authored several books on American popular culture and writing: Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (University of California Press, 2002); and October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (University of California Press, 1998). He has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships and received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and The American Scholar's prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and Cut Time was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Stephen Shapiro. Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. Shapiro is author of The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-system (Penn state, 2008), and How to Read Marx’s Capital (Pluto, 2008). Series co-editor of How to Read Theory for Pluto Press, he has also completed co-editing four critical editions of Charles Brockden Brown’s novels for Hackett. He also contributed an essay to NYU’s Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, a 2007 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
*******************************************
Meg Sweeney
Associate Professor
Dept. of English Language & Literature and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan
3187 Angell Hall
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003
fax: 734 763 3128
e-mail: meganls@umich.edu
Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons (UNC Press, 2010)
http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1730
________________________________________
Monday, June 14, 2010
Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University seeks Executive Director
Latino Policy Institute at Roger Williams University seeks Executive Director
Executive Search Announcement
Our Mission
LPI is committed to generating and communicating non-partisan data of Latinos in Rhode Island. LPI will stimulate public policy discourse and enhance the public's understanding of the Rhode Island Latino experience. With this information, Latinos’ social, economic and civic contributions to the State can be better documented and understood.
Our Vision
The Latino Policy Institute envisions a Rhode Island where:
· Latinos are socially and economically integrated and civically engaged;
· Rhode Islanders have an understanding of the contributions of Latinos to the state;
· Decision-makers have ready access to reliable and empirically-grounded data on Latinos in Rhode Island; and
· The LPI is the primary source of research on Latinos in Rhode Island.
LPI commissioned both a feasibility study and a business plan, and recently completed an organizational assessment, including comprehensive stakeholder surveys. LPI seeks qualified and motivated candidates with skills and experience in:
· Fundraising and Fiscal Management
· Knowledge of Public Policy and Research
· Serving as an Ambassador, Bridge, Diplomat
· Communication Skills; Vision / Entrepreneurial
· Leadership and Organizational Management Skills
· Experience Working with a Board of Directors
· Working with the Latino Community; Cultural Competencies
To apply, please send your cover letter and resume to human_resources@rwu.edu and reference #10-075. Submissions/applications will be accepted until June 30, 2010 or until the position is filled. Thank you for your interest.
Executive Search Announcement
Our Mission
LPI is committed to generating and communicating non-partisan data of Latinos in Rhode Island. LPI will stimulate public policy discourse and enhance the public's understanding of the Rhode Island Latino experience. With this information, Latinos’ social, economic and civic contributions to the State can be better documented and understood.
Our Vision
The Latino Policy Institute envisions a Rhode Island where:
· Latinos are socially and economically integrated and civically engaged;
· Rhode Islanders have an understanding of the contributions of Latinos to the state;
· Decision-makers have ready access to reliable and empirically-grounded data on Latinos in Rhode Island; and
· The LPI is the primary source of research on Latinos in Rhode Island.
LPI commissioned both a feasibility study and a business plan, and recently completed an organizational assessment, including comprehensive stakeholder surveys. LPI seeks qualified and motivated candidates with skills and experience in:
· Fundraising and Fiscal Management
· Knowledge of Public Policy and Research
· Serving as an Ambassador, Bridge, Diplomat
· Communication Skills; Vision / Entrepreneurial
· Leadership and Organizational Management Skills
· Experience Working with a Board of Directors
· Working with the Latino Community; Cultural Competencies
To apply, please send your cover letter and resume to human_resources@rwu.edu and reference #10-075. Submissions/applications will be accepted until June 30, 2010 or until the position is filled. Thank you for your interest.
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