I said this would be the semester I don’t go to every conference. Promises, promises.
It looks like I will be the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association conference in Greensboro this April. The talk is based on my experiences of using social media to talk back to powerful organizations. You can likely intuit the case study.
Also in April is a talk at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies conference. Noel Jackson invited me to discuss my thoughts on public/private media. Here I’m exploring concepts I’ve hashed out with colleagues in response to “twittergate”. I also continue to be intrigued by the initial CHE defense of Schaefer-Riley. They said repeatedly that hers was “just a blog”. They implied a different organizational arrangement that reduced corporate responsibility for ethics and rigor. I suspect structural changes that are reshaping how many organizations survive has created these quasi-public/private relationships, some explicit but most implicit. I will be taking a look at media that covers higher education as a case study of how these tensions evolve and play out.
Next month I am sitting down with Alondra Nelson at Emory’s “Alien Bodies” conference. I’m likely most nervous about this. I have no compunction about striking out on my own but the responsibility of doing well by someone else changes my preparation entirely.
Finally, I will be presenting some of my core academic work on gender, organizations, and for-profit colleges at the Southern Sociological Society meeting in Atlanta.
If you are planning to be in attendance at any of these events and you are not the kind of crazy that requires me to have a chaperone, please leave a note to connect.