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The weekend of April 23-25, there's going to be a joint conference of the Red River Conference on World Literature and the Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing. For the latter, I've decided to submit the paper I wrote for my genre theory class last semester. Here's the proposal I sent:

Making the Adjunct Visible: Normativity in Academia and Subversive Heteroglossia in the Invisible Adjunct Weblog Community

In recent years, weblogs have evolved from a form used mostly by web designers and computer programmers to a cultural phenomenon used and analyzed by journalists, popular culture scholars, and rhetoricians. In this paper, I use a Foucaultian and Bakhtinian framework to examine one academic weblog, Invisible Adjunct, which takes as its primary topic adjuncts and academic labor, vis-à-vis the discourse about adjuncts and academic labor in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The tone in the Chronicle essays tends to range from resigned to the current state of academic labor, to libertarian individualism (i.e., “you made this choice; you knew what you were getting into when you got a Ph.D.; this is what you get”), to “I'm an adjunct by choice, and I am fulfilled by it.” This discourse in the Chronicle is a genre that upholds the institutional status quo, with its emphasis on bootstrap rhetoric, adjunct “success” stories in the academy (e.g. adjunct as entrepreneur), and a lack of institutional critique or serious calls or plans for institutional reform. As a result, adjuncts are made to feel disenfranchised, personally responsible for why they occupy their rank in the hierarchy. To an extent, they start to identify with the discursive category “adjunct,” which suggests Foucault's normalization at work (Sawicki, 1991, p. 85). Invisible Adjunct shows what happens when the other talks back to the institution.

Nick Olejniczak of blogosphere.us is teaching a class on weblogs in the spring at the University of Wisconsin. I'm guessing it's in his home department, Family and Consumer Communications. His syllabus is a wiki on which he would like feedback and suggestions for reading assignments. Olejniczak writes, "In the spirit of the medium that inspired the class, let's see if we can build a syllabus that will itself demonstrate the collaborative power of the blogosphere." Open design for open design. Very cool--I would love to teach a similar course.

Link via Blog de Halavais.

Hilarious. I have the same fears, sort of. I also love how the story is set in Minneapolis, MN.

I have no idea what you're talking about, but happy birthday.

I think Anne's new blog design is awesome--simple and elegant. It makes me even more eager to redesign my site. I'm not going to do anything drastic, just put up a new image and make the links a different color.

It seems I'm a janie-come-lately to Misbehaving.net:

misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology. It's a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field.

Tracy has already done a link roundup on many who have weighed in so far. Cindy has a smart post about Shelley's not being asked to join (although she is on the blogroll). I'm not a regular reader of most of the parties involved in Misbehaving, nor do I read Shelley's blog regularly, but I'm going to start paying attention to what's being said here.

I didn't do one thing on my itinerary except present my paper, but I still had a great time. I met Liz, Alex, Andrew, Tracy, and Jeremy, and I also met Jason and Jason, which was lots of fun. I spent a little too much money at LUSH, but hey, when do I ever have the opportunity to go to a LUSH store?!

Anyway, now for the linking roundup:

Tracy blogs about a panel she and I both attended (and Tracy was one of the presenters by proxy): "Online/Offline Intersections." Tracy also writes about our panel in that same post and has more notes here. On Sunday, I attended a roundtable on qualitative internet research which was excellent. I took three pages of paper notes and will blog those as soon as I get a chance.