As Melissa and Jean say, there’s nothing better, more en-couraging than to have a completed project boomerang back into view while one is working on some very not-completed projects.
The happy boomerang in question is the special issue of Continuum that is the most recent product of a collaboration between Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess, Jane Simon and, luckily, me. The issue is called “Counter-Heroics & Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies.”
Melissa writes about it here. Jean writes about it here.
June 14th, 2006
Nina, Kate and I have a chapter in this book about using the internet. It describes a variety of online tools and approaches available to a new researcher. Kate presents an example of the ethical dilemmas faced when conducting online fieldwork and I use the bus study blog and website in a case study about the possibilities of online visual design. There are even some images – hurrah.
March 1st, 2006
I have a chapter in this, written with Thomson and Craighead. Not that anyone will be able to afford it (the link is to the hard back edition; but there is a paper back version).
January 19th, 2006
It’s here.
Finally, after months of patiently waiting, Kris’s photoblog paper in Media, Culture and Society has been published. And it is worth the wait. Getting published in a journal like this is an incredible achievement at any stage in an academic career, considering Kris is just at the beginning of his, it’s indicative of bigger, even more impressive things to come.
What does the photoblog want?
Media, Culture & Society 2005 27: 883-901
Theoretical accounts of photography have persistently emphasized, departed from and returned to the issue of the Real, thereby positioning the Real behind or at the heart of what photography purportedly is and does. But these familiar and familiarizing consistencies in the writing about photography do not make photographs less of a paradox at the level of being (what they are), or less equivocal at the level of their expressive content (what they mean or know). Digital photography problematizes the issues yet further even while writing about photography reasserts the familiar pieties. This article presents the results of an ethnographic study of photoblogs as a way of addresssing impasses in the literature on photography and digital photography. Blogs have become popular in the last three years as an internet-based technology for writing the self. Photoblogs are a type of blog that adds photographs to text and hyperlinks in the telling of stories. In this article, I argue that photoblogs are (1) entities that identify the repetitions which paralyse writing about photography and (2) entities that want to position photographs as something more than an outcome, photobloggers as something more than selves (or authors) and the photoblog as something more than technology.
Requests for autographs from the author can be posted here. Oh, and any questions or queries about the paper can be left here as well.
November 25th, 2005