Quote of the week: Jason Baird Jackson

"I have long cared about the serials crisis and now that the world is thinking more critically about student debt, I want us all to realize the direct relationship between the scholarly communications system, and the scholarly society system, and the neoliberalization of the American research university. Skyrocketing tuition is a consequence of public disinvestment in public universities like mine and yours. Leasing (we no longer purchase) toll access scholarship at ever higher costs from exceedingly profitable commercial firms (and their society partners) is not helping close the inequality gap in higher education. It is hardly the only factor involved (ex: think health care costs) but it is one of the few factors in which faculty and graduate students have a direct role to play—as authors, as disciplinary policy shapers, as peer-reviewers, as editors, etc. As contributors to the scholarly publishing system, we have choices available to us. We can make our work open in a number of ways and we can support and encourage those whose values and commitments align with our own."

-Jason Baird Jackson, here.

(just wanted to highlight this in case some of you missed it)

Mintz: A sense of purpose

"Studies of the everyday in modern life, of the changing character of mundane matters like food, viewed from the joined perspective of production and consumption, use and function, and concerned with the differential emergence and variation of meaning, may be one way to inspirit a discipline now dangerously close to losing its sense of purpose."

--Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power 1985: 213.

Zizek on how he defines himself

When asked in an interview how he defines himself, here's what Slavoj Zizek has to say:

I don’t define myself. I hate myself. If you ask me to define myself at gun point putting a gun to my head and tell me ‘tell me, if you don’t, I’ll shoot you’. Then I would say ‘I am a Hegelian Philosopher’. This is what interests me more than anything. The goal is Hegel, more than Lacan, more than Marx. We are just analyzing culture. It’s over now. We need what we once called ‘return to Metaphysical questions.’ We need what we call ‘Big Philosophy’. We need again to ask, ‘what is this universe?’, ‘What is freedom?’ and so on.

From here.

Vonnegut on ridiculously simplistic social divisions

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."

-Kurt Vonnegut, 2004.

a useless division...

"theory without empirical research is empty, empirical research without theory is blind"

-Pierre Bourdieu (1988)