Comments on: am I an academic?

By: hmm

hmm — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 10:58:06 +0000

Don’t you have to keep your boss happy?

By: Lucy Leite

Lucy Leite — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:45:03 +0000

Great post! The academia is full of big egos who think that just what they do is right… the ivory tower, someone put it. I think it’s great the fact that you can connect your academic research to the needs of an enterprise. This should be much more common. Many professors can’t see how they can be useful outside a classroom and many companies can’t see what they could do with a professor working in their labs or departments! Congrats, Danah, you’re an example for many!

By: Larry Irons

Larry Irons — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 10:04:46 +0000

Academia has become the equivalent of salt mines for those who don’t make it to tenure. Universities are among the most exploitative institutions existing today. Just ask the “adjuncts” who really make the whole education process work.

By: sedista

sedista — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:19:33 +0000

thanks danah for opening up the discussion. i have to go with david berry. i completely agree with your critique of university and academic practices, but still have my reservations about giving up some of the conditions that were offered by universities, or suggesting that corporate research labs are the alternative, or conflating them all into one and the same.

the way universities have been turned into corporations is a sad fact (in europe this is being enhanced through the bologna process) and exactly for this reason, and a number of others, i may follow your steps, leave academia and apply for jobs in research labs (corporate or based on public funding (http://www.v2.nl/) or organized by dedicated individuals like the old http://www.bootlab.org/).

i personally believe that you can be an academic even without institutional binding, you can publish papers and ask for funding from conferences, you can organize events, even question existing academic machinery and still be an academic (firstmonday is a wonderful example of hybrid academic/non-academic practice and just recently included an article critical of the monopoly that “academics” try to keep over knowledge: http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2609/2248). or, we can just call such hybrid trajectories punk rock theoreticians and continue actively accommodating their positions in our work and institutions.

By: Michael Mandiberg

Michael Mandiberg — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 22:08:32 +0000

Love this post about MSR. We’ve talked about this in the past. I like how you carefully leave the evil acronym (IRB) for the end.

Check out http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2009/08/on-being-postacademic.html for a different take that would be an interesting addition to your list of pros/cons: Paranoia. Along with grant-begging, that is the other side effect to the Tenure process. Fear and Paranoia.

But, what does this look like for the non scientist, or non social scientist. What does this look like for the humanities professor, or the artist? Don’t conservative political think tanks drastically outnumber all other forms of non-science research, liberal, political, or otherwise?

By: zephoria

zephoria — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:23:04 +0000

Ted – there is a difference between applying the academic skills of a researcher to a set of private sector concerns and doing pure research. I am not actually looking at private sector issues. I am not producing applied reports. The topics that I address are not driven by the needs or desires of the private sector. To the degree that my work aligns with private (or public) concerns, it is used. But there’s a big difference between being an applied researcher and a theoretical (or pure) researcher. At the end of the day, my goal is to produce theoretical contributions to public knowledge.

By: Ted Kinzer

Ted Kinzer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:02:06 +0000

Engaging post. Would you consider yourself a practicing academic? You have the training, skills, and experience of being an academic from your doctoral work. You have deciding to practice within the private sector while applying the academic skills of a researcher.

Ted
Twitter: @terribleted66

By: Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:48:10 +0000

I never needed convincing.

By: zephoria

zephoria — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:58:21 +0000

Nils – this is what differentiates the industrial research labs like MSR and Bell Labs and PARC from research that takes place in other enterprises. None of the research that I do will be locked behind closed doors because of corporate restrictions. (Some never reaches the public because I’m too lazy to write it up or because journals don’t accept it, but that’s another matter.) Knowledge privatization is not a given with research labs and, in the case of MSR, it is strongly frowned upon. We are literally evaluated based on our publication track record so we’re highly incentivized to get things out to the world at large (or at least the niche world of academia). MSR is very very very open. I’m sorry that your institution is not.

By: Nils

Nils — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:42:25 +0000

I’ve made the same basic transition you have, Danah, in working at Monitor 360. And while I agree with everything you’ve written above, there’s one point you don’t address: corporate research promotes the privatization of knowledge production, rather than the strict openness which is the hallmark of classic academic-scientific practice. Much of the work I do is stuff I can make public, but a significant portion of it is not, and this is something I sometimes feel some regrets about.

I know that one rejoinder to this might be that the academy itself is well athwart the path of the knowledge privatization, that the idea of openness is more honored in principle than in the breach, and while that’s true, there’s little doubt that degree zero of academic knowledge production is openness, whereas the degree zero of corporate knowledge production is in favor of proprietary research (either in the form of IP or secrecy).