Projects

ARCADE. I was the managing editor of Transactions at Arcade March 2010-December 2012. Arcade reimagines scholarly communication as a public, open-access venture with explicit pathways between the "raw" (blogs, comments) and the "cooked" (peer-reviewed journals). Arcade's three rubrics, Conversations, Transactions, and Publications, seek to maintain the specificity of different forms (the liveliness and quickness of blogs, the reflectiveness of long-form articles and peer review) while putting them in dialogue with one another. As the editor of Arcade's middle (and least well defined) term, Transactions, I've done a lot of thinking about how to reveal or frame those dialogues. In addition to maintaining Arcade's multimedia archive, I began putting together items from across the site, organized thematically, in collections that we're calling Colloquies. I also implemented a number of internal blog features aimed at helping academics transition from the peer review environment to the immediacy of blogging.

Publicness. I don't much like the term "public intellectual," but I do think that intellectuals have an obligation to do their jobs at least partially in public. I maintain this blog as part of my commitment to the publicness of intellectual life. I've done a little writing about publicness, what it means, and why it's important, both on this blog and at Arcade.

I often write around or near my research projects on this blog. It's not so much that I'm off doing research and then come here to blog about it as that my research interests pervade my day-to-day thinking. Some topics that either are or will be research projects include:

• Cuteness and Puerility.
  • Puerility and pedantry (12/06/2009)
  • Puerile desire and the cuteness of "WHHHHY?" (8/23/2010, on Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You")
  • "WHHHHY?": Still cute, now with different video (9/02/2010)
  • Puerility and corporate authorship (9/27/2010, on Jerome Christensen, Pixar/Disney, the Citizens United decision, and gender)
  • The Case of @MayorEmanuel; or, The Puerility of Profanity (3/14/2011)
• Children and animals. Some of these ideas made their way into my article "Sentimental Spaces"; others wound up in my article "Minor Aesthetics."
  • Dressing up our pets and/or children (10/19/2010, on Mei-mei Berssenbrugge)
  • The uncanny is the original minor aesthetic category. (2/05/2011)
  • Cuteness is a moment in the uncanny. (2/06/2011)
  • Double double (2/27/2011)
  • Animals dressed as other animals (3/13/2011)
  • Animals with stuffed animals (5/07/2011)

I also seem to write an awful lot of posts about Lady Gaga.

I adore the internet.

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