Traveling on the road? Want food off the interstate highways? Check out road food.

There is a lot of graffiti in Edmonton I like and this is one is one of my favorites. (Oilers are the local hocker team that have, in the past, kicked some serious NHL butt).

I just received a fund raising email from Lawrence Lessig who is trying to raise money to support the isummit conference to be held in mid-June in Croatia. The goal is to raise $ 100,000 which will be matched by some anonymous donor.

I hope that they are also trying to meet the challenge of getting a few ladies on board as keynote speakers because so far they don’t even have one and there are barely any as workshop organizers. Oh hey, but at least someone noticed on their website.

Along with the cash, maybe they need to raise some “awareness.” I know I sound like a broken record when it comes to this issue, but the record is broken…

Blogging Feminism: (Web)Sites of Resistance

As blogging has more widespread interest, especially vis-á-vis electoral politics, feminist activity on the internet has remained marginal to the mainstream. Thus, we were thrilled when Gwendolyn Beetham and Jessica Valenti proposed “Blogging Feminism: (Web)sites of Resistance” as a Scholar and Feminist Online journal topic, as well as a theme for a Barnard Center for Research on Women panel discussion. As Beetham and Valenti point out in their introduction, all too much feminist activity exists in the blogosphere invisibly. This theme runs through many of this journal’s contributions, and is taken up directly by Clancy Ratliff and Tedra Osell in the section entitled “Women and Politics in the Blogosphere.”

Academics in the humanities and social sciences often struggle with their writing. I just figured that as you did more and more, you got better and better. Well this recent post by Radical Tenure was pretty eye opening because she confesses about losing her writing groove (in part because of sh*t going down at her university) and then she gives a fascinating account about how blogging “saved” her. Now I am stunned because her writing is pretty darn succulent. Really. I love reading her( and am proud that she is a lady blogger too given how many males dominate the “famous” scene).

Now I am more inspired because I think indeed writing, especially in very competitive environments, can be a torturous and fraught task. And while it may get easier, there are circumstances that may derail even the strongest of writers.

It is great to see this confronted head-on, in ways positive, honest, inspiring.

Here are the relevant bits:

Another reason being anonymous didn’t work for me is really internal to Zen – er, Wesleyan, stultifying features of which I was trying to escape following the Unfortunate Events. Like being watched and talked about all the time and treated like yesterday’s news for having done the teaching and institutional work I was asked to do while struggling to find time for my scholarship even as other people were chosen to be groomed as “the scholars.” What happened to me during the last three years nearly destroyed me as a writer and an intellectual (I am actually not joking about this), and I had to start all over again, recreating a literary voice for myself and a confidence that I could command an audience with my thoughts and prose, from the ground up. It was either that or quit. ….
Do not dare feel sorry for me about this, and let me underline the point: I am a highly privileged, senior faculty member at a very wealthy institution, and many other bloggers are not. Furthermore, regardless of this messy coming-out period, my strategy actually worked. Because of this blog *and its audience*, I was able to start writing again, to finish articles that were lying about undone, to write a book review for the Village Voice, to write a book proposal, to get going on revising the book that various people and committees eliminated all over during the Unfortunate Events, to do a ton of research on a new project and to begin speaking about some critical reforms that might really help faculty – on the right and the left – enjoy their work as academics again. In other words: I Saved Myself. And I have been transformed into something more powerful as a result of my trials.

Eugenics is considered to be a technology and social practice of the past, swept away in our closest of all things ugly and bad. But the past is, in fact, quite recent, especially in the Alberta region in so far as forced sterilization was only outlawed in 1972–yes 1972.

If your physical body is here in Edmonton and are interested in the ways in which science and technology can has been placed on a truly “mad path” in the name of progress and how we are in danger of repeating the past via new genetic technologies, do check out this conference Eugenics and Sterilization in Alberta
35 Years Later .

Free and open to the public, it kicks off tonight and continues all day tomorrow. The line-up of speakers is great and most important is that it includes talks by some of those who were caught by the very unfortunate web of eugenic laws.

For those of you who like to follow cutting edge developments in the politics of intellectual property law, do not miss today’s Democracy Now program AIDS Activists Call for Global Boycott of Abbott for Withholding Drug Sales in Thailand.

It is sort of stunning in that empowering and disempowering way. The show discusses protests launched again the large pharmaceutical company Abbot who in reaction–no, make that retaliation–to Thailand’s decision to issue compulsory licenses on AIDS drugs, and import generic drugs acted in highly questionable ways:

“Abbott responded in a way that shocked many AIDS activists – the company announced it would withhold seven new drugs from sale in Thailand including a new AIDS drugs and treatments for arthritis and high blood pressure.”

It is great to see countries use the very slim rights granted to them by organizations like the WTO but in order for the rights to have any punch, these countries *must* be given the space to make these decisions without the deep intimation and that is exactly what Abbot is up to.

To learn more, read the transcript, listen to the show. And if you want to go on, I have pasted the “favorite” part of the show:

(more…)

This is what happens when a geek has a baby geek.

Recently I stumbled on a relatively new blog Tenured Radical that I really dig for it provides a compelling and witty, (if not at times very disturbing) picture of what I am soon to face, being I am at the cusp of starting an academic job. Not only is writing a real pleasure to read but she has a lot of good things to say and it is worth checking out (well maybe only if you are a student, academic, or university administrator though I reckon it may have wider appeal). At first, she blogged anonymously but now she has come out under the sun revealing her identity.

Her recent post on the problems of grading hit home, I guess because it seems like in the last week all my friends are talking/complaining about is grading given it is the end of the semester and all (I thankfully don’t have to worry about that till next year). Grades and granting them, have such a complex psychology and set of consequences for teachers and students alike and she gives a nice taste of what they are.

The online journal re-public: re-imagining democracy has a handful of articles on collaboration and wikipedia, adding to two special issues on reimagining the commons.

Many are good.

But I am disturbed over the true paucity of diverse voices, including women. The recent slew of articles does not have even one authored by a woman and there are only 2 represented in the re-imagining the commons special issues.

Given that there are many woman researchers and practitioners who do work on this material, I honestly don’t think this represents a lack but a problematic oversight. Problematic most especially because they are “re-imagining democracy,” and this does not look to imaginative to me.