• “The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron: An Open Letter to White ‘Anti-Racists’” by Kil Ja Kim at ChickenBones: A Journal

• Being “Diverse” in the Middle Ground: Thoughts on Racisms, Sexisms and the Many Phobias” by Tenured Radical

• Dismantling the Academic Industrial Complex at La Chola

• When Girls Will Be Boys at NYTimes

• What Is Rhetoric and Composition at Inside Higher Ed, in response to CCCC this year.

• What Is Rhet/Comp For? by Mark Bauerlein at the Chronicle. Perhaps this one isn’t even worth commenting on. Ugh.

• Living the Good Life by Jenny Rice. Fantastic response to CCCC and New Orleans.

• Thomas Beatie’s article The Advocate. You might also watch his appearance on Oprah at Queerty (I showed this in LGBT Studies) and this awful response to his Oprah appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Our workshop went exceedingly well yesterday. I would have loved for it to go on forever. We wound up having a great dialogue about a variety of things: what it’s like to be out as a teacher, what it’s like to be queer in academia, what role queer theory might have in composition studies (if at all?), working with students, constraints of location (institutional restraints on curriculum and regional and institutional constraints on queerness), whether the word “queer” was erasing lesbian and gay man experience, among other topics.

I went to a few great sessions this morning, and one not so great one. I’ve hung out in the French Quarter quite a bit, which I adore. Additionally, I’ve gotten some work done, since at least this trip I remembered my laptop’s power cord. Last week in Pennsylvania, I forgot the cord, so I wound up not getting much work done while out of town. Unfortunately, a co-presenter of mine forgot his power cord; it seems that this is a curse of our new, digital lives: we have more crap to remember to bring with us, and we depend on it more than we might have before.

Are you familiar with the work of Nancy Fraser? She discusses the word public and it’s multiple meanings. Michael Warner, who also does queer theory, does as well.

Fraser has four definitions of public: 1) related to the state, 2) accessible to everyone, 3) concerning everyone, and 4) having to do with the common good. Warner has three definitions: 1) “a kind of social totality,” 2) a concrete audience, like at a theatre or public speech, and 3) the kind of public that comes together in relation to a text.

Warner focuses on the last one in “Publics and Counterpublics.” Latour, too, focuses on the notion of a public being created by a text, if I understand what I’ve been told about him correctly.

So, I think when we ask what kind of public we are addressing as public intellectuals, I’d say at least 4:
1. The classroom (a space that is both public and private)
2. Our colleagues/the discipline (through texts, such as our talk at 4C’s, our blogs, and in journal articles)
3. The general public, if accessible, though perhaps that isn’t possible except in the most watered down sense. I’m imagining articles for magazines, blogging, etc.
4. Counterpublics, or those publics that are set as alternatives to the mainstream (though our discipline is also a counterpublic, as Warner argues). I’m thinking here, though, of queer publics.

Arguably, though, a job of a public intellectual is not just to speak to publics, but to help foster public spaces so that others can speak. At least, that’s my belief, especially after reading Christian Weissner’s book Moving Beyond Academic Discourse and the work of Herbert Marcuse.

• Steven Krause links to Cory Doctorow’s 17 Tips For Getting Bloggers To Write About You. Good tips for people with websites who want the attention of bloggers.

• Ira Socol discusses the benefits of online information delivery over print journalism.

• One of the newest fads in higher ed are those stupid clickers students have to buy. Here at OSU, students might have to buy 3 or 4 per term, and, from my understanding, they can’t be reused. Rhosa Eberly has brought this up at the Blogora. Last month, Ira Socol wrote a blog post asking if perhaps using mobile phones instead of clickers might be a better idea, in addition to calling into question the traditional lecture format of these classes.

• The Chronicle reports that Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting portions of his book that he is drafting on the blog Grand Text Auto. This is kinda old news, but it’s still interesting. He’s getting feedback, and he’s also interested in seeing how the local comments he gets on the blog might contradict the global comments he gets from reviewers during the publishing process.

• Gregory has started a co-authored blog for our 4C’s workshop, What’s Queer Got To Do With It, where we’ll be posting (hopefully) our thoughts and drafts as we consider our upcoming workshop (in less than 3 weeks!). I’m excited for our project.

This video is in response to Pedagogical Gregory’s video, as well as Jeff Rice’s recent discussion of rhetoric as “The usage of many, many things.” In particular, I’ve been thinking about how I espouse multimodal composition yet don’t really engage in it a whole lot — so here’s my first attempt at a video!