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Natalia Cecire
@ncecire
C19-C20 American, naturalism, experimental lit, history of science/STS, gender, childhood, and media studies. She/her.
Natalia Cecire’s posts
It's okay to not be the intended audience. What is confusing to you may be orienting and helpful to another reader. The fact that not everyone comes to a text with the same references and background is not a flaw in the writing. Becoming a good and flexible reader is a thing.
Reading is the great disappeared labor category of academia. Class prep hours don't include reading. Supervision hours don't include reading. Marking doesn't include reading! And research--forget it. You'll never get a research leave if you admit you want to use the time to read.
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What academics do. Soon I will get an 80,000 draft PhD thesis to read and comment on. The 7.5 hours a year for supervision are not enough to read one draft @NorthantsUCU
I actually do enjoy the fact that arts and humanities are so intrinsically interesting, fun, and life-enriching that the government have a whole team dedicated to warning students off it, and loads of students are still like, yeah, no, I'm still going to do the awesome course.
So many people are pushed out of the university, students and workers alike: harassed, assaulted, bullied, overworked, burned out, marginalized for disabilities or illness, made to feel like their only option is to leave. They are never protected by appeals to "academic freedom."
People who rent immediately understand that if windowless bedrooms become permissible they will de facto become compulsory because landlords will instantly jack up the price for apartments with windows so that only rich people have them
It's really telling how many colleagues fell ill as soon as we went on strike-- that phenomenon of a latent illness being held at bay by sheer adrenaline that takes you down as soon as you stop working. We were only four weeks into term & most of us were hanging on by fingertips.
I am mystified that VCs will insist that a lack of face to face teaching is terrible for student mental health but being jerked around on a weekly basis and never knowing quite what is required, safe, compulsory, prohibited, recommended, or deprecated is completely fine.
Maybe relying on international tuition to fund basic higher education operations was never sustainable? 🤔
Academia has been doing this for decades. And then those brilliant women index their husbands' books.
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‘The new trophy wife in tech isn’t the hot young model. It’s the most brilliant, accomplished woman you can get to give up her career to have your kids.’ - a woman who works tech told me this two years ago and it still haunts me. #sexism
Universities love a display that signals their "internationalism" but they won't support or staff languages. At some universities you cannot study literature in any language that is not English.
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pay grad students
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I’m thrilled to announce the largest gift in Berkeley’s history, $252M, towards the home of our new division: Computing, Data Science, and Society. The building will house a large fraction of EECS, all of Statistics, the I School, BIDS, DS Education & more news.berkeley.edu/2020/02/29/lar
This is just to say
I have emailed the students
whom you told to come to campus because "the overwhelming advice from the government and medical professionals is that we are not at that stage – and that this may actually be counterproductive"
and have given them online options.
Congratulate me, friends. I have finally completed one extremely small, painfully overdue research task, my first of 2020. Yes, I said 2020.
Sorry but I think offering to read people's job materials does more for the people offering (and our survivor's guilt) than for people on the job market. Most of them don't need better letters; they need the existence of jobs.
The "Kant invented critical race theory and was against the Enlightenment" guy has an appointment at Princeton in a unit called the "James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions" and could universities please stop giving cover to shit like this?
Here at Sussex where we offer degrees in weaving baskets out of organic tofu,* even our students can do the maths that shows that there's no degree that can get you a high-paying job if the government is deliberately suppressing wages in every sector.
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I think the whole "academics are so bad at style" "what ever happened to GOOD WRITING" thing is the absolute worst. Writing is hard. People are trying to get things out at the edge of their brains. We follow certain conventions when we need to.
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Academic prose writers! What concrete steps have you taken to develop and refine your style?
It happened... I put my Foucault lecture on Panopto and it transcribed "Panopticon" as "Panopto Khan."
The arts are some legit witchcraft, & this is scary. To acquire technical proficiency in a plastic, literary, or performing medium is to gain the ability to press on other people's imaginations & feelings. This is a deep power, which can be developed further with time & training.
I extremely hate the "stop choosing to overwork" discourse, as if you could just opt out of a system on your own. That is not a thing. That is why we're striking.
Maybe tenure requirements shouldn't be so inflated that people have to work themselves into ill health for the better part of a decade? 🤔 Could there be another solution, maybe hiring enough full-time faculty?
There are a lot of people who want universities to do nothing more than launder inequality as personal merit and infuse the status quo with prestige. They have no interest in students learning anything, and certainly not anything that might challenge Common Sense.
Grades are a key ideological tool for laundering class domination as individual merit.
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“Unexplained” grade inflation. I bet some colleagues have pet theories. Here comes some nu-bureaucracy to lend a hand.
theguardian.com/education/2018
I have posted this before, but on the occasion of its recall by the library, I present the most Sussex thing ever to exist: a worn Lukács edition bearing both a coffee ring *and* a cigarette burn
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Technically today's my publication date; happy end of 2019!
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Just published: @ncecire's "Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge" is a compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/experime
Late last night as I was trying to fall asleep, I composed a paragraph of an essay in my head but successfully resisted getting out of bed to write it down. This morning, I remembered it and reproduced it on paper. There's a gold medal for this, right? Or like a unicorn sticker?
Wait, so tomorrow people are literally going to fire up Zoom and go to their MLA panels? I feel like I'm in another space-time continuum here.
Do a degree in American Studies: actually study Mickey Mouse! Good topic, actually. History of race, minstrel shows, urban planning, midcentury techno-utopianism, history of animation and film, ideologies of childhood, and of course copyright law.
I'm comforted by the fact that this is the last REF in human history due to the collapse of the state and our imminent deaths by environmental disaster. But still vote yes/yes on your UCU ballot.
The length that some people will go to prevent themselves from having to read a book is truly amazing.
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A #MachineLearning analysis of dozens of languages done by @PrincetonCS postdoc @billdthompson shows that the meaning of words is significantly shaped by culture, history and geography. bit.ly/2Eq3QAf
As this term draws to an end I just want to remind everybody that grades are reactionary and the more they are defended as "rigor" and "standards," the more relentlessly they are functioning to launder class and racial privilege as merit. Between feedback and grades is an abyss.
To claim that some people are normal and fine and can be trusted to give an account of themselves, and that others have to be scrutinized, medicalized, and pathologized, and are fundamentally not to be trusted because of how you view their bodies, is not "academic freedom."
"STEM" was always an invidious category premised on the idea that, while scholarship is moribund and useless in principle, certain fields have a claim to futurity, and therefore have value. Any new acronym just preserves that premise. This is as abject as "STEAM," maybe worse.
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From today, we're going to start using #SHAPE – Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy – to describe the subjects that helps us understand the human world. Find out more at: ThisIsSHAPE.org.uk
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Just layers and layers of fuckery, one on top of the other. A fuckery millefeuille.
What really gets me about university "wellness" culture is the whiplash between the patronizing admonishments to really take leave and rest and the instant blowback and suggestion that you're not pulling your weight if you actually do.
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The fantasy that there is a magical Good Writing that will let you bypass the labor of learning is mysteriously persistent.
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"I have never heard of this! I am confused! And it's okay; I don't need to get mad at the author because they did not tailor this explanation to my exact expertise, because I can just follow up the footnote and fill in my knowledge gaps like a fucking adult."
I carry an Epi-Pen. When I was in grad school at Berkeley, I had health insurance (& thanks to my union, & unlike Harvard grads currently on strike, dental). But an ambulance was two months' pay, so there were multiple times I WALKED to the ER. Let's not piss away this NHS thing.
A cool service that Twitter provides is men to explain your own tweet to you.
If you don't come out of this quarantine with several new internet enemies, you never lacked the time, just the discipline.
Has anyone else had the experience of students equating the word "Negro" to the n-word and/or demanding that it be censored, even in historical contexts (which are the only contexts in which it would appear in any case)?
Understaffing; parts of the degree mysteriously not joined up; reduced pastoral care; tutors hired at the last minute; insufficient support for disabled students; large seminar groups; loss of community: these are disruptive to students. A strike tries to do something about it.
Sorry, but I find this really facile. Scholarship can be important without being important to a lot of people.
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I want every academic to ask themselves: is what I'm writing about important? If so, write a book accessible to more than 100 people.
Can't get over the UCSB prison dorm. "Come to Santa Barbara, a beautiful coastal city surrounded by sea on three sides and mountains on the other. It's 70 degrees in winter and the breeze is scented with salt and orange blossoms. Also, you will be living in a sealed Tupperware."
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Forgive me
they are my students
and the #25 bus is a fucking petri dish
I'm still thinking about lost classroom time. Not lost due to strikes, but due to austerity: two-hour seminars quietly become one-hour seminars; three-hour seminars become two-hour seminars; a lecture component is scuttled; a workshop goes away; the size of the class rises.
I just figured out that if you delete passive-aggressive emails you can prevent yourself from replying to them.
I am aware of many academics, especially BIPOC and women, who are made to feel FOR YEARS that their work isn't good enough bc they get rejections that disingenuously talk about "fit" or "rigor" from people who are patting themselves on the back for their commitment to "kindness."
What's happening at SOAS is intentional on the part of the government. They mean for it to happen at a lot of places, and it will (and is now). Systematic disadvantaging of humanities fields in metrics, state harassment of int'l students, forced tuition-dependency: it adds up.
The truth is that if you teach race, gender, sexuality, disability, your academic freedom is always in danger. Not a trivial concern at all.
In line with UCU guidance, because I am overseas, in lieu of striking I will donate 100% of my salary for the three strike days to the UCU strike fund: ucu.org.uk/fightingfund
I fully support the industrial action for fair pay and pensions and against casualization.
One of the nicest things about a labor action is seeing workers across the universities in solidarity, instead of participating in the Hunger Games-style competitions for students and resources that managers claim are necessary.
Counterpoint: his writing is relatively accessible and scare-mongering doesn't help people have the confidence to take on challenging yet worthwhile texts. You can read it without getting every nuance and it's absolutely fine. twitter.com/ft_variations/
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The point is that college essays do not exist because we have a critical national shortage of 2,000-word essays about _Jane Eyre_; it's because students need to do the super hard cognitive work of learning to use language as a tool for thinking
UK universities can learn from US universities that you absolutely do not need exam boards, moderation, or a one-thousand-step process for submitting grades. US universities can learn from UK universities that you absolutely do not need cops on campus.
Ok but for real, it's 65 pages of *years* of fuckery going back to *1979.* It's so bad. Harvard and Chicago both need to answer for this. twitter.com/Greene_DM/stat
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Imagine being so entirely sexist as to suppose that there could be a benefit conferred by "looking young" that could in any way begin to mitigate the dismissal and erasure of your many years of professional achievements. I wonder what that benefit is supposed to be.
Grades are ideological fairness theater created to justify class oppression, thank you and good day
I'm thinking of setting up an auto-reply that just says "Do not email me."
Surprised to see so many people unironically tweeting about how great it is that their alma mater/affiliated institution made it to the top 37 or whatever in the latest bullshit uni ranking. As if such rankings didn't exist precisely to undermine education as a whole.
Everyone knows the Foucault thing was a transphobic dog whistle, right? Of course it pulls up some bog standard culture wars nonsense as well, but fundamentally it's about insisting on gender essentialism, part of a global far-right attack on the study of gender and sexuality.
Your occasional reminder that tenure was abolished in the UK under the Thatcher administration and weirdly enough it did not slow the precaritization of the profession at all 🤔
Hello! I am on strike.
This article on the "student-centered" software that these high school students hate nypost.com/2018/11/10/bro puts me in mind of Gert Biesta's observation that the shift away from "teaching" toward "learning" occludes the labor of teaching. publications.uni.lu/bitstream/1099
Lots of people are responding defensively to this but I think it's very possible that literally being world class in your area of research but still being treated like chopped liver by your employer might skew one's perception of what it means to be good at something
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Something I've noticed about many academics over the years is that if they're into something--running, chess, violin, painting, etc--they can't stand not being really, really good at it. They consider themselves terrible at something if they're not nearly world class.
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The university will not even acknowledge that they have been harmed.
Can't believe I had the occasion to whip out this seasonally themed strike placard AGAIN
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So I'm on the PMLA Advisory Committee for American 1900-1950 and did you know? Submissions in that area are hella few and far between. Submit your articles if you have 'em, folks. Nothing quite like that weird double column layout we all know and love.
Ok I'm ten seconds into the pilot and if someone congratulated me on becoming chair I would understand it as a declaration of war
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I say "the" but actually there are many disappeared labor categories.
But this one has implications everywhere, because it's widely not seen as work or a skill, **and it is.**
The form absolutely should NOT be used to upload each chapter of Moby Dick one by one
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The misleadership of @RutgersU has completely lost the plot. They have morphed from a public university to big brother. Shameful
If you say the word "empirical" three times in front of the mirror, a Science appears
Tenured fac volunteering to do extra work unpaid because contingent fac are getting sacked and calling it solidarity... 😑
It's really telling how the first reaction of some folks in the UK is to take US racism as a sign of British virtue. It would be inappropriate even if it were true. But it's not true. Thread from a wonderful historian of the Caribbean.
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So we’re clear: the United States of America was first 13 British colonies. The British set up slavery in those 13 colonies and indeed slavery was in place in the 13 colonies (speaking generally) for longer than slavery existed in the US.
Stop claiming that postdocs are in contract posts bc they're underqualified for permanent; it's bc HE is casualized.
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"The more you can build the skills of your postdocs so they're eligible for future academic posts, the better”
theguardian.com/higher-educati
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Quite honestly, Discipline and Punish. It's so widely taught I don't know how people manage to not read it, but there it is. Also Orientalism.
The tendency to disappear digital labor, not count it, not see it, is very well documented. It's a significant part of why academics are so overworked (though not the whole story). Digital labor is always treated as nonexistent or somehow making work easier when it's the opposite
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1hour is absolute bollocks. If you have taught before just to load slides to virtual learning environment and then link any session recording to the VLE after takes AT LEAST 30 min. I would say a 1h lesson repeat takes min 2hr prep. I would say at least 8h for a new session
I am so uplifted by the fact that they tore that statue down and put it in the water. Beautiful.
On this day I have seen the body of my mortal enemy, this damn book, stamped out on the pulped and dried flesh of trees and bound, and am I dead? NOT YET.
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University managers would rather pay scabs to give students feedback like this than negotiate with the workers who have been giving real, professional feedback year on year while taking pay cuts each time twitter.com/DrOliverSmith/
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Each day I consider faking my own death and disappearing into the night because it's the only way I can imagine managing my workload; hbu?
Yes, the world is in flames, but I just need to enjoy Scott Walker being voted out for a minute here. Congratulations, Wisconsin.
Just discovered this new #wellness tip, it is called finishing your index and vowing never to look at your #fucking #manuscript ever again
Btw, can I point out that the Home Office has been charging foreigners to use the NHS for several years now, in an up-front very large lump sum at the point of visa application, even though visa holders are paying the exact same taxes as everyone else? Obviously the beginning.
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£20 for a GP appointment and £66 to go to A&E is designed to kill the poor, the elderly and disabled. This is a class war they've been waging against us for years and it's time to start fighting back before we lose everything.
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And then!! People get mad that they can't understand academics' writing! Specialized reading is a skill though?? What do you think we were learning to do in grad school?
Ok I made one, not as funny as the archives one but I'm currently living this truth
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I edit the shit out of my stuff but it still comes out a pile of linguine sometimes. Words are not a transparent medium. They represent the labor of thinking. Thinking is hard.
I am still reeling from this Wright State scab ad, in part because of what it says about academia. "Move to a new location where you have no friends or support network to be exploited, pitted against colleagues, and treated as disposable in your turn."
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Wright State advertising for "long term adjunct teaching" starting immediately, AND offering on-campus housing for out-of-area scabs. Wonder if they've hired the Pinkertons, too. SHAME. SHAME. SHAME. higheredjobs.com/faculty/detail