Abstracts and Their Mysterious In-Betweens: Attuning to the Lacuna of Scholarly Communications

The Pedagogical Benefits of Responding to CFPs as Openings

The awarding of graduate degrees is often predicated on writing theses and dissertations, which we as authors are then forced to defend. But in focusing so much of graduate education on producing these documents as the major culminating event, we can overemphasize a genre that we’ll never revisit, other than to possibly make other people write in it. A scholarly career is frequently spent writing articles, and if there are book-length projects, publishers tend not to be interested in texts that read like dissertations, so even the dissertations that do become books are still substantially rewritten.

Responding to CFPs would allow us to redirect at least some energies toward other forms of scholarship, instead. For instance, if a pedagogical goal is to learn how to formulate a research question or choose an area of focus situated within a field’s contemporary discourse, attempting to craft responses to CFPs can be good practice, for possible directions and manageable scope are often implied in CFPs. If this makes sense overall as scholarly practice, then when we put together projects involving CFPs, we might consider being even more open to including and working with graduate student contributors.

And inasmuch as we might think of ourselves as lifelong learners, CFPs offer openings—openings to collaborate and think with others, openings to meet new people, to share ideas, to be, to begin, and sometimes, perhaps—in a few hundred words or less—openings to begin all over again.

CFPs as a Scholarly Genre

Calls for papers often make references to bodies of literature, but what if we consider CFPs to constitute a body of literature itself, or in other words a genre? Considering CFPs as a genre might shift the ways in which we respond to CFPs, and those of us who partake in textual analysis, narrative interpretation, and ideological critique might bring those approaches to bear upon the initial abstracts that are often requested in the process. For instance, in treating an individual CFP as a narrative, being attendant to the narrative gaps and ideological presumptions can often provide us with the framework for a paper. And typically, when we encounter a narrative and find what it says without saying, it is then that we begin to make intertextual connections.

Here we use the CFP calling for papers on discourse theory as an example of what it might mean to treat CFPs as a genre and object of discourse theory. From this CFP itself, we show how one could develop the idea for the very approach we describe in this abstract.

Public Scholarship in Miniature: Pedagogies Without Paywalls, But…

Amid calls for public scholarship are ways in which—at least in part—scholarship is already open. Books and edited collections involve promotional abstracts for marketing purposes, just as academic journal articles make use of structured and narrative abstracts alike. These abstracts, regardless of whether they have been indexed, can eventually be collected through text-mining, machine learning, and web scraping, after which their metadata can inform open-knowledge graphs that become part of searchable sites like Wikidata.

The ways in which abstracts can be accessed and processed may not be at the forefront of our thinking. In fact, abstracts can often be the very last thing that, with the relief-filled glee of eating a celebratory dessert, we tack onto a newly finished manuscript. There might not be anything that we can do about our writing getting caught up in the vortex of Big Data, but at the very least, if we have written abstracts with more purposiveness than “now I can click ‘save’ and upload this to the submission site,” we can rest assured that we have at least had some control over what we thoughtfully put in front of a paywall. From a public scholarship and community engagement perspective, this could be an opportunity to make the take-aways of our scholarship more accessible to public audiences.

At the same time, however, we should be careful not to use abstracts as substitutes for our longer-form work. Were we to do this, it would be like substituting a movie trailer for the movie. This suggests that there is value in our longer-form writing, value beyond the main ideas. In approaching abstracts as a genre of scholarly writing unto itself, we suggest that taking abstract writing seriously as a practice could be an exercise in service of both our short- and longer-form writing, for the exercise of purposeful abstract writing brings yet another question to the fore: Were the thousands of other words I wrote worthy of reading?

New Social Contracts for a Common Good: Toward Sharable Knowledge

Transformative approaches to education for children, youth, and adults are—and have been—needed. In response, the International Commission on the Futures of Education (2021) calls for a new social contract for education in Reimagining Our Futures Together, one based on human rights and “principles of non-discrimination, social justice, respect for life, human dignity and cultural diversity” (p. iii). This contract, the Commission continues, “must encompass an ethic of care, reciprocity, and solidarity” and “strengthen education as a public endeavour and a common good” (p. iii).

Given the interconnectedness of both the futures of education and work, we might read Reimaging Our Futures Together alongside economic policy reports anticipating that 50% of the workforce will have needed to upskill or reskill by 2025 (World Economic Forum, 2020). Taken together, these policy reports call not only for a single new social contract, but for several new social contracts overall. If the visions expressed in these and similar reports are achieved as written, then the futures of education and work will soon, if not already, involve building a knowledge commons.

Still, we should exercise caution if enlightenment notions of the social contract persist. Namely, if there is a tacit belief that freedoms should be surrendered to the sovereign in exchange for protection, that does not necessarily mean that the universal right to nonharmful, beneficial knowledge should be surrendered as the domain of the proprietary in exchange for personal gain. Toward that end—emphasizing that it not always desirable that all knowledge be shared—we support the co-creation of shareable knowledge. This can be done by establishing mutually beneficial relationships with the knowledge repositors and producers, along with other interested parties. To accomplish such relationships, the new social contracts must conceptualize certain sharable knowledges as a public good.

Ethical Reflections on Participatory Information Processing

As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to develop, so does the ability to create participatory archives and data sets in real-time. Given the scope of digital information, the possibilities for what can be collected, displayed, and processed are expanding into the public, as recent trends in crowdsourcing, citizen science, and citizen archiving bear out. Expanding upon earlier volunteer-initiatives—like SETI@home, which used internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and Foldit, which crowdsources protein science through an interactive computer game (Koepnick, 2019)—everyday people are now regularly contributing to a wide range of participatory knowledge creating and processing initiatives.

For instance, volunteer analysts currently search event displays for signs of long-lived particles produced in the particle collider at CERN, where they also make “tiny black holes” (CERN, 2022). Other volunteers examine images from deep space telescopes to identify distant galaxies and support attempts to measure dark energy; use global satellite imagery to document environmental degradations and human rights violations; and provide multilingual translations for disaster assistance and humanitarian aid.

Others collect artifacts and build new, participatory archives. Individuals, groups, and cultural heritage organizations alike have been interested, for instance, in creating versions of museums without walls, and at the time of this writing, 1,300 librarians use open-source tools to preserve information from thousands of museum, library, and archival websites as part of the initiative for Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (2022).

Simply put, the ways in which we collect, analyze, share, access, and interact with information are rapidly changing, and it is imperative that the ethical components of these practices not be overlooked. For instance, while on first gloss, it may seem to be a good thing to examine satellite imagery for instances of human rights violations, making such information public could inadvertently teach those who violate human rights better ways to avoid detection. Thus, before publicly processing information, an ethical comportment generally asks both: What should count as information that’s ethically permissible to gather and publicly share? And further, in what circumstances is there a public ethical imperative to make sure that information is not lost?

Annotation as Restorative Methodology

In Annotation, Kalir and Garcia (2021) observe that the act of “annotation is written with the warp and weft of our texts, patterning the fabric of everyday life” (p. 8). In turning to annotation, and thereby “foreground[ing] an element of paratext over the often privileged text,” the authors explore authorship, expertise, intention, and expression at the same time that they examine how annotation creates opportunities in information, commentary, power, conversation, and learning (p. 13). In so doing, Kalir and Garcia offer many direct possibilities for annotation. Kalir and Garcia also make general reference to the “Annotation Tuesday!” feature of the Nieman Storyboard project, in which previously published pieces of writing are republished; reprints include questions posed to the author, which the author answers, in an annotated Q&A format embedded in the original text (ex., McDonald & Cole, 2016). We believe that such practices can make evident relations of power often erased in published texts.

In extending annotation into the realm of methodology, annotation might inform multimodal inquiries, participatory research, and examinations of not only extant marginalia, but also what Kalir and Garcia describe as anchored paratext (glossaries, notes, further readings, and the like). In short, we suggest that integrating annotation into methodological practice has the potential to create openings for inclusive communications by making accessible the work often erased through the finality of publication. #AnnoConvo

The Question for the Time that Will Have Come After: Organizing for a Utopia of Systemic Change

Although there continues to be work to be done, the progress that activists have made regarding issues of justice should not go unacknowledged. Much of this work has been intersectional with respect to immigration justice, abolitionism, antiracism, anticolonialism, AAPI safety, Indigenous rights, LGBTQIA+ activisms, and gender equity, to name a few. Furthermore, discriminatory health care practices leading to inequitable outcomes for BIPOC populations, trans and non-binary people, and people with disabilities amid a global pandemic—or what has also been described as multiple pandemics—have been made clear. There has been renewed emphasis on aspects of social mobility and economic opportunity, among them the affordability and accessibility of higher education, available child care, pay gaps, digital divides, the invisibility of remote work, and the Great Resignation. Diversity, equity, and inclusion have gained attention not only in the workplace, but in society as a whole. Meanwhile, inflation has increased, along with it the unaffordability of food, water, and shelter—all of which constitute basic needs. And even at home, when there is a home, people who identify as women and girls frequently are unsafe in a shadow pandemic where violence has intensified. Moreover, the erosion of the protections for reproductive rights are leading to the erosion of broader rights such as privacy. As this occurs, the need to advance equity continues, along with the need to organize for systemic change.

But what is the relationship between organizing and activism? Activism is often directed against institutionally organized injustice. Activism, in a sense, is an organized activity meant to undo what gets organized by unjust institutions, but with the caveat that the type of organization pertaining to activism and institutionalized injustice is different. More specifically, institutionalized injustice partakes in hierarchical organization that takes as its end the perpetuation of oppressions serving the benefit of those at the top of the hierarchy. As a response, activism arises organically and as such, gives rise to self-organizing systems that are often adept at dismantling hierarchical organizations. However, because self-organizing systems are nongoverned by definition, they are not always well-positioned for governing when governance is necessary. There is a continued need to explore how activism can contribute to governance without reproducing the hierarchical organization that makes institutionalized injustice possible in the first place. In other words, unjust systems certainly need to be dismantled, but once this is accomplished, we need to be sure that what we replace them with does not lead to more of the same. Thus, the question becomes: If they are, how are utopias organized?

UX Utopias

When it comes to utopian imaginaries, there are questions regarding who designs utopias and the processes through which utopias are designed. These questions underlie an anxiety, perhaps, that utopias may not be for everyone—that they are only intended for a privileged few. Although most utopian-thinkers would likely make strong arguments against exclusion, as that tends to be the very opposite of the stated goals that most utopian-proponents are trying to achieve, questions do remain. These questions are not unreasonable, given the many inequities and stratifications that continue to exist. It can be difficult to imagine our way out of the conditions in which we live, and utopias ask us to have faith in systems and people that we may not have.

Yet, because utopias might also be possible—possible beyond what we might individually imagine—they are a risk worth taking. The answer to the question of who is involved in utopian design, then, might be as many as possible. Furthermore, the answer to the question of how might involve not only the methods of user experience design (also known as UX, UXD, and UED), but also, in following disability studies, the principles of universal design. In emphasizing inclusion from the beginning, we might be closer to reaching the utopian imaginaries of which we dream. This is important, for, as Freire (1992/2021) reminds us, “Hope is an ontological need” (p. 2).

Appeals to Logos, not Pathos: Beyond Hope and Anxiety in Critical Scholarship

Freire (1992/2021) reminds us that “Hope is an ontological need” (p. 2). However, there are ways in which to read anxiety as that which brings an ontological being into existence in the first place. And if one thinks further, one might notice that both hope and anxiety share more similarities than one would initially expect. Namely, both hope and anxiety have indeterminate objects. We see this in everyday grammar. Whereas an utterance such as, “I think,” is incomplete, “I’m hopeful,” or “I’m anxious,” are not. Furthermore, one can express either hope or anxiety given the same set of nonvolitionally influenceable circumstances, so much so that it would seem that hope and anxiety are cut from the same cloth, only one is positively valenced, the other negatively.

So when we are told to have hope toward good outcomes, say, might this be an imperative to realize a sort of compulsory achievement that is at the same time beyond our control? Might it be the case that when we are told to be hopeful, such a command cannot help but rouse in us an ineluctable anxiety?

Scholarship often appeals to either hope or anxiety when it takes up urgent situations: the job market and our academic careers, the pandemic, institutionalized injustice, impending mass extinction. However, might we think beyond using either hope or anxiety as facile caps when we do not know how to end our papers that tackle the world’s problems? I [James] suggest that in such situations, we might instead turn toward a rhetoric of invitational logic in the service of sharing technique and collaborative knowledge creation. We might not know the answers to the questions we pose, but maybe others do. Still, there is no need to create spirals of unfulfilled hope or profound anxiety in seeking help. And true, critical scholarship has often critiqued certain “logics” but perhaps we might get further by not abandoning logic in general, being mindful to use and create logics together.

Ideologies of Loneliness

In the age of digital connectivity and social media, many have experienced—and are still experiencing—unexpected and prolonged feelings of isolation. There are often fewer meaningful interactions in our personal and professional lives, and the connections that do remain increasingly take place onscreen. It can seem as if we are connected to everyone and to no one at the same time, as if we are on display constantly, yet never truly seen.

Adjusting to a world different from the one that was before can be a profoundly lonely experience. However, loneliness is not new—it is just something that is perhaps becoming more apparent and better understood. For many, experiences of the world had been very lonely already. Counterintuitively, loneliness can be a shared experience affecting many—an experience that remains lonely because, in turning inward, it is experienced singularly. Without pathologizing loneliness, there may be opportunities, in some instances, for some to reimagine how meaningful connections might be made. In fact, one of us [James] knows this through transformative personal experiences regarding housing insecurity, having come to understand that at least some of the aggravators of loneliness could be ideological.

One thing common to colonialist, supremacist, and capitalist ideologies, for instance, is the fantasy of the singular, self-sufficient individual. These ideologies fail to understand our necessary community with other ontological beings, our being-with. Inasmuch as we have been unwillingly inundated with negative ideological messages, uncritical acceptance of this fantasy of self-sufficiency also forecloses the fact of our dependency upon others. The fantasy of self-sufficiency can lead us to believe falsely that we are alone because we had been.

Reimagining range in scale and scope of our being-with, albeit even modestly, might open up ways to realize how we have always already been in community. And in so doing, this might help us to engage in unanticipated collaborations and perhaps even make new friends.

Trauma Studies: A Caution from Nonexperts to Other Nonexperts

There is an increasing focus on well-being in higher education for students, staff, faculty, and administrators alike. Some have suggested that well-being has become part of the expanding mission of higher education, and that, moving forward, well-being should be incorporated more intentionally and more permanently into colleges and universities. Among others, this can be seen within recent trauma-informed teaching pedagogies, trauma-informed workplace designs, and trauma-informed returns to campus. As trauma-informed practices have gained traction, several areas of emphasis have risen to the fore, including intergenerational trauma, anxiety and stress, burnout, grief, and a sense of ambiguous loss. Moreover, as recent surveys of students and personnel in higher education indicate, significant percentages of people are currently reporting at least one indicator of post-traumatic stress, if not more.

In taking these findings seriously, we applaud as both good and necessary renewed efforts to address trauma. However, given the sudden proliferation in the academic interest in trauma, we—as nonexperts ourselves—would still like to caution that trauma should not be taken lightly, with the levity of the next academic buzzword. From the standpoint of deontological ethics, there are reasons that we nonexperts should avoid engaging in an exploitative study of trauma that treats trauma as no more than the newest academic fashion, one wherein the lived experience of others is used as a means to an end. When trauma is taken up by nonexperts in this way, the potential to do harm is real.

Climate Change as the Biggest Health Risk: Faceful Encounters With Narrative Medicine and the Medical Humanities

According to the World Health Organization (2021), climate change now represents the single biggest health threat facing humanity. In tandem with disparate vulnerability factors and questions regarding the capacity of health care systems to respond, there are many serious health risks that relate indirectly and directly to climate change. The 2021 World Health Organization fact sheet on climate change and health, for example, lists the following: injury and mortality from extreme weather events; heat-related illness; respiratory illness; water-borne diseases and other water-related health impacts; vector-borne diseases; malnutrition and food-borne diseases; noncommunicable diseases; zoonoses; and mental and psychosocial health. Although neither narrative research nor the humanities will remedy climate change health risks alone, several interconnecting approaches within them have the potential to respond. Specifically, the medical humanities have the ability to engage with multiple frameworks in narrative medicine.

Within the broader context of climate change, but also on a day-to-day basis everywhere, health care systems (and the personnel who work within them) must fully treat people as people. Climate change risks elevate the urgency of this long-existing need, particularly as it relates to diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and antiracism. Narrative Medicine by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, (2007), for example, draws from Indigenous perspectives and notes that narrative medicine “arises from the impossibility of separating treatment from the stories told about the treatment, the audience hearing the stories, and the context in which the stories are told” (p. 5). Furthermore, The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine (Charon et al., 2017) and contributions from medical sociologists such as Arthur Frank (1995) have been foundational to the discourse. In addressing these and other writings from intersectional perspectives throughout (e.g., Green, 2011; Holmes, 2015; Mehl-Madrona & Mainguy, 2014), the fields of climate change, health, narrative medicine, and the medical humanities can work together on behalf of one of the largest equity challenges for humanity yet to come. By turning to narrative medicine and the medical humanities, we can resituate abstract and faceless exigencies with face-to-face encounters with the individuals whom climate change affects.

The Anthropause?: Revisiting Narratives of the Now

One of the most recent temporal orientations to the anthropocene is the anthropause, a proposed term that—in reference to the early months of the pandemic—describes the “considerable global slowing of modern human activities, notably travel,” that occurred (Rutz et al., 2020, p. 1156). As a result, some have been quick to celebrate the anthropause from an ecological standpoint, using evidence from this brief interval of time to encourage environmental policies that might recreate its effects. Yet, as scholars in biology and wildlife ecology such as Rutz et al. observe, not all of the changes that happened during the anthropause were positive, particularly from other species’ point of view. They write:

for some species, the pandemic may have created new challenges. For example, various urban-dwelling animals, like rats, gulls or monkeys, have become so reliant on food discarded or provided by humans that they may struggle to make ends meet under current conditions. . .. humans are flocking to green spaces in or near metropolitan areas, potentially disturbing resident wildlife. (Rutz et al., 2020, p. 1156)

The relationships between humans and ecologies are complex, often in ways that can be difficult to recognize over time—even in the timeframes in which we live. In approaching the anthropause as narratives of the now, one can extend Erin James’s (2022) suggestion that, “The Anthropocene is both a narrative and is incapable of being narrated, at once a story unfinished and not a story at all” (p. 3).

Narratives are always already incomplete, and so long as narratives circulate—just as the temporal now is an unpausable eternal present—narrative movement itself can never be paused, for the flow of narrative gaps are themselves indivisible. Thus, great care should be taken with respect to narrative circulation and the necessarily partial stories we choose to tell. For instance, not all human ways of living have contributed to climate change, but mostly extractive practices; nonetheless, the worst effects of climate change are and will be largely experienced by the Global South. In this regard and others, we suggest that the narrative of the anthropause perhaps contains lies of omission, so to speak, whereby agents of harmful change have all too plot-conveniently written themselves out.

Tipping Points, Cascades, and Catastrophe Theory

When faced with anomaly or crisis, as Kuhn (1962/1970) writes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, researchers not only reconsider—but also change—what it is they have been doing. This is also what happens when researchers are unexpectedly faced with catastrophe. “The unexpectedness is because the conditions surrounding the event change slowly and continuously. Nevertheless, a sudden discontinuity—a radical jump—occurs, overthrowing the existing order” (Castrigiano & Hayes, 1993/2018, p. xii). When this happens, one form can give way to another in the midst of catastrophic change, and what emerges has the capacity to exceed the sum of its parts. Given that cascading effects have been set into motion and that planetary tipping points have already been passed (per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), it is possible that we are on the brink of radical change.

What’s Past is Prologue: Planetary Extinction and Space Imperialism

Will it be such that, having damaged this planet to such an extent that it becomes unlivable, the expansion of humanity will continue into space? If so, will imperialism, settler colonialism, and extractivism be repeated off-world? Will we or the generations that follow witness a new manifest destiny, one that is eventually galactic, universal, or cosmic in scope? In engaging with these questions, cosmopolitics (Stengers, 1997/2010, 1997/2011) and planetarity (Spivak, 2012, 2015) imagine a different way. As life on this planet moves closer toward what may be a sixth mass extinction event, this is the time to inquire and work toward alternative possibilities: while the past may be prologue, the future has yet to be written.

Five out of Four Horsemen Agree: A Critique of Health and Wellness Capitalism

Based on calculations of the Forbes list of billionaires and World Bank data, at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Oxfam made it clear that the pandemic created roughly 30 billionaires per hour (Oxfam, 2022; Peterson-Whithorn, 2022). Because it seems unlikely that billionaires are eager to let their revenue streams dry up, just as we were vigilant about scrutinizing industry and war-profiteering after Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, we should monitor the growth of health and wellness capitalism.

Following Trevor Hancock, Žižek (2022) suggests that humans, through our use of techniques to ward off death, might be the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, so to speak. And while it is easy to point all fingers toward billionaires, health and wellness capitalism could spiral out of control when we are not reflective upon the ways in which we are complicit with this form of capitalism, complicit owing to an illogical attitude that our own personal survival may be achieved at any cost, even at the price of mass extinction. While the desire to live is an ethical one, we should pursue it through energies that are minimally destructive, if destructive at all. This pursuit could be guided by learning to live with alternative energies.

Solarities: Living with Alternative Energies

Perhaps solarity requires of us another imaginary, one shared by many cultures—not of growth but of abundance. Abundance is what literally moves with a wave, ab + undare, of undulation. Hence it is nothing like the overcoming of limits, the stockpiling of surplus siphoned to increase production, but on the contrary requires an embracing of earthly metabolisms, even of degrowth. (in Vemuri & Barney, 2022, p. 12)

Solarities offer not only the promise of clean and abundant energy, but also a possible framework of abundance through which to live. In other words, as the collective writing Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice suggests, there is another way. It may, at times, be messy. It may also risk uneven implementation, especially if the extractivisms, exploitations, and slow violences (Nixon, 2011) of the past are allowed to continue. Within this larger conversation, therefore, as Marder (2017) writes in Energy Dreams of Actuality, there is a choice to be made: “the dominant ideology, bent on extracting the last drop of energy from everything and everyone, or the dream of energetic existence that cares for and preserves both beings and being itself” (p. xi). As such, solarities and energy dreams are situated within the emerging field of energy humanities (Szeman & Boyer, 2017) and its related texts (e.g., Schumacher, 1973/2010). Thus, the question becomes: What are the alternative energies through which we might live? An alternative to modes of energy that extract and consume might be a consideration of unlimited and nondestructive ways to generate energy.

The Future of Cultural Studies?: The Dialectic of Conjunctural and Intersectional Analyses

What is the future of cultural studies? The future of any discipline implies a shared project, and if cultural studies has a shared project, it could be conjunctural analysis (Grossberg, 2019). To understand a future, it can often be helpful to look to the past. The project of conjunctural analysis has its history in Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978) and the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1947/2010). It is in these texts wherein we are given nascent conceptualizations of the conjuncture as relations of ephemeral, historically contingent social forces. However, cultural studies often reaches a theoretical impasse when thinking about the concept of a conjuncture when it attempts to delimit the bounds of its spatio-temporal scope.

From yet another perspective, cultural studies also has a shared project in intersectional analysis. Intersectional analysis has its history in the theorizations of Crenshaw (2022) and Hill Collins (2000, 2019), but it too, as Nash (2008) points out, gets into a theoretically obscure area with its competing ontologies of intersection. Namely, intersectionality either applies only to multiply marginalized individuals, or it is a generic framework by which to describe any ontological being who exists at the intersection of multiple spheres of intersecting identities.

Perhaps possibilities are opened up by bringing together both conjunctural analysis and intersectional analysis. Conjunctural analysis has a fluid conception of power relations. Intersectional analysis transcends the problem of spatio-temporal boundness inasmuch as identity as a logical construct, while always already spatio-temporal, is conceivable without reference to space-time. Thus, were conjunctural analysis and intersectional analysis to move forward together, perhaps we could develop a methodology providing theorists and researchers with a framework of analyzing power relations that imply subject positions of fluidly intersecting identities. Such a conceptual framework could account for ever-changing modes of being, both at once conjunctural and intersectional.

We Can Work from Home!: The Impending Vicissitudes of the Oikos

As more and more people have become accustomed to what they perceive as the convenience of working from home, reluctant employers refusing to adapt likely having no small part in what is being called the Great Resignation, is it really the case that we have been afforded more freedoms, or is working from home yet another capitalist trick to extract even more labor from people by blurring the boundaries of work and home life?

If the home is indeed the smallest unit of a territorialized sense of belonging, then what if it’s the case that worse than the colonio-fascist entitlement of being at home everywhere in the world, it’s the case that capitalism itself intrudes into the home in the guise of improved working conditions? What does this mean for hospitality when we’re given the forced choice of inviting the corporate into our homes? This incursion isn’t only through Zoom that does nothing to curb the voyeuristic gaze, but is evident in a seemingly ineluctable drive to have Instagram-worthy backdrops expediently delivered to us from online retailers. And this, too, while retailers such as Wayfair had also profited from furnishing detention centers from the un-homed, undocumented children forcibly separated from their families (Noguchi, 2019).

If the labor force in general is to adapt to this shift of never not being in one’s place of work, perhaps the emerging landscape can be navigated by examining resistances to the ever-blurred, never-not-at-work lives of many academics who find themselves in an increasingly neoliberal academy. We must resist conflating the economic with the oikonomic, which have perhaps never been clearly separated in a capitalist system of values because etymologically, they are of the same root.

Re: E-Cycling Cultures, or the Capitalist Fantasy of Healthy Consumption

Leaving the mall, we ran into a colleague, and Jasmine casually mentioned that she had just been test riding a Peloton, to which James hurriedly noted his noninvolvement: “I’m not,” he clarified, “like that commercial guy.” Although both of us enjoy cycling and its accompanying exercise—and James is not like that commercial guy—there is a sense in which the culture of e-cycling is commercial beyond heteropatriarchal marketing campaigns, but in the very literal sense of being supported by machines of data extractive capitalism that consume energy while literally taking us nowhere.

Unsubtly tied to marketing for specialized apparel and gear but also to things like Apple’s iTunes and not so secret hacks to allow for cookie-collecting Internet browsing, these machines touted as health positive collect more than users’ biometric data but are moreover apparatuses of Big Data, such that the data get caught up in a feedback loop wherein we ostensibly drive the machines that drive us as both consumers and consumer laborers. Far from Hegel’s dialectical spiral toward the end of history, one feels that this is more the hamster wheel of both platform and surveillance capitalism (Srnicek, 2016; Zuboff, 2019).

The capitalist logic of e-cycling culture partakes in cyclical, iterative processes. What has become a several billion dollar industry in the U.S. partakes in the ideology of wanton energy expenditure and the exploitation of the natural, such that riders to nowhere experience recorded simulations of cycling in the scenic global open—captured on GoPro footage that intentionally obscures climate change—from the comfortable rooms of the capitalist built environment: “Consume as you will,” we’re reassured, “for consumption is healthy for both you and the world, so get on that leaderboard!” Perhaps, however, it’s time we tell the e-cycling industry: “No, get on your bike!”

Circular Economies and Rethinking Intellectual Property

My idea for online retailers using reusable and returnable packaging came from a realization that I [James] had when visiting relatives in the Philippines. Glass soda bottles were recycled, but instead of collecting the bottles and melting them down, they’re simply washed, refilled, and topped off with a new bottle cap.

Circular economies minimize waste and reuse products to better allow for the conservation and regeneration of natural systems. As such, circular economies accomplish a rethinking of private property. Private property, in a sense, is equivalent to the right to destroy, to determine whether or not what one owns becomes mere waste. In attempting to eliminate waste, destruction is no longer a right in circular economies.

Applying the idea of circular economy to knowledge production, we might use this as a critique of intellectual property. When we claim ownership of shareable intellectual objects, produced through discovery, with our signature, we do what is tantamount to claiming the right to destroy that knowledge by retaining proprietary rights to it, for destruction has the effect of making what’s otherwise useable unusable. But there is no normative justification to claim such a right. Because truth in terms of aletheia is discovery, how can truth be owned in the first place? If we can own any type of intellectual object, it can only be falsity.

Thus, if we extend the ideas of circular economies to intellectual objects, we might remove knowledge from an economy where it is not a thing to be owned, but a thing to be shared and reused. Thus, knowledge commons would no longer be an exceptional response, but simply what we have. Before we go about partaking in ways of uncritical destruction—regarding whatever this or that may be—it is good to remember that someone else might need to use that. This seems like a better way to live.

Clickbait Scholarship: Interpellated? Critique Ideology With This One Weird Trick

If a sample size of two is enough by which to generalize, perhaps it is the fate of Hegelians everywhere to inadvertently write confusing titles. For instance, long ago, I [James] attended a keynote lecture given by a cultural studies scholar of great renown who said something to the effect of, “Contra Žižek’s claims in For They Know Not What They Do, I think people indeed know what they do, but act as though they don’t!” I then turned to my friend and asked, “Do you think he just read the title? He pretty much just repeated Žižek’s description of disavowal.” In any case, if such a thing could happen to Žižek, I’m really just happy that people know I have a book.

So if too long; didn’t read is a foregone conclusion, thank you for getting this far, but I really just want people to not forget about ideological critique. If you have not, please read some Žižek. That’s a good place to start.

“In This Paper. . .”: On the Scholarly Practice of Responding to CFPs

Other than not using exclamation points in your titles, attempting to include in-text citations to Berlant and Stewart (2019) and Queneau (2012) in one’s actual paper abstract, and resisting the temptation to make vague allusions to several-years-old song lyrics as though they’re new, what advice would one have for writing abstracts for CFPs? We attempt to show and not tell by reading a collection of select abstracts for papers we once thought absolutely for sure we’re totally going to write.

Spoiler Alert!: Mystery Novel as Scholarly Inquiry

Once it lived by Perec’s (1969/2005) A Void, but now it lives elsewhere. Still, Henri Lefebvre’s (2004/2014) The Missing Pieces continues to occupy a special place in my library. A book of just that, The Missing Pieces is simply a list of things that have gone missing in what one might call western culture. True, that it concerns itself primarily with western culture makes the missing pieces of The Missing Pieces all that is gone missing in the rest of the world. And yet I have a fascination for this book. On my bookshelf it is a reminder that at one point, I had only Volume 1 and Volume 3 of Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre, 1947/2008a, 1981/2008b), a reminder that many of my collections are still incomplete. But this is not the reason of my fascination.

Perhaps, as it’s reported that Yogi Berra once remarked, “I really didn’t say everything I said,” Henri Lefebvre didn’t write the book that he wrote, at least not that Henri Lefebvre. On the last unpaginated page, it’s revealed that this Henri Lefebvre was born in 1959!

Because Jasmine insisted that all our books be alphabetized by author, Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces is quite the opposite. Where there should be a gap, instead we find a hard, inexorable kernel, one that really does no more but to make salient that there are more gaps.

It strikes me that scholarship is but this. Ever are we encouraged to fill out the missing pieces, but try as we might, we create only more spaces of indeterminacy. We may turn to alternate modalities such as annotations or newer media—such as livestream video or podcasts—but the more we say, the more conspicuously we leave unanswered. It’s as though we’re in the business of writing mystery novels with plot-spoiling abstracts: “In this mystery novel, I will give a detailed account of how the butler did it,” as though we’re in the business, along with our colleagues at CERN, of creating tiny black holes.

Exergue: Introduction to the Researchers’ Cardbox

And today, the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into [their] own card index. (Benjamin, 1974–1976/2021, p. 63)

The Researchers’ Cardbox podcast is a free associational, transdisciplinary repository of seedling ideas. An attempt to partially catalog the missing pieces of scholarship, it includes annotations of other people’s published work, the unpublished underneath of our own, and other random stuff we like. Think Sunday brunch with friends, only on a Wednesday (Salvo & Ulmer, 2022; available at researcherscardbox.com).