Teachers, it’s time to flex fair dealing.

Yesterday, a happy coincidence: first, a highschool friend, now an educator, asked me out-of-the-blue on Facebook (it’s the kind of thing I love about FB) a question about copyright infringement cases involving educators; second, I received CAUT‘s new Guidelines for the Use of Copyrighted Material, a must-read primer on fair dealing for educators. I’ve reproduced my friend’s question and my response, extending the latter with more about fair dealing and CAUT’s guide — because more educators need to know how liberally we can and should be exercising our robust fair dealing rights.

Q: I need an example of a Canadian Copyright Infringement Case related to academics or education and am having trouble finding anything interesting on the net…. I thought you may have a ready example given your recent involvement on the subject. Any thoughts or suggestions on where I can find what I’m looking for?

A: Probably the most important case for copyright and education in Canada was Law Society of Upper Canada v. CCH Canadian in 2004. Michael Geist outlines and links to it in a recent blog post about fair dealing.

Canada’s Heritage ministry has some analysis of it (but keep in mind that this is one of the ministries responsible for tabling Bill C-32). The ministry analysis considers the opportunities and implications of the CCH decision, one important result of which is simply its formal recognition in law that “fair dealing, as construed by the court, now allows for a more flexible framework.” And while the ministry’s analysis suggests problems raised by the decision, it doesn’t suggest they’d be solved by the “digital locks” provision that made C-32 so hotly contested. Citing scholars’ and students’ dissatisfaction with licensing, the analysis attributes some of this to a failure of CanCopy (now Access Copyright) to recompense authors: “CanCopy ‘had more than $18 million in undistributed royalties, and no apparently systematic way of determining to whom this money belongs’.”)

Howard Knopf (whose blog, like Geist’s, is also very good on copyright) also summarizes the importance of CCH v. LSUC in this recent post:

…the CCH decision in the Supreme Court of Canada made it very clear that:
• “User rights are not just loopholes. Both owner rights and user rights should therefore be given the fair and balanced reading that befits remedial legislation.” and.
• “ The fair dealing exception under s. 29 is open to those who can show that their dealings with a copyrighted work were for the purpose of research or private study. ‘Research’ must be given a large and liberal interpretation in order to ensure that users’ rights are not unduly constrained.”

There are also some relevant fair dealing cases and appeals underway right now:

Province of Alberta v. Access Copyright. Knopf is blogging about it, as in this post from early May; according to Knopf, the case “involves the very important issue of whether material prescribed by a teacher or provided in multiple copies can be fair dealing.”

This blog post by Knopf makes reference to the SOCAN v. Bell case, which investigated “whether providing previews consisting of excerpts of works is fair dealing for the purpose of research that does not infringe copyright.” In May 2010, the Federal Court of Appeals decided that that the free 30-second previews provided by music download vendors like iTunes are to be treated as fair dealing for consumer research purposes. Geist is reporting new appeals to and interventions in that decision.

Notably, of these cases, only Alberta v. Access Copyright directly involves educational institutions. But all three cases have significant bearing on the educational exercise of fair dealing. Enter the CAUT Guidelines, and the following. As stated in the message to which CAUT attached its Guidelines:

There has been a good deal of controversy and conflicting advice regarding when copyrighted material may be copied without permission or payment to the copyright owner. CAUT is concerned that both users and owners of copyrighted material are treated fairly. To that end, CAUT has prepared the attached document [which] explains the legal foundation of copying rights and provides direction on its lawful exercise.

The “controversy and conflict” to which CAUT alludes has resulted from debates about Bill C-32 and about ACTA and CETA, from Access Copyright’s “astroturfing” against fair dealing in C-32, and also maybe from increasing actions over mere linking. Now dead but expected back from the grave soon, Bill C-32 promised good, clear fair dealing provisions for educators, albeit provisions trumped by protections for “digital locks” like DRM. Often compared to the USA’s DMCA, Bill C-32′s fair dealing for educators actually fell short of the flexible and generous provisions given US educators. Check out this syllabus for Martha Woodmansee’s course on copyright — look at all the freely available course readings. (If that’s what US fair use now affords, then Canadian fair dealing should, too.)

Access Copyright (AC) lobbied hard against C-32′s educational fair dealing provisions, all the while while negotiating a massively inflated licensing tariff for educators. The royalty-collecting society’s campaign, in effect, pitted the creators of published works against the educators who use them, caused much confusion over the perceived pros and cons of new copyright legislation, and also provoked lots of institutions to decline to renew their licensing agreements with AC. AC is vigorously opposing the fair dealing provisions in any new Canadian copyright legislation — after all, revised and expanded fair dealing provisions could well put a collecting agency like AC out of business.

Meanwhile, the mere act of hyperlinking is increasingly subject to regulation. In Crookes v. Newton (2009), the BC Court of Appeal ruled that a website owner is not liable for linking to defamatory sites, that decision is now being appealed. In March of this year, the US Dept of Homeland Security arrested an Internet user for linking. And AC’s proposed new tariffs for PSE call for the documentation of and collection of fees for any and all Internet linking done by teachers (this proposal has not been approved and could be debates for months if not years).

Taken together, all these different developments, together with privately imposed teaching policies and publishing guidelines (e.g. a limit of 150 words on quoted excerpts in refereed articles, which I’ve heard of anecdotally but can’t find documented), are chilling the climate for fair dealing, and enclosing that much more of the already shrinking commons of public knowledge. Which is to say, they’re chilling the climate for teaching. As Michael Geist told delegates at last year’s ABC Copyright Conference, fair dealing is a “use it or lose it provision”: if Canadian educators don’t start exercising our fair dealing rights more extensively and aggressively, we stand to lose them altogether under the pressure of Big Media’s hugely influential lobbying efforts.

Fortunately, court decisions like LSUC v. CCH can and should embolden us to flex our fair dealing rights, rather than shrink from doing so under threat of litigation. The legal precedents currently support a “large and liberal” interpretation of fair dealing, and, as public educators, we have, I think, an ethical responsibility — not to mention a huge convenience — to act on that interpretation, towards principled and productive pedagogy. Against the creeping chill over academic freedom and effective teaching, give CAUT’s Guidelines a read — take ten minutes to learn the basics of educational fair dealing — and start staking your claim to a patch of the knowledge commons. A modest and reasonable patch, tended properly and shared appropriately, can yield large and liberal teaching outcomes.

Works Consulted

CAUT. Guidelines for the Use of Copyrighted Material. Ottawa: CAUT/ACPPU, May 2011 http://www.caut.ca/uploads/Copyright_guidelines.pdf

Edmonds, Kelly. “Off with their heads! Copyright infringement in the Canadian online higher educational environment.” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 32.2 (2006) http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/52/49

Dhawan, Sona. “Potential Liability for Hyperlinking: Crookes v. Newton.” The Court [blog] 31 Mar. 2010 http://www.thecourt.ca/2010/03/31/potential-liability-for-hyperlinking-crookes-v-newton/

Federal Court of Appeal. Decisions of the Federal Court of Appeal [database]. http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/en/index.html

Geist, Michael. “The Canadian Copyfight Story: The Next Chapter.” ABC Copyright Conference. Athabasca U, 21 June 2010.

—. Michael Geist’s Blog. http://www.michaelgeist.ca/

Knopf, Howard. Excess Copyright [blog]. http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/

McCutcheon, Mark A. Academicalism [blog]. http://academicalism.wordpress.com/

Ministry of Canadian Heritage. “Fair Dealing in Canada.” Ottawa: Government of Canada, 22 May 2009. http://www.canadianheritage.gc.ca/pc-ch/org/sectr/ac-ca/pda-cpb/publctn/cch-2007/102-eng.cfm

Supreme Court of Canada. Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada [database]. Lexum/Supreme Court of Canada. http://scc.lexum.org/en/

Woodmansee, Martha. Intellectual property and the Construction of Authorship [course syllabus]. Case Western Reserve U, n.d. http://www.case.edu/affil/sce/authorship/syllabus.html

Speaking in tones

I’m a million different people from one day to the next. –The Verve, “Bittersweet Symphony”

Between drafting a paper for Congress and giving one, last Friday, to a remote audience in Marburg, I’ve been reflecting on the different voices I adopt in different media and genres (to say nothing of the million different performative personae that “I” go through on any given day).

As genres, the conference paper and research essay demand different kinds of tone, rhythm, and vocabulary. These basically boil down to keeping things simpler, more direct, and more repetitive (as well as much more concise) in a conference paper, to help a listening audience follow along. I’ve tried drafting conference papers with speaking in mind, but every time I read or speak draft work back to myself, it always needs more paring down and smoothing out.

Which got me thinking about blogging: what kind of voice do I take on in blogging? Is there even any single voice that emerges among posts — or do different posts themselves speak in different tones? My general sense is that the tone of most of my posts tends to be less formal and more conversational than that of either a conference paper or an essay.

Anyway, the upshot is that it might be worth trying to compose conference papers not as simplified research essays, as I’ve been doing, but rather as extended blog posts. It might be worth the thought experiment, if only to find out whether the paper would need fewer re-writes afterward.

Say goodbye to a self crystallized around a matrix of consistency. – Christine Tamblyn (150)

Further to the development of different voices in different apps, I don’t think there’s any point trying to discern any consistent tone for someone’s Twitter messages. The extreme brevity of the form, its preponderance of links, and its compulsive re-tweets all seem to work against establishing any consistent voice. It might be more accurate to think in terms of brand, not voice, for Twitter — with all the commodity fetishism that entails. But I think there is something to identifying one’s Facebook voice. It might be the parallax produced by me in my circle of “friends,” but Facebook seems to be where facetiousness and sarcasm reign; anytime anyone posts something serious, heartfelt, or otherwise real, it always seems jarring and inappropriate to me.

In admitting this, I think I’m admitting to a symptom of what Tobias van Veen calls “the cryptofascism of corporate perception”; in other words, the modes of communication that are structured and limited by corporate social media (to which the Elgg that supports the Landing is, I think, a notable open-source exception): “the technics of perception in which uncitizens engage with the social network aligns desire with socially networked consumerism. Desire is directed toward a ceaseless flow of objects and data (either LIKED or absented in response).” In other words, you can’t “dislike” something on Facebook; you can only disappear it by refraining to like or comment on it. On the implications of “corporate perception” like this for “the youth vote” in the recent federal election, van Veen writes:

There is no rebellion not because youth don’t care; there is no rebellion because youth live in a world created and catered through info-filtering mechanisms tailored so precisely to predict and provide for their consumer and erotic impulses that the practice of democratic choice has no place within it. One can LIKE but one cannot not like; there is no choice per se, only the metrics of one-way desire. [...] Youth—a category no longer of age but of consumer uncitizenry, which is to say, humans who only participate in collective processes through consumption and discourse with corporatized social networks—feel that with social networks and mobile communications that they, each and every one, are the centre of all attention. Uncitizens command and demand—not from their nation-states, but from their corporations, and what they demand is the short-term satisfaction of their pleasures.

van Veen’s point is that social networks erase the nation-state and thus cripple democratic participation in it: since, in social networks, the nation-state “does not exist as such—which is to say as a metric of consumer desire,” its virtual nonexistence helps expedite its material dismantling by the right-wing powers that be. (BTW, van Veen’s blog exemplifies a very different tone for scholarly blogging.)

I’m likewise preoccupied by the message of social media, as McLuhan might say: how social network technologies make specific kinds of environments, how they allow only certain, limited kinds of discourse and communication. And, in the process, how they privilege certain kinds of voices, and construct certain kinds of subjects.

Works Cited

Tamblyn, Christine. “Grafting Tentacles on the Octopussy.” Vulvamorphia: Lusitania 6 (1994): 147-52.

van Veen, Tobias. “Technics and Decrepit Democracy.” Fugitive Philosophy [blog]. 3 May 2011 http://fugitive.quadrantcrossing.org/2011/05/technics-decrepit-democracy/

The Verve. “Bittersweet Symphony.” Urban Hymns. Hut, 1997.

Cross-blogged from the Athabasca U Landing

Science fiction means business

The US-based Creative Science Foundation is hosting its second annual workshop in the UK this summer. According to the call for papers:

This workshop will explore the use of science fiction as a means to motivate and direct research into new technologies and consumer products. It does this by creating science fiction stories grounded in current science and engineering research that are written for the explicit purpose of acting as prototypes for people to explore a wide variety of futures. [...] In this way fictional prototypes provide a powerful interdisciplinary tool to enhance the traditional practices of research, design and market research.

The relationship between fiction and fact here is familiar enough to science fiction. In popular and fan discourses, this relationship tends to be mystified in terms of “uncanny prediction”: recent popular magazine articles detail “6 eerily specific inventions predicted by science fiction” and “11 astounding sci-fi predictions that came true.” In criticism and research, we find demystifications that investigate the material conditions linking science fiction to fact, extrapolation to production. Mark Fisher has helpfully coined the term “SF capital” to describe how science fiction works as a literary laboratory for real-world R&D, a resource for what Henry Jenkins calls “the military-entertainment complex” (75). A generation before Fisher, Marshall McLuhan — who was ambivalent about science fiction, and sometimes criticized for writing it -– had a firm, proleptic grasp on the idea of SF capital, which he well understood in his dual capacities as maverick scholar and corporate consultant:

Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer. (124)

What’s striking in the CSF is perhaps the boldness of business’ courtship of SF: how frankly SF capital is being recognized and instituted, in a peculiarly Utilitarian program to enlist SF production specifically for “consumer products” and “market research.” The CSF is, in a way, simply spelling out the terms of a long-standing if somewhat asymmetrical partnership. SF’s command of both a popular market and a certain counter-cultural cachet has positioned it, since its inception (in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), as more commodity than culture, hence its exile to the peripheries of legitimate “Literature,” according to a cultural-economic history provocatively explained by Samuel R. Delany (195). But is its future to be increasingly channeled into and defined by the speculations and futures we associate more with high finance and global capital than with cultural commentary and social progress?

Putting the question this way, of course, oversimplifies the numerous trajectories, formations, allegiances, and even definitions of science fiction; this is perhaps more an issue of science fiction studies, of the genre’s role in and relation to research: will a program like that of the CSF represent a route for delivering SF out of its encampment on the fringes of literary studies, towards more interdisciplinary and more broad-based social engagements, or will it merely transport it from one camp to another?

Works Cited
Creative Science Foundation. Intel Labs, Hillsboro, 2011.
Delany, Samuel R. and Carl Freedman. “A Conversation with Samuel R. Delany about Sex, Gender, Race, Writing — and Science Fiction.” Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 191-235.
Fisher, Mark. “SF Capital.” Transmat: Resources in Transcendent Materialism (2001).
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.
Kessler, Sarah. “11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True.” Mashable 25 Sept. 2011.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam, 1967.
Murdock, Colin. “6 eerily specific inventions predicted by science fiction.” Cracked 19 Nov. 2010.

A Romeo & Juliet mix. Happy Love Day!

In a grad class on Shakespearean adaptations, I presented a DJ mix as my seminar on Lorca’s El Publico: a Surrealist adaptation of a seminar seemed appropriate for Lorca’s Surrealist adaptation of Romeo & Juliet. (The seminar was a success: everybody danced.) In time for Happy Love Day* I’ve posted the set online, in two “acts.” (Seminar details and annotated playlist are housed at the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project.

PA System: A Romeo & Juliet mix (Act 1) cloudcast by sonicfiction.

PA System: A Romeo & Juliet mix (Act 1) by sonicfiction

PA System: A Romeo & Juliet mix (Act 2) cloudcast by sonicfiction.

PA System: A Romeo & Juliet mix (Act 2) by sonicfiction

* “Happy Love Day” is a spoof of “Valentine’s Day” in an episode of The Simpsons (“Trash of the Titans” [S9E22]. Fox, 26 Apr. 1998):

“Come on, Mom, The stores just invented this holiday to make money.”

Trash the slash

Note: this is a post about writing style only. I have nothing but love for slash fiction, I could take or leave slasher films, and I’m enough of a Nash the Slash fan to own some vintage vinyl.

A while ago, a colleague and I were discussing an invitation she’d received to write an article for the Popular Culture and Philosophy book series, whose titles tend to crowd the likes of Gramsci off the shelves of your local book monopoly’s “Cultural Studies” shelf. We discussed their submission guidelines, some of which left me wondering who exactly the market for these books is. The guidelines show a barely veiled hostility to academicalism throughout: they advise a contributor to “explain philosophical ideas” but avoid “jargon” — unless it’s “‘in-group’ phrases” that will be “familiar to fans of the [pop culture] topic”; they advise you not to spend pages discussing philosophy, but to mention the topic “regularly and frequently.” Okay. So these books are for fans, not philosophers.

Anyway. One imperative in the guidelines for Good Writing and Presentation caught my attention, under a header called “Avoid the monstrously ugly!”:

Avoid all use of slashes to indicate alternatives (“in a modern/progressive vein”; “theocratic/patriarchal”); this habit betrays slovenly thinking as well as a tin ear for verbal expression. (If a polarity is intended, employ a hyphen: “left brain-right brain,” “freewill-determinism.”)

And this is where the guidelines started to make sense. I share these editors’ loathing of the punctuational slash — / — in academic writing, specifically in the literary criticism and Humanities research that tend to dominate my reading, and that definitely tend to overuse the slash. I read the slash as a symptom of the stylistic malaise of scholarly writing, which has prompted not only the admonitions of editors but also the lamentations of scholars. In literary criticism, this malaise was the subject of a recent Readers’ Forum of English Studies in Canada (ESC), edited by Stephen Slemon, called “Why do I have to write like that?” Dr. Slemon calls literary criticism a “baleful genre,” but holds out hope that professional reflection on it signals “a genuine capacity for [said profession's] self-rescue and that the diacritic of that capacity might be another way of writing” (2).

My modest contribution to building this capacity here is to make a case for scholarly writing, especially literary criticism, to trash the pernicious slash. I realize it’s not my place to dictate on points of style, but I can at least explain why I never use it.¹ The slash is to me a bit like what Comic Sans is to designers: amateurish, inappropriate, and inexplicably overused.

First, in which cases is using the slash authorized?

• To mark the ends of quoted poetic lines
• In citing URLs
• In writing dates, e.g. “9/11″

(An increasingly common construction in everyday writing, “and/or” would be a provisional, supplementary entry on this list. There are clearer constructions to indicate alternates, and this “verbal monstrosity” has its own controversy, but I’m hunting bigger punctuation game here.) So having summarized approved slash uses, let’s look at its misuses.

The slash disguises imprecision and indecision as ambiguity and indeterminacy. Now don’t get me wrong: as a writer of literary criticism, I depend and thrive on textual ambiguity and indeterminacy. But in scholarly writing, using slash punctuation to signal a point of ambiguity or disjunction tends rather to suggest that a statement needs both further critical reflection and closer editing. Take this example:

a prominent endeavour among colonised writers/artists has been to rework the European ‘classics’ in order to invest them with more local relevance and to divest them of their assumed authority/authenticity. (Gilbert and Tomkins 16)

Here the slash simply seems to replace “and,” which would read more smoothly and retain the sense of pairs that are intimately articulated. In another passage, though (in this text which uses the slash rather compulsively in this way), the slash interferes with clarity of meaning: “Since its history/practice is extremely complex, it is impossible to do justice to Indian drama in a broadly comparative study” (7). Here, history and practice are two very different terms, presumptuously identified and singularized as a noun that still clashes grammatically with the singular verb “is” which follows. Here, then, is a case for reflecting further on which term better fits the statement, or whether “and” could more clearly conjoin both terms.

Decide! I am provoked to think, on reading sentences like these. You’re writing an argument, not a Choose Your own Adventure.

The slash reduces theoretical insight to crude shorthand. One of the contributors to Slemon’s ESC forum makes a case for “adjusting what we understand as good critical writing,” arguing that it should not need “to conform to academic formulas” (12). On this I quite agree: what’s blogging, after all, if not critical writing that doesn’t conform to academic formulas? However, among the standards outlined and reflected on in this article, that concerning spelling and punctuation makes a symptomatic, parenthetical exemption: “Nothing is misspelled (unless self-consciously so, in which case the misspelled word is coded as linguistic intervention through the assiduous placement of dashes, hyphens, quotation marks, and/or parentheses)” (10). The exemption usefully outlines a standard theoretical rationale for the kind of creative punctuation epitomized by the slash: it represents a “linguistic intervention.” It also makes such an intervention by using “and/or.” But too often this kind of linguistic intervention occurs cursorily, without the extensive elaboration that would articulate and account for the specific intervention purported to be made. (Commitment to such articulation is arguably a significant part of what makes Derrida’s writings so lengthy; he doesn’t make linguistic interventions lightly, or without explicating in detail their implications.)

And we read an instance of the more naturalized than problematized “linguistic intervention” later in this same ESC article, amidst reflections on the author’s grading process and its politics, as a process “designed to discipline/convert students to the conventions of good academic critical writing” (11).

In the context of an argument for rethinking the criteria of good writing, the slash here may well represent an ironic linguistic intervention against “writing that is ideologically coded as upper middle class and white” (11) — a point well taken, in its own right. But the further irony is how this intervention also interferes with basic grammatical clarity. In the context of the sentence, both “discipline” and “convert” are transitive verbs, but “discipline” doesn’t use the same transitive construction: one may discipline students in the conventions, but not to them. Alternately, it would be grammatically correct to discipline students to do something — that is, to follow the slashed verb with another verb. However, discipline can also be read intransitively, which would grammatically end the sentence much sooner, right after discipline. In short, the grammatical and semiotic interference posed by the slash as used in this sentence outweigh its coded theoretical insight (which presumably alludes to the Foucauldian theory of discipline and its academic exploitation).

It’s symptomatic that this article is written by the ESC forum’s most junior contributor, a doctoral candidate. I don’t say this to belittle or unfairly criticize the contributor at all — I quite agree with the article’s argument — but its conspicuous slash use contrasts to the absence of the slash (with one exception [4]) among the forum’s seven other contributions, all by more senior scholars. The slash in this article, then, is a symptom of a particular moment in literary critical pedagogy, a moment shaped and informed by the linguistic, theoretical, and cultural turns of the Humanities in the last decades of the twentieth century.

I realize that reading the slash as a product of that moment, and that moment as a product of those paradigm-shifting turns, could be misconstrued as an attack on theory; so let me be clear that nothing could be further from my intent. (I intensively study, extensively use, and tentatively develop theory in my own writing.) As I said at the outset, my concern here is strictly stylistic, and just as style has its politics, so does resistance to stylistic excess, in the name not of simplicity or “common sense,” but of clarity and confidence of voice in critical composition, as a surer means to persuade a larger readership of the soundness of one’s argument — and, of course, of its validity too. As another of Slemon’s contributors affirms, “we must teach the tools of the well-wrought sentence even as we teach the tools for dismantling it [...] as a daring return to the idea that the best prose and the best writers flow across genres” (27). Or to put it another way, by paraphrasing Flaubert: be regular and orderly in your punctuation, that you may be wild and original in your ideas.

To my reading eye (and I know I’m not alone on this), the slash does to the flow of reading a scholarly text what a skipping needle does to the flow of listening to a record. What is presumably intended as semiotic richness reads like punctuational noise. In my research writing and in how I teach writing, I will continue to work towards that happy day when the academical slash may be regarded as a quaint oddity, the way we now regard the presumptuous use of the masculine pronoun to speak on anyone’s behalf.

I’m not so set in my ways that I wouldn’t like to hear the counter-argument, and there may well be more than one theoretically informed and incisive problematization of the critical deployed slash. But I haven’t yet seen such a problematization, only its further, naturalizing proliferation. As in the latest ESC arrived in the mail. This issue’s Readers’ Forum? “Pro/Con/fessionals: (Re)defining Ourselves and the Profession.” And the needle slips clean off the record.

Note
1. I’ve been publishing research since 2002, and the only slashes in any of it (excepting the above authorized uses) appear in two phrases — quoted from other scholars. (An article I co-wrote uses some slashes — but not the part I wrote.) I’m well aware my writing has lots of its own stylistic excesses and deficiencies, but slash misuse is something I’ve always studiously avoided.

Works Cited
Dobson, Kit and Jason Haslam. “Readers’ Forum Introduction: Pro/Con/fessionals: (Re)defining Ourselves and the Profession.” English Studies in Canada 35.4 (2009). 1-2.
Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tomkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge: 1996.
Slemon, Stephen, ed. “Reader’s Forum: Why do I have to write like that?” English Studies in Canada 32.2-3 (2006): 1-37.

A scholarly take on the copyfight & pop culture

Academicalism has a new section for CC-licensed research, and the first working paper I’ve posted there is one I’ll present later this month, for the Socialist Studies conference taking place as part of Congress (Canada’s annual Humanities and Social Sciences bashment):

“The copyfight, science fiction, and social media”

Cory Doctorow, one of the authors discussed in the paper, has kindly made time to read it and post a positive response his blog, for which I’m very thankful.

Between this endorsement from one of today’s biggest “copyleft” advocates, and the Socialist Studies connection, I may think twice about crossing the US border anytime soon.

Making tracks

Part of my research trip stateside over the winter holiday was to try my hand at music production. Here are links to downloadable mp3 versions of the two tracks, hatched by Yours Truly in collaboration with Tiger + Rat Design.

These are still very much works in progress, but I’ve released their drafts under a Creative Commons license to invite feedback, critique (does the melody of the house track sound off-kilter to you too?), and, of course, remixes. (If you’re serious about the latter, contact me about using the source .wav and master files.)

“In appropriate reverb”

An instrumental house track going for a dubwise bassline. (I’d welcome a critique of its melody from anyone with actual music theory expertise.)

“McLuhan on the Boyle”

A downtempo sound collage that imagines Marshall McLuhan in sampled conversation with IP scholar James Boyle, against a backdrop of other samples, including outtakes from Steffen Irlinger’s interviews with Detroit techno producers in his 2008 radio drama Copy/Right.

mobilizing knowledge at TransCanada 3

The TransCanada Institute’s third and final conference in its Literature, Institutions, Citizenship series just wrapped up last weekend at Mount St Allison U in Sackville. Amidst the provocative papers and discussions, I was enthused and honoured to mobilize knowledge* in the “TransCanDance” post-banquet dance party that I’ve DJ’d now for all three events. And this time I saved the playlist (the longest yet, at 5 hours and change). So here’s what got scholars up to get down; as always, a mix of requests from the floor and the DJ’s own strategic selections. I could name names for some requests, but some knowledge is best mobilized anonymously — and collectively.

[* Thanks to Daniel Coleman for refining my idea that the dancefloor is a site of knowledge production; 'mobilization' better meets SSHRC's current research priorities.]

Ferry Corsten “Rock Your Body, Rock” [vocal intro]
INXS “Calling All Nations”
Sandeep Chowta “Dil kabutarkhana hai”
Shapeshifters “Lola’s Theme (Club Mix)”
Boogie Pimps “Somebody To Love”
The Doors “Hello I Love You (Adam Freeland Fabric mix)”
1755 “Disco Banjo”
Sylvester “Dance (Disco Heat)”
T-Rex “Bang A Gong (Get It On)”
Sly & The Family Stone “Dance to the Music”
The Jackson Five “ABC”
Elvis Presley “Jailhouse Rock” (Spankox Re:Version Highpass Radio Edit)
Credence Clearwater Revival “My back door”
The Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
The Rolling Stones “Jumping Jack Flash”
Kenny Loggins “Footloose”
David Bowie “Modern Love”
Nelly Furtado “Powerless (Josh Desi Remix)”
M.I.A. “Paper Planes (DFA Remix)”
Stevie Wonder “Superstition”
Bob Seger “Old time rock ‘n’ roll”
ABBA “Dancing Queen”
Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”
Michael Jackson “Beat It”
A. R. Rahman “Jai Ho (New York Electric Mix)”
Arcade Fire “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”
Dusty Springfield “Son of a Preacher Man”
Nine Inch Nails “Closer”
Latin Fresh “Bata Bata”
Daddy Yankee “De La Paz Y De La Guerra”
Tito El Bambino “En La Disco (DJ Mauri)”
Mr Vegas “Heads High (Kill Dem Wid It)”
Major Lazer “Hold The Line”
Madonna “Like a prayer”
New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”
The Jackson Five “I Want You Back”
Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”
David Bowie “Let’s Dance”
Michael Jackson “Billie Jean”
Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
The Pixies “u-mass”
The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”
Sam Roberts “Them Kids”
The Ronettes “Be My Baby”
The Ting Tings “That’s Not My Name”
Maestro Fresh Wes “Let Your Backbone Slide”
Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock “It Takes Two”
Scissor Sisters “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’”
Gnarls Barkley “Crazy”
M.I.A. “Boyz”
Young MC “Bust a move”
INXS “New Sensation”
Blondie “Heart Of Glass”
Santogold “Lights Out”
Pulp “Common people”
Go Home Productions “Velvet Sugar”
Feist “1234 (Vanshe Technologic Remix)”
Armand Van Helden feat. Spalding Rockwell “Hear My Name”
Tori Amos “Professional widow (Armand’s star trunk funkin remix)”
Wubble-U “Petal”
Cornershop “Brimful of asha (Norman Cooke remix)
Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”
Neil Diamond “Sweet Caroline”
Jimmy Cliff “Wonderful World”
Toots And The Maytals “Take Me Home Country Roads”
Arakatuba feat. Lilliana “Riva”
Waguignho “Academia de Furacao I”
Tegan and Sara “I Hear Noises”
Justice “DVNO (Justice Remix)”
Leonard Cohen “Closing Time”
John Lennon “Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”