Kimberly Hirsh

🔖📝 Read Writing Advice Isn’t Made for Bodies In Pain.

Too many things I want to quote here, so if the headline appeals you should just go read the whole thing.

🔖 Read Emma Thompson’s Third Act.

I’ve always loved Emma Thompson, envisioned her as a kindred spirit, a screen aunt like Carrie Fisher is a screen mom. This profile made me love her even more.

“[When I act] I’m taking a holiday from myself.”

🔖 Read #AcademicTwitter Will Endure—for Now.

If you’re at an institution that provides hosted blogging, you could microblog there, pipe the feed into micro.blog, & then syndicate to Twitter. Let me know if a tutorial for this would be helpful.

🔖 Read Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies | The New Yorker.

🔖 Read Editorial policies, “public domain,” and acafandom.

the importance of fans as both human subjects and creators… can be a discreet, yet ever-present and deeply internalized, part of [the acafan’s] methodology.

🔖Read Attention Economy, Layered Publics, and Research Ethics Kristina Busse / University of South Alabama – Flow

The dilemma that online researchers have to confront is how to respect a user’s or group’s perceived privacy while simultaneously not ignoring their voices.

🔖 Read SCMS 2011 Workshop: Acafandom and the Future of Fan Studies – transform

We need to ask ourselves how identifying as an aca-fan impacts the scholarship we produce, and if we have given our fan identifications too much influence over academic ones.

🔖 Read Post-SCMS musings on the value of the word acafan – transform

I would argue that aca/fan is most vitally understood as a contextual position that we bring to our work as well as to our investment in media texts and/or their communities.

🔖 Read Against Aca-Fandom | Ian Bogost.

Specialty humanities conferences are just fan conventions with more strangely-dressed attendees.

🔖 Read When is a Publication Not a Publication? | Just TV.

The thing that “counts” as a line on a CV is slow-moving and comparatively hard to access, while that which clearly is getting broadly read and cited is viewed as an optional hobby.

🔖 Read On Disliking Mad Men | Just TV.

It’s worth considering the role of fandom within media scholarship, not as a separate object of analysis… but as a structuring facet of academic research.

🔖 Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter

I am both fascinated and terrified by the phrase “the girl in the machine.”

🔖 NC Mutual Will Cease Operations This Month

This is heartbreaking and I’m ashamed I didn’t follow this story earlier.

🔖 Read Howl’s Moving Castle should be the model for every book-to-film adaptation (Polygon) by Petrana Radulovic

🔖 Read The Big Bang Didn’t Happen.

I know very little about cosmology, but this makes some good points about the limits of academic funding and publishing and the value of public science communication.

🔖 Read A CRITIQUE OF DARK ACADEMIA: THE ROMANTICIZATION OF OVERWORK.

Wearing tweed and wandering old bookshops is fine. Denying yourself sleep over an essay that isn’t due for days is not.

Say it with me: school should not take priority over your mental health. School should not take priority over your physical health. School should not take priority over your relationships.

If Einstein could take a nap, so can you.

🔖 Read Wear Me This: Dark Academia could be the answer to the very problem it romanticizes.

I would venture that slipping on a tailored button-up and sitting in the library because Aesthetics Wiki told you “studying and reading” are “activities” of Dark Academia could be the impetus for a powerful academic pursuit or useful social connection.

🔖 Read THE SCHOLARSHIP OF SEXY PRIVILEGE: WHY DO I LOVE DARK ACADEMIA BOOKS?

This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries. This ‘dark academia’ reminds me not to take things so seriously, to see the rot in the foundations of an institution I can’t stay away from, and build my own school in defiance.

🔖 Read What’s Dark about Dark Academia

I think the real power of dark academia is the way it compresses—and thus preserves—humanistic study at a time when the humanities are under constant threat… Creating and emulating dark academia content offers students a way to fantasize about a world in which higher education isn’t instrumentalized, but rather self-sustaining and inherently valuable.

An aesthetic that evokes the academy is more flexible, more malleable, than the academy itself.

But if dark academia commodifies education, they learned how from the corporate university itself. Their commodification as style has far less insidious ends than the university’s spreadsheets of departmental deliverables.

🔖 Read Rapport or Respect? (Helen Kara).

Dr. Kara makes excellent points about how research can seem friendly but be extractive. This is why I prefer either to do insider research or to maintain relationships after the study.

🔖 Read ‘Lost’ Fans Gave Me a Safe Place on the Internet. Is Such Fandom Possible Now? (Catapult) by Anna Myers

🔖 Read Violence Made Me Feel Like I’d Left My Body. Physical Theater Helped Me Return by Lindsey Trout Hughes 🎭

🔖📝 Read On Writing with Chronic Migraines (Catapult) by Yuvi Zalkow.

I really appreciate Zalkow’s metaphors for pain and tiered system for deciding what work to do. This may inspire me to create my own spreadsheet of task levels.