- Recent Entries
- Archive
- Friends
- User Info
RSS (Subscribe)
Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia
I never metadiscourse I didn't like
3/7/08 04:12 pm - new blogger
I am thrilled that my frequent co-conspirator/co-author Rebecca Rabinowitz has started blogging over at![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
diceytillerman (RSS). I'm sure that blog will be a great place to get more of Rebecca's insights about children's literature, especially focused through the lenses of queer theory and fat politics.3/5/08 06:40 pm - different markets, different audiences, and recreational reading
After having been fairly publicly snippy in Roger Sutton's blog, I feel a need to explain myself. For one thing, Roger Sutton is a big macha in children's literature and I... well, I'm not. To a certain extent, you could even call him my boss; at least, the book I just put down to write this post was sent to me courtesy of Horn Book Guide, who will pay me to read and review it. Moreover, Roger is a very intelligent man for whom I have a lot of respect, and it feels weird to have people sending me e-mail saying "thank you for what you said to Roger!" And finally, I don't want to come off, as Elissa said, as a Trekkie angry at SNL Shatner's "get a life". I think Roger raised a lot of points, some good and some less so, and I do want to address them.( Audiences for reviews )
( Remembering the implied audience )
( Because children's books are better: sentimental blathering or trufax? )
( Am I missing something in the world? )
9/18/07 10:47 am - social networks and scholarship
I've been far too overwhelmed to post here recently, or even to read my blogs, and for that I feel immensely guilty. I've been doing so much: getting settled in my new job at Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, working on my research on romance fiction, working (far too little) on the project I'm doing with Rebecca Rabinowitz on subversive children's literature.I've also been talking with Alan McKee in preparation for our installation of Henry Jenkins' fangirl/fanboy detente. That has been an absolute joy. It's so wonderful whenever you find another scholar who delights in examining the same kinds of questions that you do. Both of us have found such pleasure in talking about media fandom, and I confess it has been from both a scholarly perspective and a fan perspective. This, of course, is the most wonderful part about being an acafan; the shameless delight in the subjects of our study.
I wonder how much further I would have gotten in children's literature scholarship if the academic blogging community had existed 10 years ago. Would I have made further inroads there? I've made such friends in media and fan scholarship, real genuine friends, people I love and care for -- and I suspect I will be making similar friends in romance scholarship, based on what I've seen of that community. As an independent scholar, it is so discouraging to have no infrastructure for my fields of study. And it's not like I'm not busy, it's not like I'm not doing this scholarship in my spare time after work and dinner and gardening and feeding the cats. If it weren't for the social network of wonderful people who share my interests, I don't know if I would be able to keep it up.
5/6/07 08:47 pm - Media in Transition 5, fan scholarship, and gender boundaries
I'd really like to say something intelligent about the conversation which started after Media in Transition 5 about acafen and gender, but for two things: First of all, I only attended one panel at the conference, so I'm not sure I can speak informatively about anything other than my greater experiences as a scholar and as an acafan. And secondly, I just took another look at the pile of books I need to review tonight, and that is genuine professional obligations, to which blogging will have to take a backseat. So for now, I am going to link to some of the blogs which are making really fascinating points in this discussion. It's worth reading not only the blog posts but the comment threads, in which people who fundamentally disagree are having really worthwhile conversations with some valuable give and take.So go take a look at Kristina Busse, especially her MiT5 Review, which has some fascinating discussions in the comment section. Karen Hellekson doesn't delve as much into the issues which concern Kristina, but she gives a good conference report of the panels about which Kristina is concerned with their gender makeup. Louisa Stein, who was unable to attend the conference, speculates that the paper she was intending to present would have spoken to many of these issues.
Also, as I've chosen to keep my professional and scholarly blog identity within livejournal, I should certainly not neglect those others who have done the same thing.
heyiya responded to Kristina with her post Fandom, gender, and knowledge. robin_anne_reid asks people to discuss their experiences in fan scholarship as pertain to gender, and also links to Ron Robinson's comment in Henry Jenkins' blog about the absence of scholars of color at MiT5.The only thing I have to add to the conversation that won't take more thought than I have time for right now is that fan scholarship has far and away been the most supportive scholarly community I have ever been a part of. Never before has the editor of a volume spent uncountable hours on long-distance calls with me fine-tuning my contributed paper far beyond the requests and suggestions made by the anonymous peer reviewers. Never before I entered fan scholarship have a number of other scholars called or e-mailed me to say "that point you made last week was excellent; you have to come to this conference and join a panel with me." I don't know if I would call that gendered -- children's literature scholarship is heavily female, and I certainly never felt so encouraged and mentored by that community -- but it is certainly an overwhelmingly positive experience for me.
9/17/06 12:22 am - at the intersection of children's literature and queer theory
The essay I co-wrote with Rebecca Rabinowitz, "'Beautiful, or thick, or right, or complicated': Queer Heterosexuality in the Young Adult Works of Cynthia Voigt and Francesca Lia Block", has been published. The collection is Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature (Amazon, Powells, Table of contents). I haven't read the rest of the essays, but I'm excited to. Calvin Thomas wrote the introduction to the book, too!I'm very proud of this essay. It's the first -- but not the last -- formal compilation between me and Rebecca (although we've helped each other extensively on our prior work).
And here's another plug for Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (McFarland, Table of Contents, Amazon, Powells, Henry Jenkins Review, Rebecca Tushnet Review). I say with no false modesty that I think most of the essays in this book are way better than mine -- not because mine is bad, but because this collection is so damn good.
3/10/06 11:22 am - I need a 12-step program
So. Um.My name is Deborah K and I am a Wikiholic.
( Why I spend more time editing Wikipedia than is generally considered healthy )
11/2/05 09:31 am - book review musings
If I always had this many books on my plate to review, I could support myself doing this. Not very well, I admit.I've been thinking about what I've liked reviewing for different journals (and disliked). I think in many ways it reflects what I like and dislike about the reviews themselves, and their purposes.
( I ramble on about reviewing )
I have more thoughts, but I'll come to them later. I think I'd like to ramble at some point about terrible nonfiction design. Here's the entire rant in two bullet points: 1. Designing your book to be laid out like an (ugly) web page will not make your book more hip, it will make it unreadable; readability on a 6 x 8 piece of paper is an entirely different beast that on a computer screen with working hyperlinks. 2. Providing web sites in your "further resources" section is a great idea, but you also need to provide references to other materials, and if your footnotes primarily reference non authoritative web sites, then you've identified yourself as a lazy hack.
1/18/05 03:35 pm - ALA Midwinter report, part 1: children's and young adult
ALA Midwinter report, part 1: children's and young adultTrue Story being used here for Metaphorical Purposes: I'm a butcher's daughter, and used to watch the sausage being made. Now I'm a vegetarian.
I don't suspect that's going to happen -- quite -- with my opinions of the words the American Library Association awards to children's and young adult literature. After all, they have a fairly good record. Being an ALA Notable winner is a good hint that a book might be worth reading. Might. Still, the sessions were enlightening to watch.
( The sad )
( The good )
Powered by LiveJournal.com