Screen vs Life

Competition has, in the humanities, become a very dirty word. Along with the notion of personal responsibility, it is largely denounced as a somewhat unnatural proscription of neoliberal policies that has been foisted upon academics and cultural workers, who are believed to be more inclined towards collaboration and cooperation.  Competition is here characterized as a cut-throat practice where individuals engage in malevolent and underhanded tactics to greedily accumulate resources for themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Competition is understood as a fundamental characteristic of free market capitalism; a zero-sum game which atomizes communities and valorizes narcissistic self-interest. This understanding of competition as the opposite of cooperation is a dire misunderstanding of the concept. It is a misunderstanding that underwrites the social justice activism of many humanities scholars, and the astonishing delusion that they are above such base practices. ...

Yesterday, by way of anecdote, I proposed that academia is at least in part, responsible for the mainstream media acceptance and rationalisation of violent anti-white racism . See here if you missed it. Admittedly the points made were largely anecdotal and provided little in the way of evidence. What I offer today is more substantial in terms of evidence, and is provided in the form of a critique of what is a largely unchallenged field of study within the humanities, known as critical race and whiteness theory (CRW). My knowledge of CRW stems from my PhD research where I leaned the claims of the theory to discuss the representation of national identity in Australian film and television. If you are interested my dissertation is linked here . I am no longer a proponent of CRW theory and here’s why…  Critical race and whiteness (CRW) really began to coalesce as a theory within the humanities from the late 1990s. The interdisciplinary field CRW has deep roots within pos...

The media and police response to the recent abduction and torture of a white mentally disabled man by four black men and women in Chicago exposes a sickness within Western culture, and as humanities scholars we are all absolutely responsible for the spawning of this sickness. Despite the fact that the perpetrators live streamed the torture on Facebook, clearly articulating their racial and political motivation (the assailants can clearly be heard chanting Fuck Trump! and Fuck white people!, as well as forcing their victim to proclaim is love of black people), some mainstream media in the US refused to label this attack as racist or racially motivated. As many astute critics have asked, would journalists be so generous if the scenario were reversed with whites torturing a black victim, disabled or otherwise?  What this question foregrounds is a recent revision of the term racism such that it has come to be re-defined as a product of prejudice plus power. In othe...

Adapting computer game technologies for educational purposes is a practice is from a novel concept. Some recent developments, like the mod for Minecraft, MinecraftEdu , appear to have the potential to win kids over (children are very good at knowing when they are being tricked into learning). A conversation with fellow educators at THATCamp Melbourne yesterday highlighted a significant problem with current business models for funding these experiments in a university context. One colleague expressed a desire to find an existing program and tool that would allow her archaeology students to learn archaeology through a virtual experience, specifically a type of program modelled on RPGs. This colleague also indicated that she once worked with a Professor in the USA, who developed a prototype along these lines, and knew that the achievement of such a project was well beyond the type of budget that she could generate, as well as beyond her expertise. The fact of the matter is...