Workroom

Civil resistance

Link and Wu and Liu and Havel still resonate–now in a different context:

As Vaclav Havel had noticed in Czechoslovakia, there are fissures in any society, no matter how totalitarian, and inside them a citizen can be civil. Treating each other with dignity, people together can push upward and outward to expand the scope of a citizens’ culture that contrasts with the harsh official culture, and can reach to people “inside the system”— why not? If the authorities lash back, citizens should not fight but retreat, wait a while, then reoccupy the lost ground, perhaps going a bit further. This strategy can win in the long run because the garden-variety moral values of the populace are on its side, not the side of the regime.

If fissures exist in any society, do scholarly institutions have fissures too? And are dignity and civility the right choice?

Working on…

Working on a presentation for our research group’s reading club. I’m leading a session on I Have No Enemies: The Life and Legacy of Liu Xiaobo by Perry Link and Wu Dazhi. Trying to turn my mountain of notes into something that actually makes sense for a presentation.   

Bold step forward

No doubt, the best part of serving as director of the PhD program is the privilege of leading the Doctoral Seminar with our incoming PhD students. In each session, we discuss a reading that one of them has selected as particularly inspiring.

Bold texts abound, and the energy students and texts bring is invigorating. These past two weeks, for instance, we have read and discussed “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography” by S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, and Ways of Being by James Bridle. These bold efforts to forge new epistemologies seem to signal a deep unease with our current ways of thinking. And perhaps the failure of previous bold attempts at epistemological shifts too. So it makes a lot of sense that new generations of scholars pick them up.

Yet today during the seminar, I found myself remembering the sentence attributed to a Uruguayan military officer: “We were at the edge of the cliff, and then we took a bold step forward.” I guess that was my awkward way of asking myself: Will these new epistemologies foster a more pluralistic and empathic world, or merely a more pluralistic yet atomized and fragmented one?

Much closer to my experience

David Marchese, Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World:

I actually dislike the word “burnout.” It creates this image that the person in question did their job, the job was really hard and after a while they couldn’t stand how hard it was and they stopped doing it. Which I don’t think is correct. A lot of the health care workers I spoke to said that it wasn’t that they couldn’t handle doing their job. It was that they couldn’t handle not being able to do their job. They saw all of the institutional and systemic factors that prevented them from providing the care that they wanted to provide. For them, it was more about this idea of moral injury, this massive gulf between what you want the world to be and what you see happening around you. At some point that becomes intolerable. I think that’s much closer to my experience of pandemic journalism too.

OK, thank you

Awkward situation this week. I receive an email from a student expressing interest in our PhD program. It turns out that he already holds a PhD. He is seeking admission to, right after being admitted, submit a second dissertation in the thesis by compendium format—essentially assembling previously published (or soon-to-be-published) articles.

The appropriate response is obvious. So I opt for a brief reply: thank you for your interest, it is actually not possible, best of luck. But then he writes back–and quite persistently. I then have to elaborate: the thesis by compendium is not intended as a mechanism to validate previous publications but rather as the culmination of a structured doctoral training process, it is to be undertaken under the supervision of an advisor, often within the framework of a research group’s collective project, and developed over the course of the doctoral program, and so on and so forth. He then responds with a terse, “OK, thank you.”

Wondering where he might eventually succeed in getting what he seeks.

Researchers can mine

In David Shambaugh’s review of The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer by Robert Suettinger (Harvard UP, 2024), I found this interesting bit on archival research:

His extensive trawling on the Chinese internet reveals just how much can now be accessed outside of China, and why scholars need not necessarily travel to China to research it. In many ways, the situation of China studies today — under the strict controls and censorship imposed by Xi — is similar to that of the 1950s and 1960s, when the country was closed to foreign researchers altogether. At least today, as Suettinger’s study demonstrates, researchers can mine the Chinese internet and social media, as well as its electronic databases. Much printed material is available in libraries and private collections outside of China. Suettinger only went on one research trip to China, where he visited Hu’s tomb at Fuhua mountain in Jiangxi province.

A shady network

Manuel Ansede, Un turbio entramado compra revistas científicas desde un caserón inglés para ganar millones publicando estudios insustanciales:

El análisis de las prácticas de Oxbridge Publishing House es revelador. La Revista de Psicología del Deporte, antes relacionada con la Universidad de las Islas Baleares, ha pasado de cobrar 300 euros por estudio a exigir 6.000. El 74% de sus trabajos eran españoles, pero ese porcentaje nacional ha caído en picado hasta el 13%. Los autores chinos monopolizan ahora la publicación. La revista Fonseca, Journal of Communication, antes vinculada a la Universidad de Salamanca, no cobraba por publicar, pero ahora pide unos 2.500 euros por cada estudio a sus autores. Lo mismo ocurre con la revista educativa Artseduca, antes editada por la Universidad Jaume I de Castellón. El conglomerado en torno a Oxbridge ya ha publicado casi 1.500 estudios en sus revistas españolas, según el análisis de Martín y Delgado publicado este miércoles. Son, presuntamente, ingresos millonarios. Los investigadores de Granada denuncian que se están adquiriendo revistas respetadas para “convertirlas en granjas de cobrar cargos por procesamiento de artículos”.

Then, these researchers ask very pertinent questions about these “APC-charging farms”:

¿Están haciendo algo las instituciones (normalmente universidades públicas) para evitar que las revistas auspiciadas, financiadas o apoyadas por ellas acaben en manos de dudosos grupos empresariales extranjeros? ¿Se están beneficiando nuestras universidades de los cientos de miles de petrolibras que están derramando los inversores extranjeros en las revistas españolas?

The Politics of Knowledge Production about China

Thrilled that our proposal was accepted for the symposium The Politics of Knowledge Production about China, organized by The China Quarterly. The call for proposals was:

Since the launch in 1960, The China Quarterly has been one of the leading journals where scholars from a wide range of disciplines publish their research on China. Building on the wealth of knowledge accumulated in the past decades and the hindsight gained through observing the evolution of our field, we are now at a critical juncture that calls for reflection on the relationship between China studies and knowledge production. This task is increasingly urgent, given the epistemological shift within the academy and a geopolitical climate that conditions social science and humanities research on multiple levels.

How can China scholars around the world maintain their academic independence in such a charged geopolitical environment? How can China studies better engage with recent debates on decolonising knowledge production, especially in regard to positionality and epistemology?

How should we evaluate the negotiation between disciplinary scholarship – such as political science, sociology and anthropology – and China studies in the past decades, and how do we envision the intellectual agenda moving forward? What are the new challenges faced by China studies at theoretical, epistemological and methodological levels? Amidst the vociferous discursive field where academics, media, think tanks and politicians are all trying to claim credentials on China expertise, how can scholars of China studies better navigate the current ecology of knowledge production?

Excited for the conversations coming up in June!

Birthday present

Richard Wagner, Siegfried Idyll, WWV 103:

Resist intellectual inertia

Jonathan Malesic, There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore:

It’s tempting to lament the death of a reliable pathway to learning and even pleasure. But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort.

(…) It’s up to students to decide whether they’ll resist intellectual inertia. All I can do is demonstrate that it is worth it to read, to pause, to think, to revise, to reread, to discuss, to revise again. I can, in the time students are with me, offer them chances to defy their incentives and see what happens.

Research in the humanities

There is an assumption that research in the humanities must be modeled after research in the sciences. For instance, that research groups should be as large as possible, with scholars working in the typical engineering fashion—breaking problems into small tasks, distributing them among different people, and then assembling the results into a collective paper signed by dozens of authors.

However, significant research in the humanities does not function this way. A humanities scholar must engage with a problem across all its different scales, from the micro to the macro, in a comprehensive and integrative manner. Conducting humanities research as if we were engineers in a lab may deceive some institutions and funding agencies, but it will inevitably produce insipid results and—perhaps even more tragically—alienate scholars from their profession.

I have reflected on the works that have most deeply influenced my own research—whether for their ambition, originality, or methodology. My own “fieldwork” exercise led to the following conclusions: none of these impactful works emerged from a lab-like project, nor were they deeply shaped by such an approach. Instead, they are all single-authored monographs.

This does not mean that the authors of these works did not engage in collective or collaborative efforts—they certainly did. But their collaboration took a different form: exchanging ideas, engaging in discussions, and refining their arguments rather than fragmenting their research into alienating micro-tasks. Moreover, most of them did not rely on large, exorbitantly funded research projects. Instead, they benefited from research leaves that allowed them the time and space to think, read, write, and engage in meaningful scholarly exchanges.

Coincidence

In the morning, I attended a very interesting department seminar on the new paradigm in academic fraud. Instead of (or in addition to) falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism, this new paradigm involves more sophisticated ethical gray areas, such as self-citation, double affiliations, citation cartels, and so on.

In the afternoon, a colleague (who does not work in Chinese studies) asked me for advice. She had received an email from a Chinese scholar proposing a deal: in exchange for supporting his candidacy for one of the European academies that require the endorsement of an internal member (which she qualifies to provide), she would be invited by his institution to spend a few weeks in China—doing research or whatever.

Service

Very honored to have served on a university-wide committee for internal promotions. I am also very proud that, as a committee, we offered qualitative, humane feedback to candidates—rather than the typical cold, competitive, bibliometric kind of assessment.

Ristretto

Writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe interviewed by my colleague Ignasi Gozalo. In about 10 minutes, he offers a masterful ristretto with some of the skills or qualities that any scholar should have. For example, a sense of empathy–moving away from moral vanity as a starting point; a sense of scale–connecting specific topics with broader issues; a sense of literariness–using narrative as a way to fight for attention. Or the ambition for complexity–allocating the time/extension that complicated problems deserve:

I like complicated subjects, I usually have a lot to say. So something like Tik Tok is very hard for me. I have children (…) and for them if you can do it in a minute you are going on too long. And that’s a scary thought for me because the truth is that life is complicated and sometimes it takes some time to explain a complex issue. 

Truth be told

In this interview, Professor Carles Boix offers the best synthesis of the typical European paternalistic view of (or blindness to) what is going on across the Atlantic. To the question “What do we read wrong about Trump, from Europe?,” he answers:

You don’t look at yourselves enough. The very same forces that are behind Trump exist in Europe. And, truth be told, I would say they are even worse. Because Europe hasn’t grown as much. And because Europeans are much more ethnic in their conception of nationhood than Americans.

Academic matchmaker

Delighted to have been part of the doctoral thesis committee that today evaluated Inventando Filipinas: Discurso colonial en la literatura española de finales del siglo XIX (1876-1894) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Even more delighted to have acted, a few years ago now, as academic matchmaker between Cristina Guillén, the thesis author, and my colleague Rocío Ortuño, one of the thesis co-directors, during one of our ALTER seminars.

But here’s the thing

Ann Patchett, The Decision I Made 30 Years Ago That I Still Regret:

Because I do regret email. Even though I’ve turned off the ping that once heralded every new message, I regret how susceptible I am to its constant interruptions. I regret all the times I look, only to find there’s nothing there. I regret the minutes it takes for my attention to fully return to other work at hand after stopping to check. I regret how I can spend an hour a day writing back to people I’ve never met, explaining why I can’t speak at their school or judge their contest or read their novel. I regret how every person who hits “reply all” to the holiday message sent to a hundred people shaves off a few seconds from all of our lives. Those seconds add up.

(…) I’m a fairly disciplined person. Most novelists are. I’ve turned my email off for certain hours of the day. I’ve made deals with myself about how often I can check. But here’s the thing: They keep on coming regardless of whether or not I look. Taking a day off from email means sitting up for hours at night, digging myself out. I go to bed to find my husband and dog already asleep. I have missed them.

Garbage time

I always thought that my basketball wisdom would end up being useful for work as well: Yan Zhuang, Dejected Social Media Users Call ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy.

In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline.

Xiulant el temps

Wonderful visit to the exhibition Xiulant el temps at the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món. The exhibition includes an intervention that has (temporally) modified one of the museum’s rooms. It has been curated by our ALTER colleague María Íñigo, who gave us a superb guided tour with plenty of critical thoughts about contemporary museology.

From Mont Blanc to Gran Paradiso

This summer, the Catalan skyrunner Kilian Jornet completed one of his greatest challenges: he connected the 82 4,000-meter peaks of the Alps in just 19 days. I wonder if anyone asked him if on his way from Mont Blanc to Gran Paradiso he made this or that detour, or if he visited this or that typical spot.

When I go to a conference or on a short, intensive research trip, I always get asked these kinds of questions. Academic tourism has done a great disservice to our profession. It is probably all well deserved: scholars have been very persistent about it. I remember my frustration when I served on committees that allocated department travel funds and found, year after year, applications to travel to cool and trendy places to present the same old (tweaked) paper… This has probably made me overconscious. And so when I go somewhere for work, I basically spend all my time working.

Strings Across Moon

At Mollie Used Books NTU: Anacole Daalderop, Strings Across Moon. 

The Man Between

I never had the chance to take Comp Lit 285 with Professor Heim. I remember him as an imposing presence, but always giving me a friendly, civil nod when we passed each other in the hallway. And I also remember seeing him reading while walking around campus!

After reading The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & A Life in Translation, I discovered his activist side. And I regret it even more not having taken his graduate workshop in literary translation.

I’m not quite sure his contribution to PEN (now the PEN/Heim Translation Fund) is sufficiently well known–even if, as Esther Allen explains in her chapter, he precisely wanted to keep it unknown…

He got straight to the point. He was concerned about the paucity of literary translation into English and admired the various initiatives PEN’s Translation Committee had taken to address that situation. Accordingly, he and his wife Priscilla had decided to donate $500,000 to establish a fund at PEN to support literary translation into English. He said this in a quiet, matter-of-fact tone, with a hint of embarrassment. My mind went blank. The PEN staffers weren’t entirely sure they’d understood. He had to repeat himself.

There was, he quickly added, one stipulation: the donation was to be absolutely anonymous. He didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, ever, about having given away this money. No one was to know he and Priscilla were the donors. We all must be wondering, he continued evenly, taking in the expressions on our faces with some sympathy, how a professor in the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and his wife were able to make such a donation. He explained: the money came from a death benefit the U.S. government had paid his mother when his father—a Hungarian-born composer who enlisted in the U.S. military during World War II—died following an accident at a military base. Heim was a toddler at the time and had little memory of his father. The family had invested the money when it came in and left it to grow in the decades since. Mike had recently turned sixty, and he and Priscilla had decided this was what they wanted to do with it.

That was how I learned that Michael Henry Heim was an activist.

Squirting tourists with water pistols

September and back in Barcelona–these days our very own overcrowded blend between Venice, Las Vegas, and Tijuana.

I found this recent piece by Michael Kimmelman on cities hosting the Olympics quite helpful to understand the roots of what is going on now in Barcelona and why we are squirting tourists with water pistols.

In truth, Barcelona’s makeover started years before the city bid on the Games. During the late ’70s, after the death of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, civic leaders devised an urban-renewal scheme for a newly democratic, independent-minded capital of Catalonia. With a potential Olympic bid in mind, they began during the ’80s to remake Barcelona’s railway system, airport and seafront. These and other changes, accelerated by the deadline for the Games, turned the city into a wealthy European gem and tourist mecca.

But at a cost. Low-income housing gave way to luxury hotels and high-end development. It’s no coincidence that American-style suburbs began proliferating on the edges of Barcelona during the years following the Olympics, catering to families seeking more affordable homes and fleeing the mobs and mosh pits along the Ramblas and the seafront. Thousands of Barcelonians, fed up with a housing shortage, the rising cost of living and overcrowding, took to the streets this month, squirting tourists with water pistols and toting signs telling visitors: “You are not welcome.”

Another very good piece recently published on the topic is Lisa Abend’s ‘The Demand Is Unstoppable’: Can Barcelona Survive Mass Tourism?: 

“Now there are drunk tourists peeing on our neighbor’s doorstep.” For anyone hoping to understand the complicated contours of overtourism in Barcelona, the Carmel Bunkers is a good place to start. The frustrations experienced by those who live nearby apply to other hot spots: residents of the Gothic Quarter who feel displaced by the crowds; pollution along the waterfront where massive cruise ships dock; and everywhere, it seems, an apparent disregard for local culture.

To Those Sitting in Darkness

Pio Abad, To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum. Absolutely fascinating project. Info here and great video here. My favorite artwork of the exhibition: “1897.76.36.18.6”–a set of black and white drawings showing bronzes (from the Benin Punitive Expedition of 1897) next to contemporary everyday objects. For example:

Wayfaring

Ann L. Cunliffe, “Wayfaring: A Scholarship of Possibilities or Let’s not get drunk on abstraction“:

Those of us doing non-mainstream work find ourselves in a paradoxical situation—on the one hand we are exhorted by journal editors to be “original”, “insightful”, “curious”, “theoretically radical”, and “fresh” (all adjectives taken from well-known journal mission statements) and told by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, 2015: 2) that “Excellent social science needs people with the skills, curiosity and creativity to be truly innovative…”. Yet in my experience we are facing the opposite—a narrowing of scholarship through increasing normalization.

In a way, Cunliffe’s claim resonates with a recent discussion about the contrast between the macro, bombastic, paradigm-shifting claims in introductions that are then followed by micro, rigid, formalistic developments in the chapters–a fracture probably due to the inflation rhetoric of book and grant proposals in a competitive system.

Le Carré squared

Coincidence: reading le Carré at home this week, plus visited the exhibition Write Cut Rewrite at the Weston Library–which includes samples of his manuscripts, cut and pasted (literally: chunks cut with scissors and then taped together somewhere else). And then today I discovered this mysterious pile next to the books I ordered at the Bodleian.

Intrigue: is the fellow who picks up stuff next to me working on le Carré, having a super summer, or is there something else? (Then I sensed that someone was following me. I quickly turned back. But there were only shadows.)

But then…

Lunched with a revered colleague. We discovered we often ask ourselves the same question: What should we do when a student inquires about embarking on a PhD and future academic career given the meager job market and future perspectives?

I first felt somehow relieved to know that we share the same ethical dilemma in these situations. But then I quickly realized that, if someone based at such a prestigious institution feels that way too, the situation is really really sad.

Great news

Great news from home! Our ALTER proposal for a collective research project on Chinese and Sinophone transitions around the 1980s has been successful and will be funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. This is a highly competitive call, so we are all ecstatic. Super happy to share the project’s co-PI role with my colleague Carles Brasó. Can’t wait to begin working with the team–about fifteen scholars from different Catalan and Spanish universities. Great motivation for the days ahead at the library this summer.

Some kinds of freedom

Writer Jenny Erpenbeck’s profile by Steven Erlange.  On living in East Germany before 1989:

In fact, she said, there was a “kind of freedom” in East Germany, where the ideology of equality meant less stress, competition and greed, and where there was comparatively little to strive for in a society that had only a few options for consumer goods.

“There are some kinds of freedom that you wouldn’t expect to have surrounded by a wall, but it’s also a freedom not to be forced to expose yourself and shout out all the time about how important you are and what you have reached, to sell yourself,” she said.

Demoralization happens

Kevin R. McClure and Barrett J. Taylor, The Hollowing Out of Higher Education.

Doris Santoro, a philosopher of education at Bowdoin College, has researched demoralization among teachers for over a decade. She noted that teaching is morally rewarding when “educators feel they are doing what is right in terms of one’s students, the teaching profession, and themselves.” Demoralization happens when “the conditions of teaching change so dramatically that moral rewards (…) are now inaccessible. In the same vein, public policy has rendered many public institutions shells of their former selves. It’s harder for academic workers to do right by our students and colleagues.

You’ve got to see beyond it

Days of feeling tired and distressed. Found some energy back in a wonderful biographical interview to Natalie Zemon Davis in the volume Visions of History. Particularly when she talks about vocation–and going beyond the profession’s trivialities that end up causing that distress:

Young people need to get jobs. People have to have a place in which to teach. There is a workplace. But as I said to my colleague Carl Schorske when I came to Princeton, “You know, I really think of myself in a calling or vocation” (…) And although the word intellectual is perhaps more appropriate for his generation than for mine, I’m more comfortable thinking of myself as an intellectual. The only trouble with the word is that it doesn’t suggest the artisanal side of the historian’s work identity. But I’m more comfortable with intellectual than professional and with vocation rather than career. A career has a certain fixed curve that the profession decides–when you get your honors and so on. I don’t think those are totally unimportant. There are certain rituals you need in order to know what a field is and where it’s going. You need elder statesmen and stateswomen who can stand for something. I’m not trying to do away with all ritual or structure, but I’m saying that you’ve got to see beyond it. If there’s nothing beyond it, it’s not worth it to me. Life is really more than our little ponds.

China desde el mundo hispanoamericano

Happy to have participated in LASA2024. I shared a panel with Maria Montt Strabucchi and Brenda Rupar: “China desde el mundo hispanoamericano: Influencias, lecturas y representaciones.” Maria and Brenda were in Bogotá, while I joined them online from Barcelona.  We exchanged impressions about our books–all published recently.

Research careers

Moderated an inspiring roundtable on research careers as part of UOC’s Doctoral Day. I could ask one of my favorite questions on the topic: How to juggle the different dimensions involved in an academic career–which require different temporalities too? Strategy and vision (looking ahead) with everyday groundwork such as reading, writing, fieldwork (right here, right now). Not easy–not only for PhD students but also for faculty.

Interesting experiences about alternative pathways across industry and academia–or a “third space”, which I guess has now become less alternative and more mainstream…

You think it will never happen to you

Collective reading at La Central in memory of Paul Auster, who died on April 30.

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. (Winter Journal)

Speaking of

Speaking of academic fraudsters, I’m afraid that in Spain we have our very own versions of them–less ironically sophisticated. And, no doubt, accepted with a very different degree of tolerance. See for example the case of Juan Manuel Corchado–who, by the way, was recently elected Chancellor of the Universidad de Salamanca:

Las trampas de Corchado eran muy burdas. Hacía resúmenes de sus conferencias, añadía una cantidad hiperbólica de autocitas y los subía al repositorio científico de su universidad. El catedrático sabía que el motor de búsqueda de Google Académico detectaba esos documentos y los tenía en cuenta para elaborar sus indicadores, según los cuales Corchado es uno de los expertos en inteligencia artificial más citados del mundo. En un texto de dos páginas de una conferencia en Chennai (India), se citó a sí mismo 200 veces. En otra charla para la Universidad de Tecnología de Malasia, Corchado incluyó más de 150 autocitas. El profesor también subía al repositorio seudoestudios científicos, como un documento de cuatro párrafos sobre la covid con un centenar de referencias a sí mismo. Justo cuando EL PAÍS comenzó a preguntar a su entorno por estas prácticas, Corchado ejecutó un borrado masivo de sus publicaciones más controvertidas.

An ironic revelation

Andrew Gelman, How Academic Fraudsters Get Away With It:

In recent reporting in the Chronicle, Stephanie M. Lee describes how “a famous study about a clever way to prompt honest behavior was retracted due to an ironic revelation: It relied on fraudulent data.” The author of the retracted study also wrote a book titled, appropriately, Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules in Work and in Life.

Examples of this particular irony are more numerous than might be expected. The disgraced primatologist March Hauser wrote a book originally called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. The psychologist Dan Ariely, who was forced to retract an article containing faked data, and who has promoted a company making fishy claims about insurance algorithms, wrote a book called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone–Especially to Ourselves. He even participated in a radio show called Everybody Lies, and That’s Not Always A Bad Thing, in which he gave this amazing-in-retrospect quote to the ever-credulous hosts at National Public Radio: “What separates honest people from not-honest people is not necessarily character, it’s opportunity. (…) The surprising thing for a rational economist would be: why don’t we cheat more?”

What’s going on?

L’any de la rata

A few weeks ago I was invited by Silvia Fustegueres and Mireia Vargas to talk about Regresar a China at the podcast L’any de la rata. The episode is now available.

We recorded the episode right after Diada de Sant Jordi–the Day of Books and Roses. It was fun to talk about Lu Xun, Lao She and Qian Zhongshu on such an appropriate date…

Legacies of Chinese Labour in Latin America and the Caribbean

Just attended the workshop “Legacies of Chinese Labour in Latin America and the Caribbean” organized by Harriet Evans and Hans Steinmüller at the London School of Economics. A very energizing couple of days!

Two organizational highlights. First, it was great to focus the sessions on discussion. We were asked to give minimal presentations (no slides!) and so we had ample time for questions, comments–an actual conversation. Second, it was particularly stimulating to share ideas and discuss with scholars from many different geographies and institutional contexts. I wish all academic conferences had the same arrangement and composition.

El invisible

Today I led a session on Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak at the book club organized by the Confucius Institute in Madrid. We discussed Miguel Ángel Petrecca’s translation: El invisible, published by Adriana Hidalgo in 2016.

I love sessions in book clubs–always full of passionate and very sophisticated readers. So I am very grateful to the audience for their comments and questions. And to my colleague Andreas Janousch for the invitation.

Here is also an interview related to the session–in which I “reveal the secrets of a literary giant” (sic)!

 

Feels almost like a miracle

Ecstatic: two dear colleagues who have been working on short-term contracts for many years have just landed stable positions. Super happy for them. Something is not right when what should be a normal thing (a brillant scholar who finds a decent job) feels almost like a miracle.

Reasonable doubts

Department meeting today. Folks from our university’s library services gave us a presentation about Open Science. The Q&A leads to the topic of predatory publishers. Interesting to see the institutional differences regarding MDPI journals. Colleagues from other fields/departments do not see these journals as predatory. While it may be a borderline issue, depending on specific fields and journals, the fact that many of these colleagues have consolidated their careers through publications in these venues raised (reasonable) doubts: Do they endorse these journals because they are academically sound, or because their CV has strongly been built on them?

Working on…

Working on a talk on Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak I will be giving at the Confucius Institute in Madrid later this month. I plan to offer a summary of Ge Fei’s trajectory–great opportunity to submerge again in his fascinating early works.

To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality

Cal Newport, To Cure Burnout, Embrace Seasonality:

The problem with the virtual factory, however, goes beyond the fact that it makes us unhappy. It’s also ineffective. The process of producing value with the human brain — the foundational activity of many knowledge sector roles — cannot be forced into a regular, unvarying schedule. Intense periods of cognition must be followed by quieter periods of mental rejuvenation. Energized creative breakthroughs must be supported by the slower incubation of new ideas.

8,031

Very honored to have participated in the Humanities in Transition seminar at Tejidos Conjuntivos, Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Part of my talk was about “work” in academia. I mentioned some of the meaningless dimensions that now characterize our profession. Inspired by the artistic setting, I included a pseudo-performative feature: a hoax article made of 8,031 words–the exact amount of words that we had used in all the emails exchanged in relation to the bureaucratic preparation of the session…

The only letdown was unrelated to my talk–and related to architecture. I was able to wander inside the Nouvel Building, which I had never visited. I found it disproportionate, megalomaniacal–meaningless too.

Read widely and outside your field

Christopher Lupke on C.T. Hsia’s strategies of reading and mentorship:

I would relay [Hsia’s] advice to any graduate student: Read widely and outside your field. Yes, it will slow you down somewhat, but it will give you contextual insight into your own specialization. (…) Hsia urged me to take afternoons and find a comfortable spot in the library where nobody would disturb me and read whole novels or chunks of novels, which I did and continue to do so.

On the Edge

Margaret Hillenbrand’s fascinating On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China. The impossibility of giving up working. A much larger and less fancy collective than tangping–and with much less media coverage, no doubt.

This is exactly the processual glitch that Hao Jingfang nails elegantly in Folding Beijing via her conceit of temporal warehousing—the notion that people can be put to sleep or placed in cold storage until the voodoo of market forces animates their insensible beings for drudgery once again. The difficulty, of course, is that real life is not sci-fi—not quite yet, anyway—and those who have been consigned to zombie citizenship cannot simply be magicked in and out of visibility. As such, they terrorize the fantasy of social harmony in the era of the Chinese dream.

Research transfer

Department workshop on research transfer–and dissemination, impact, exploitation, valorization, public engagement, outreach, knowledge exchange, etc., in the humanities.

I always think that teaching is the most obvious way of transfering research and knowledge to society. And I always wonder why teaching remains out of the equation’s semantics. Then a colleague provides a practical answer: universities measure teaching by its own metrics.

PhD in Humanities and Communication

Just started in my new role as Director of the PhD program in Humanities and Communication. Looking forward to serve in this new institutional position. And, above all, very excited to learn more about–and help in–the different projects that our graduate students are carrying out.

Bright moments in dark academia

I tend to be quite reserved in class and didn’t share my recent promotion to full professor with my students. But somehow they found out–and at the end of today’s session a warm round of applause erupted and a bouquet of flowers suddenly emerged! I was so caught off guard that didn’t know what to say. And I only thought about taking a group thank you photo when they had already left the classroom… I went back home in levitation.

I tend to be quite reserved in this workroom too and hesitated sharing this anecdote. But I think it deserves to be known that there are also bright moments in dark academia.

Working on…

Preparing a session for the Humanities in Transition seminar at Tejidos Conjuntivos, a program in critical museology, artistic research and cultural studies organized by the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in March. I will co-lead the session with my colleague Joana Pujadas.

The topic for our session is “to work”. I will organize my part around the idea of giving up work. I will try to connect two cases: the tangping movement and the academic quit lit. So I’m now warming up reading Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs–the full book based on the shorter piece that caught my attention back in 2018.

Bullshit Jobs : Graeber, David: Amazon.es: Libros

College as a transactional experience

Beth McMurtrie, AI and the Future of Undergraduate Writing:

In doing so, they say, academics must also recognize that this initial public reaction says as much about our darkest fears for higher education as it does about the threats and promises of a new technology. In this vision, college is a transactional experience where getting work done has become more important than challenging ourselves to learn. Assignments and assessments are so formulaic that nobody could tell if a computer completed them. And faculty members are too overworked to engage and motivate their students.

Professor

My public defense for the promotion to full professorship went very well. I did my best to summarize my academic career so far and present a new research project to be developed in the coming years. I was very well accompanied by colleagues and family. And the commission was very kind. What else can you ask for?

On the humanities and value

Quick quote from Agnes Callard’s inspiring piece, I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is:

Humanists are not alone in their ignorance about the purpose of their disciplines. Mathematicians or economists or biologists might mutter something about practical applications of their work, but very few serious scholars confine their research to some narrow pragmatic agenda. The difference between the humanists and the scientists is simply that scientists are under a lot less pressure to explain why they exist, because the society at large believes itself to already have the answer to that question. If physics were constantly out to justify itself, it would become politicized, too, and physicists would also start spouting pious platitudes about how physics enriches your life.

(…) The task of humanists is to invite, to welcome, to entice, to excite, to engage. And when we let ourselves be ourselves, when we allow the humanistic spirit that animates us to flow out not only into our classrooms but also in our public-self presentation, we find we don’t need to defend or prove anything: We are irresistible.

Working on…

Working on my public defense for the position of full professor. It will take place just before the Christmas break. The assessment conventionally includes the candidate’s academic and research records and a proposal prepared ad hoc for the occasion.

Since the setup is quite similar to that of an oral PhD thesis defense, I find myself returning to the 4 sage pieces of advice that a colleague offered me long ago, which I have since then passed down to other colleagues and PhD students–and which now boomerang back to me…