My absence from blogging here has been because as a grad student, you have to be incredibly prolific all the time in ways that benefit your own agenda and trajectory. I didn’t blog here because I didn’t see a way that it could benefit me – I was busy with CFPs, term papers and research agendas. However, for the next several months I will be preparing to take my comprehensive exams. At UIC we are required to have a committee of 5 faculty. (At least) one must be from outside our department. As a fellow I have to have a committee member who is a member of the ESP-IGERT faculty, and I was lucky enough to get a law professor with a strong background in philosophy who could give me readings in philosophy of technology (and let me slip Simondon’s upcoming English translation of “On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects” onto my list (to be published by Univocal this year). I also have committee members to give me exams/readings in STS, philosophy of design, history of technology, and media archaeology.

My process has always been to obsessively research and plan things out in advance so that I am a few steps ahead of what needs to happen. My advisor is good enough to know how this isn’t always the best course of action, so he has refused to give me a reading list until I work through some of the ideas that I have been working on.

This is the creative element of academic work and also the most frustrating. It feels a bit like starting from scratch to be asking oneself “what am I interested in? What’s my research question? Where should my field site be?” Things that seem like they should already be answered, or that they are right in front of you if only you could see them. But it is not so much as square one, as it is finding work that is not to familiar and yet not too bizarre so that it will be original and fruitful to work in.

So I will be posting some of this, as well as reflections on readings, as a way of keeping myself publicly accountable, sort of like an open journal (besides my closed one) and helping me to work through my research in areas that I describe as “political materiality” and “post-luddism.”