ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: Come on Britain, Try Skype Ph.D. Exams

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Come on Britain, Try Skype Ph.D. Exams

A very good scholar with a very good dissertation (all right, it's Anthony Paul Smith) was recently told that I couldn't be in his viva in the UK via Skype. WTF, really? The reasoning was bizarre for a Yank (recently defected). Somehow we would all start demanding to be flown over there.

But wait—I did two long distance vivas (or defenses as they're called here) last year: one for CU Boulder, and one for Duke. I did them by phone for Chrissakes! Not even visual chat...

Come on Brits, you have broadband, we are willing to work for nothing (really), and we should make the most of this globalization transatlantic bla bla thing.

1 comment:

Claudia Westermann said...: They want bodily presence? There might be a solution coming up: doctor's help robot (I must admit, this comes with a touch of irony -- the robot's allusion to a human body actually enhances a feeling of distance, I think. However, chances are they fall for it.); June 16, 2011 at 1:56 PM

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton has written All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), 8 other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.

“Outstanding.”
—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”
—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”
—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”
—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”
—Vince Carducci

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Come on Britain, Try Skype Ph.D. Exams

1 comment:

Counter

ShareThis