Negotiations: April

Negotiations in April

FPP Workshop: MLA Jobsearches

COMING YOUR WAY IN APRIL:

NEGOTIATING THE MLA JOBSEARCH--A WORKSHOP

Will you be seeking a job soon, or just want to learn more about what
it entails?  Join CRYSTAL BARTOLOVICH, SARAH BROUILLETTE (newly hired
at MIT), STEVEN COHAN, and KATE GIGLIO (newly hired at the University
of Central Florida) for a discussion of the nitty gritty of the
search, from finding where jobs are to surviving an on-campus
interview.  With Syracuse faculty who have served on numerous job
committees as well as successful recent job candidates both on hand,
you can hear about the search from both sides, and start to plan your
own search.

The workshop itself will be on THURSDAY APRIL 20 at 4pm in the
English Department Library. Please mark you calendars now!  Everyone
welcome.

I am writing early, though, to ask people who are planning on
attending to let me know--we'd like to have a sense of how big a
group we will be.  Also, if you have particular questions you'd like
us to cover, please let me know.

Hope to see you there!


RSVP and direct questions to Crystal:  clbartol@syr.edu

Negativland!

Mark Hosler
Friday, March 31 at 7pm
Shemin Auditorium
Shaffer Art Building
Syracuse University

Free and open to the public

A 90-minute film and storytelling presentation by Mark Hosler,
founding member of Negativland, with Q and A to follow. No lawyers
were harmed in the making of this event!

Pranks, media hoaxes, media literacy, the art of collage, creative
activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing,
intellectual property issues, evolving notions of art and ownership
and law in a digital age, artistic and funny critiques of mass media
and culture, so-called "culture jamming" (a term coined by Negativland
way back in 1984).... even if you've never heard of Negativland, if
you are interested in any of these issues you're sure to find this
funny and inspiring presentation worth your time and attention.

Is Negativland a "band"? Media hoaxers? Activists? Musicians?
Filmmakers? Culture jammers? An inspiration for the unwashed many? A
nuisance for the corporate few? Decide for yourself in this
presentation that uses films and stories to illustrate the many
creative projects, hoaxes, pranks and "culture jamming" that
Negativland has been doing since 1980.

Most famous for getting sued for their "U2" single, Negativland have
had 25 years of fun being a thorn in the side of the corporate media
and entertainment biz. They've released a gazillion CDs, do
occasional tours, make little movies, and were the subject of San
Francisco filmmaker Craig Baldwin's 1995 feature film "SONIC OUTLAWS".

Negativland isn't just some group of merry pranksters; its art is
about tearing apart and reassembling found images to create new ones,
in an attempt to make social, political and artistic statements.
Hilarious and chilling.
-   THE ONION

Contact: Roger Hallas, rhallas@syr.edu, 443-9468.

Respect is due!

The semester is only a little over halfway done, but we've already have loads of
congratulations to dole out. It has been a very good year to us here!

Congratulations go to...

Jon Singleton and his wife Julie, whose healthy baby girl, Lydia Jane, was born on February 28.

Laura Farmer, who had her "Christmas Eve" published in the Winter 2005/2006 Iowa Review.

Polina Kroik, who has been accepted to the English & Comparative Literature PhD program at Cal Irvine.

Gina Liotta's "A New Narrative: Reading Langston Hughes' Literature for Children as
Imagetext," which was featured in our October Negotiations reading, has not only been picked
up for publication in the forthcoming collection To See the Wizard: Politics and the Literature of Childhood from Wayne State University Press, but has also been accepted to next year's MLA convention.

Jon Senchyne, who accepted an offer to join the PhD program in English at Cornell.

Mike O'Connor is now officially a "PhD candidate", passing the qualifying exams he took this winter.

Enass Khansa was accepted into Georgetown University's Department of
Arabic Language, Literature and Linguistics.

Nate Mills is currently weighing offers from PhD programs at Michigan, Illinois,
and Wisconsin.

Kate Giglio, who was hired by the English Department at the University of Central Florida
in sunny Orlando (no more Syracuse winters!).

I'm sure I've missed somebody, so apologies in advance. Let me know and I'll make sure to add more kudos to the list!

-mike

Pre-Order Ali Hasan's Grieving Shias

Grieving Shias, MFA student Ali Hasan's book of poems is being released this month from Sheep Meadow Press. If Ali hasn't let you know already, you can pre-order it from Amazon here or from Sheep Meadow here.

A spectacular blurb from Stanley Moss:
American English his adopted language, at home in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syracuse, N. Y., Raza Ali Hasan deals with material unavailable to any other poet I know writing in English. Without rank, without comrades, he has fought battles of the mind and spirit. The reader may hear music he does not recognize; perhaps it is of the subcontinent. The architecture is American fusion, Mughal, postcolonial, colonial, sometimes peasant, sometimes Syracuse motel. Ali Hasan does not play cricket; his often painfully beautiful poems do not play fair.

A few items today.

PhD admit Jessica Kuskey will be visiting campus this week. The department has organized a graduate student lunch with her on Thursday 3/23. Please attend.

We need volunteers for our upcoming Negotiations panel. Now is the time for all of you first-years to get your feet wet in presenting your work! I can't tell you how beneficial getting feedback from within your department will be when you are preparing for conferences. Please contact me or Jon Senchyne if you're interested.

There will be an EGO Meeting on Friday, 3/24 in the English Library. The tentative agenda is as follows

1) GSO Funding Proposals for next year:

Your grad student activity fees go into GSO's coffers and are dispersed upon request. As far as I understand (Gina might enlighten us further) these funds can be requested at the end of the year for any organizational activities. I've heard through the grapevine that GSO is flush with cash right now, so we should take advantage.

That means if we want to bring in guest speakers, create our own publication, do a reading series, or even set up a small conference, we could request GSO funding to do so. The money is there, and it's ours for the taking--so let's take advantage of that.

2) Elections for next year.

If you are interested in any of the EGO positions, (PhD Facilitator, MA Facilitator, Agenda Committee, Undergrad Committee, Grad Committee, Faculty Development Sub-Committee, Webmaster, or Writing Program Lower Division Committee, we will discuss the responsibilities put upon each position and accept nominations.

3) Albany Conference

We need to formally submit our budget for the SUNY Albany Conference in April. I've talked to Gregg Lambert informally, and he has assured me that it will be funded in full, but I'd like to finalize that soon.

4) I'd like for us to discuss some of the developments in the department this year (Teaching Evaluation Changes, MLA funding for grads, etc)

5) We could also use a more comprehensive website. I can probably do it myself, but I'd like to hear people's suggestions.

6) We also have loads of congratulations to hand out. It's been a good year for us!

thanks everyone
Mike

February 2006 Negotiations Panel


PhD students Rachel Collins and Michael O'Connor are scheduled to deliver papers in this month's Negotiations Panel, Tuesday at 4pm in the English Library. Rachel's talk, titled "Metonymic Kinship: the Gardin City and Levittown Reconsidered" addresses the impulse behind the Garden City movement, and its reliance on utopian fiction. Mike O'Connor's paper, "Not Black, White, or Green: Documentary Film and the Myth of Irish Immigrant History" explores the relationship of documentary representations of "Irish-ness" in America to issues of race, class and ethnicity.

Look forward to seeing you there!

RESOLUTION OF THE ENGLISH GRADUATE ORGANIZATION OF SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY IN SUPPORT OF GSOC/UAW 2110, the union of graduate student employees at New York University.


WHEREAS, the English Graduate Organization of Syracuse University is organized to provide
an inclusive, public and democratic space in which to advocate for the interests of all Syracuse English graduate students, AND

WHEREAS, it is in the interest of the English Graduate Organization of Syracuse University to
protect graduate student rights, to advocate for improved material conditions for graduate
students, to seek to uphold and protect academic freedom, to advocate for fair labor standards that do not impede rigorous graduate education, AND

WHEREAS, the above named principles, conditions, an practices lead to strong graduate
education, collegial academic departments with high morale, and improved
undergraduate education by graduate student instructors, AND

WHEREAS, GSOC/UAW 2110 has gone on strike to defend these same principles and values
and in so doing seeks to protect graduate student employee interests through a legally binding collective bargaining agreement New York University, an institution that depends on graduate student labor, AND

WHEREAS, the efforts of the administration of New York University to defeat the graduate
student union and retaliate against those who have initiated and sustained the current strike defies all protocols of civility and fairness and heralds a bellicose approach to the union and its demands for fair wages, decent health care, and provisional job security, AND

WHEREAS, the requests made by the administration of New York University upon its faculty
represent an unprecedented and dangerous infringement on departmental autonomy, AND

WHEREAS, the administration of New York University utilized information technology
such as Blackboard to engage in electronic surveillance reportedly in order to gain information about teaching staff and the status of their courses during the strike, and that the seizure of access to the communication between teaching staff and their registered students is in deepest violation of academic freedom, AND

WHEREAS, President Sexton of New York University on 28 November 2005 threatened to
rescind the Spring 2006 stipend support of striking graduate students who do not return to
the duties of their assistantships by 5 December 2005, also that such students would return to work under the proviso that striking again would disqualify them from two semesters of teaching and stipend support. AND

WHEREAS, such draconian policies and threats violate the principles of the university, violating the academic
freedom of students who have chosen to strike according to good conscience

IT IS RESOLVED that the English Graduate Organization of Syracuse University approves the actions of, and expresses solidarity with, the graduate student employees of New York University now on strike and refusing to teach, grade, advise, or perform any other duties associated with their assistantships.

*In solidarity with other groups, parts of the above were copied from written statements in support of the NYU TA's posted on www.facultydemocracy.org

PASSED 10 December 2005

Labor News At Syracuse University

A development on campus that hasn't been covered widely. . .

(from the SU News clearinghouse)

Adjunct faculty union vote begins

On Oct. 31, a petition was filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by Adjuncts United, a labor union affiliated with the New York State United Teachers Union (AU/NYSUT), seeking to represent part-time and part-time adjunct faculty members employed by Syracuse University.
In its communications with the relevant faculty members, the University has stated that it would prefer to work directly with part-time and adjunct faculty to achieve mutually agreed upon goals, without an outside organization and that it respects the right of employees to choose whether or not they are represented by a union.

Details of this ongoing process are available at: http://provost.syr.edu/unionization/unioninfo.htm.

On Dec. 5, the NLRB is sending all eligible voters a ballot, by which they may cast their vote in a secret-ballot election to indicate whether they wish to be represented by a union for purposes of collective bargaining. This election will be conducted by mail. Eligible voters are defined as: all part-time, non-tenure-track faculty members employed by the University on the University’s Syracuse, N.Y., payroll and working in Syracuse, including part-time adjunct non-tenure-track faculty members; and including such faculty members employed by University College, all professional schools and on-line instruction programs. Excluded are all full-time faculty members, tenured and tenure-track faculty members, visiting professors, research faculty members, graduate assistants, teaching assistants, research assistants and faculty members who work in dual capacity for the University, which includes supervisory, confidential and/or managerial status, confidential employees, temporary employees, managers, guards and supervisors as defined by the National Labor Relations Act, and all other employees.

The majority of the votes cast in that election will determine whether the entire eligible group is represented or not. That is, employees who vote not to be represented and employees who abstain will, regardless of their vote, be represented by the union if a majority of the votes cast favor unionization. SU urges every employee who is within the petitioned unit to vote his or her personal preference.

Ballots must be returned on or before the close of business on Dec. 19 to count in the election process. Ballots will be counted on Dec. 20 and the results will be shared immediately. Regardless of the outcome of the election, SU will continue to work toward addressing the needs of its faculty and staff, in line with the priorities and economic realities of the University.

Notice the rhetorical threat of the "ominous union monster" in there? This is a clear (and common) anti-union tactic used to frighten unsure workers by encouraging them to link unions with totalitarianism in the that hope that they will instead opt for the university's proposed "good faith" model in which workers and the administration work toward mutually agreed upon goals.

The Graduate Employee Strike At NYU



Since November, graduate student employees of NYU (TA's, GA's, RA's etc) have been on strike. NYU's GSOC was the first graduate student union to win recognition at a private univeristy. The Bush National Labor Relations Board, however, released NYU from its obligation to recognize the union. When their contract ended this year, NYU refused to recognize the union, and seeks to 'take care' of its graduate students on good faith. In the meantime, however, graduate students claim that since the end of the contract, they have seen their health care costs rise dramatically. When the strike commenced, NYU apparently engaged in ethically dubious activities to coerce graduate students back into work. It has been reported that the administration entered Blackboard course pages in an effort to discover if the GA/TA in question had suspended courses. This is an incomplete account of the events, more information can be found at the GSOC webpage here.

Recently, the president of the university issued a statement saying that graduate students who do not report back to work by December 5 will lose their stipends for the Spring semester, and further, that students who strike again will lose their assistantships. That statement is available here. These actions are being called the most draconian response to the graduate student labor movement. Judith Butler, Joan Scott, Frederic jameson, Slovoj Zizek and others have issued a statement in response and are calling for signatures on an online petition site. Their letter is also reproduced below.

To: President John Sexton, NYU
December 2, 2005
John Sexton
President, New York University

We, the undersigned faculty from several universities in the United States and abroad, write to express our objections to the New York University administration's efforts to defeat the graduate student union and retaliate against those who have initiated and sustained the current strike. The union in question was clearly instated on the basis of a fair election which then obligated New York University to negotiate with the appointed representatives in a fair and open manner. Although the NLRB in 2005 released the university from its obligations to recognize the union, it did not authorize retaliatory action on the part of the university.The recent actions of your office, now widely publicized, defy all protocols of civility and fairness and herald a bellicose approach to the union and its demands for fair wages, decent health care, and provisional job security.

As we all know, there may be differences of opinion on how best to formulate policies that would address these various issues, but undermining the union itself is nothing more than Reagan-esque union-busting and so conveys and enacts hostility to student labor that can only heighten conflict and circulate a ruinous image for New York University as an unfair and indecent place of employment. The infiltration of student and faculty email constitutes an unauthorized invasion of privacy.And the most recent threat to rescind funding for students engaged in the strike constitutes an abhorrent form of coercion.

We urge you to enter into negotiations with the union and to find civil, legal, and productive ways of resolving whatever issues of employment exist between these two parties.

Sincerely,

Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Fredric Jameson, William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies, Duke University
Joan W. Scott, Harold F. Linder Professer of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study
Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
Paul Gilroy, Anthony Giddens Professors of Social Theory, London School of Economics
Donna Haraway, Professor of History of Consciousness, University of California at Santa Cruz
Slavoj Zizek, Co-Director International Center for Humanities Birkbeck College, University of London
Etienne Balibar, Professeur emeritus, Université de Paris X Nanterre, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, University of California, Irvine

EGO members may find it interesting to compare NYU's actions against the striking graduate students with former Chancellor Buzz Shaw's reaction to SU faculty that refused to cross the picket line in the 1997 service workers strike at SU. You can read about that by following the link at left for "1997 service worker strike."


By, the way, I know the guy who kinda looks like Sideshow Bob in this picture. He's a musicology PhD student. Brilliant kid.

Judith Butler Field Trip

On Thursday November 10th a contingent of 14 grad students went to Cornell University to hear Professor Judith Butler deliver a lecture entitled "Toward a Critique of Violence." Professor Butler presented ways for thinking justice outside revenge killing and discussed the Isaeli state, Levinas, and a little Benjamin. After the lecture, the crew moved to Ithaca's Collegetown for dinner at Ruloffs. Pictures from Nate's cell phone to come.




UPDATE: Cornell Daily Sun News Coverage

Butler Asks for Mideast Dialogue
November 11, 2005
by Samantha Henig
Sun Staff Writer


Judith Butler’s talk yesterday afternoon surprised on two counts. First, there was the fact that the talk, ambiguously titled “Violence, Non-Violence” and delivered by a woman renowned for her work on gender theory, was actually about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Second, her presentation and the audience questions that followed employed the kind of calm, removed and intellectual language that, though common in academia, came as a shock for a subject that typically makes blood pressures and speaking volumes soar.
This is Butler’s first visit to Cornell as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large.

Prof. Jonathan Culler, chair of the English department, introduced her as an especially appropriate pick for the position because “far more than most academics, she is a professor who has been at large in the world, ranging freely outside the academic world.”

He noted that in addition to being a prolific and respected scholar in the United States, Butler “has also become a major public intellectual in Europe — even in France!”

Butler began by warning the audience of a couple hundred that her talk would deviate from her more typical subject matter.

“If you know me at all — or know this thing called ‘Judith Butler’ — it may be that you know me through my work on gender studies,” she said. “But for now I am interested in pursing Jewish ethics.”

As she spoke, Butler’s face was barely visible over the large wooden podium before her, but her presence nonetheless loomed large.

Calling for an open intellectual discourse about Israel, Butler lamented the strong emotions and stigmas that normally stifle such discussions. She said that many Jews feel as though they cannot express discontentment with Israel without first renouncing their Judaism, and that those who do are all too often labeled “self-hating Jews.”

She herself has fallen subject to the latter: “There are loads of Web sites that keep lists of all of the self-hating Jews and I think that I’ve made all of them,” she said.

Butler engaged the works of Edward Said, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas to explore identity in Israeli-Palestinian relations. In particular, she questioned Levinas’ claim that persecution is the core both of Judaism and of Israel.

Butler takes issue with “the idea that you can be persecuted for all of history without ever being viewed as the persecutor.” Such an interpretation, she argued, puts Jews in a position where they can always present their actions as self-defense, and thus never be blamed as the aggressors.

Butler also criticized Levinas’ disinterest in engaging with Muslims. She told a story of Levinas meeting with the late Pope John Paul II and the prominent anthropologist Clifford Geertz. When the Pope asked the men if it is possible to create dialogue among Christians, Jews and Muslims, Levinas responded that it would only be possible among Christians and Jews.

In addition to condemning those who dismiss Islam as a religion, Butler also questioned people who want to withhold rights from Palestinians to prevent them from outnumbering and overpowering the Jews.

“I want to call into question why the demographic advantage has to be preserved as a part of Zionism. It wasn’t always that way,” she said.

One audience member asked Butler under what conditions violence is justified, to which she responded that she is “not an absolutist in my ostensible passivism."

Rather, she said she was mostly interested in arguing against revenge theory and questioning a state that would work to preclude the citizenship of certain groups.

Butler closed by urging people to come to her seminar today at 10 a.m. in Barnes Auditorium.

The auditorium was abuzz with discussion long after Butler stepped out from behind the dwarfing podium.

“She really embodies the role of public intellectual in the way that she brings her academic practice out to address current political concerns,” said Theo Hummer grad.

Ashley Puig Hertz grad also commented on Butler’s choice to apply her more abstract theories to current controversies. “She was talking about very charged, controversial issues, and discussing them in a way that was very enlightening,” she said.

Prof. Stuart Davis, English, said all he had to say was that “she was in rare and beautiful form.”

Halloween Party Pics

Here's a smattering of the pics, the rest are on the Flikr account.

October Negotiations Panel

Annual Stephen Crane Lecture Scheduled, Graduate Students Encouraged to Attend
”The Body Count: Stephen Crane and the Cost of War.”

I am writing on behalf of my colleagues to invite you to the upcoming Stephen Crane Memorial Lecture, hosted annually by the English Department and the Dikaia Foundation. We are honored this year to have Cindy A. Weinstein, Professor of English at California Institute of Technology, give this year’s lecture. She will speak at 4 p.m. on October 19th in Room 208 of the Goldstein Alumni and Faculty Center. The title of her talk is ”The Body Count: Stephen Crane and the Cost of War.”

A member of the faculty in Cal Tech’s Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Weinstein is widely recognized for her work in nineteenth-century American literature. The Literature of Labor and the Labors of Literature traces the intersections of aesthetic and economic discourse in nineteenth-century America. Her most recent book, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, argues that the cultural achievement of the enormously popular sentimental fictions of the mid-nineteenth century was to challenge the very constitution of the bourgeois family, substituting love for consanguinity, contract for biology. Professor Weinstein is currently at work on Narratives, Numbers, and Pictures: From Poe to Dos Passos, the project from which her lecture will be drawn. In this moment when counting the bodies, whether of the Iraqi dead or those lost in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is a matter of serious political and ethical debate, Professor Weinstein’s inquiry into the question of numbers—of who is counting and who counts—in the work of late nineteenth century writers is an unusually timely one. Like last year’s Crane Lecture by Cecelia Tichi, Weinstein’s talk promises to focus on the ways in which writers use narrative to confront issues of urgent civic importance and to confirm the vital public import of scholarship in the humanities.

The Stephen Crane Memorial Lecture series is made possible by the generosity of the Dikaia Foundation. It commemorates the achievements of Stephen Crane, who attended Syracuse University in 1891 and was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity from which the Dikaia Foundation derives. We are very pleased that a scholar of Crane and his generation of U.S. writers of Professor Weinstein’s prominence will address us on this special occasion.

We hope you will join us for Professor Weinstein’s lecture and at the reception following it.

Sincerely,
Amy Schrager Lang
Professor of English and Humanities

SuperEGO Soccer Club's Passionate Effort Ends in Heartbreaking Defeat



SuperEGO, the English Dept intramural soccer team, dropped a heartbreaking loss to the Rancho Carne Toros
on Sunday night, surrendering a goal in the final minute and losing, 3-2.

After absorbing some early pressure, EGO struck first in the match. John Henderson & Ben Krier helped to
set up the sequence that ended with Michael Montero slipping the ball past the Toros keeper to take a 1-0
lead.

The SuperEGO defense, anchored by Meghan Boyle, stood up to the task of defending the lead. John Henderson
and Laura Winkiel frustrated their opponents with some stingy defense on the wings, and producing some
counter-attacks. Late in the period, Mike Dwyer was sprung on a breakaway, but came up empty as the
opposing keeper made the save. Cruelly, the Toros were able to equalize on a long-distance shot, just before
halftime.

The second half started unevenly, when goalie Mike O'Connor was tested several times. Save after save
was coaxed out of O'Connor, when finally a busted play (and dubious offside non-call) gave the Toros a 2-1
lead.

EGO struck right back on the ensuing kickoff. Some clever combination play between Ben Krier and Mike
Dwyer brought the equalizer within seconds, leveling the score at 2-2.

The rest game was a very even affair, with both sides playing tight defense and making the most of their
chances. EGO's defense tightened up, with strong efforts from Amata Schneider-Ludorff and Ali Hasan in
the defensive third.

With the clock winding down and fatigue setting in, it
was the Toros who mounted one last attack. A shot
from outside the box just escaped O'Connor's reach to
give the Toros the gamewinner with just 38 seconds
left to play.

One final SuperEGO attack was stymied when Michael Montero's shot was blocked by the defense. Still, it
was a valiant effort, and a whole lot of fun. Thanks to everyone that came out to play or just came to
watch. Next game is Tuesday Oct 11 at 9:45 pm!



Forza SuperEGO!