Research Projects and Scholarly Papers
A sample of my current and recent research projects is given below. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you are interested in finding out more about a specific project.
Anonymous workbloggers -- employees who write online diaries about their work -- are often simultaneously productive workers and savage critics of the organizational cultures in which they toil. Looking at how bloggers indulge their creative and political aspirations while "hiding out" in office jobs, this research assesses the potential of blogging to transcend individualized cynicism and contribute to the critical transformation of work. Broadly surveying media and organizational responses to the workblogging phenomenon, and engaging in ethnographic study of anonymous workbloggers on both sides of the Atlantic, my dissertation explores the relationship between emerging networked technologies and resistance. Considering workers as authors, it documents the diversion of significant creative and intellectual resources away from the labor process. Situating workbloggers within a rich tradition of iconoclastic literary and artistic responses to work, it explores whether embedded writers, in spite of their ambivalence about the alternative, can constitute an effective counter-hegemonic force.
Dissertation: Complete Version [4.21MB]; Chapters 1 [667kB] | 2 [245kB] | 3 [1.24MB] | 4 [1.31MB] | 5 [2.15MB] | 6 [290kB] |7 [220kB] | Bibliography [242kB]
Selected Papers Related to Dissertation:
Diary
of a Working Boy: Creative Resistance among Anonymous Workbloggers in
Ethnography, Sage Publications, Vol. 8, No. 4, 403-423 (2007).
The Story of Petite Anglaise: Celebrity Workbloggers and Workplace Resistance, presented at Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, New York, February 21, 2008.
Anonymous Bloggers and Organizational Coping Strategies, presented at American Sociological Association Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada, August 12, 2006.
Project Skive is an interactive multimedia piece that looks at the creative time-wasting efforts of six English white-collar workers, inviting people around the world to contribute stories of their own skives. Skiving, which derives from the French esquiver or "slink away," is an English slang term that includes all non-work activity engaged in during time when one is supposed to be working. The piece was featured recently as an art installation for No Time to Lose: A Search for Work/Life Balance, curated by Milena Placentile at Peacock Visual Arts Centre, Aberdeen, Scotland (13 June - 26 July 2008). NTTL is an ongoing project, with more venues to be announced soon via the NTTL blog!
More information on Project Skive:
Project Skive
(you are invited to add your skiving story!)
Peacock Visual Arts summary
of the No Time To Lose show
The NTTL Blog: Main
page and exhibition
photos/postings
Project Skive background paper
and photos of vinyl | installation
Crisis and Renewal: Ambivalence in Walter Benjamin's Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
I recently read Enid Starkie's biography of Rimbaud and was gripped by the idea that the young poet wrote Le Bateau Ivre, my favorite poem, without having seen the sea. According to Starkie, the language in the poem was inspired in part by scientific and historical picture books of the day. I was able to obtain one of these books (Figuier's Ocean World) and to explore the connection with Benjamin's essay on mechanical reproduction by juxtaposing Rimbaud's verse and illustrations from Figuier's text. I then reflected on the "crisis" aspects of Benjamin's essay by delving into The Machine Stops, a prescient story by E.M. Forster that anticipates some of the negative aspects of the Internet age. It is a pleasant coincidence that Forster also deals with the theme of the sea and the extent to which we can know the sea without experiencing it. In my conclusion, I have tried to relate these two literary examples to current questions surrounding the potential for crisis and renewal in our increasingly technological society.
5Pointz: Portrait of a Graffiti Community
5Pointz is the name graffiti artists have given to a multi-story warehouse in Long Island City (LIC), which is one of the few remaining legal graffiti spots in New York. LIC is a run-down yet rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of abandoned factories, railroads, and expressways, just across the river from the gleaming skyscrapers of Manhattan. This study looks at how the graffiti artists organize themselves and explores the relationship between "outsider" artists and "insider" artists who rent studio space in the building, chronicling the graffiti artists' struggle to legitimize their art while remaining true to a hiphop-based culture that is inherently iconoclastic.
Why People Garden
The ARROW vegetable garden is an improbable patch of bare earth that exists in amongst the warehouses and junkyards of Queens, its 20 grave-sized plots caged in by a tall iron fence that seems to have been put there to hold back the asphalt. This ethnographic study follows the handful of committed gardeners who keep the project going, remaining committed to its future and passionate about the personal and societal benefits of community gardening, in spite of dwindling membership and pressures to give up the space. The study concludes that, in a relatively low-income, time-scarce community, underuse of a community resource such as the ARROW vegetable garden does not necessarily signify lack of interest in or need for public greenspace.
The Great Dog Massacre
The title of this piece is borrowed from Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, which draws on the account of an 18th-century printer, Nicolas Contat, who witnessed the ritual slaughter of cats as part of a workers’ rebellion against emerging inequality in the print houses. This project explores Manhattan’s pampered dog fad as mirroring, in a contemporary context, the situation described by Contat. Manhattan’s dog spas and luxury dog clothing stores exist side by side with growing income polarization, homelessness, and inner city deprivation. Juxtaposing footage of Woofspa, a luxury dog facility in the West Village, and a pack of junkyard dogs owned by a homeless former hot dog vendor, this piece reflects on the way in which we legitimize opulence in the face of extreme poverty.