African journals seek to create a space for themselves by disseminating their journals through online platforms and archives. There are multiple possibilities for preservation and publishing on line. One of these is electronic archiving. In this research post Kakou presents the HAL archive and explores the representation of African document. Developed and administered by the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD), the platform HAL is an open archive in Social Sciences. In this post, Kakou presents an overview of the services offered by HAL, including Episciences.org and Sciencesconf.org. Episciences.org offers journal publishing within the archive and supports the innovative peer-review overlay approach to journal publishing. Arima, a journal that has been supported by the North-South coalition Colloque africain pour la Recherche en Informatique et mathématiques appliquées (CARI) for twenty years, is among the 15 Episciences journals. This is « our » platform too ; Morrison’s 2018 ELPUB OA APC survey can be found in Episciences.
OpenEdition (formerly Revues.org) publishes 21 African journals. Only one of these journals is published in an African country (Kenya). In this post Kakou illustrates a gap in dissemination of African scholarship, particularly francophone African scholarship. For example, of the 524 journals included in African Journals Online (AJOL), 465 (89%) are published in English speaking countries and only 39 (7%) in French speaking countries. Only 12 of the 24 African countries where French is an official or co-official languages are represented in AJOL. This research illustrates the African and particularly Francophone African knowledge gap that is the focus of Kakou’s doctoral research.
Back in July we surveyed members of the
Radical Open Access Collective on a
possible decision-making model of lazy consensus. To quickly recap, lazy
consensus is the process by which decisions are taken when no one disagrees
with a proposal within a short(ish) window that takes into account numerous
time zones and weekends. Anyone can propose an action and this motion can be
debated until there are no further disagreements.
The idea of lazy consensus was well
received on the mailing
list and an interesting discussion ensued about the future our collective
governance. Kathleen Fitzpatrick highlighted the need for community building –
what she terms ‘social sustainability’ – as crucial to radical forms of
collaboration. This underscores the need for ROAC members to get to know one
another and to extend generosity and care to one another as far as possible.
Joe Deville emphasised this with particular respect to the tone of our
discussions, which should be ‘conducted in open, generous, caring ways’. Yet,
as Endre Dányi kindly pointed out, there is a ‘certain sense of violence
implied in claims about commonness and the common good’. We must be wary of not
imposing on each other a predefined set of identities and values that we all
share, instead keeping in mind that community itself necessitates difference or
un-commonality (what Roberto
Esposito would term a ‘common non-belonging’).
Following on from this discussion, one of the first points of action we would like to propose for the ROAC, is to implement the idea of lazy consensus with a 72-hour window for objections, while we will also ensure to stimulate discussion as much as possible. In practice, we do not envision any huge decisions being made about the collective and so it is likely that lazy consensus, as a decision making model, will only be intermittently used. Nonetheless, please feel free to propose ideas for the collective to consider – we really want to keep everything horizontal and informal to the greatest extent we can.
Related to this, during the mailing list
discussion Gary Hall shared some helpful thoughts from his experiences helping
to run a local community football club (and his reading of Barcelona En Comú’s Fearless
Cities). Gary’s advice can be summarised as follows:
Don’t be afraid to take the
lead
Ensure a gender balance and
diversity from the start.
Have generosity as a key value
– collaboration requires individuals to be generous (with their time, energy,
attention etc.).
Try to reduce vertical
hierarchies by distributing authority among as many people as possible
Try to make it possible for
everyone to feel they can contribute
Given that everyone is busy, and it is easy for initiatives like ROAC to lie dormant in particularly busy periods, we felt it would be worth instigating some of these approaches through a member advisory board, which we would like to put forward as our second point of action. The board would help generate and moderate discussion, admit new members and generally be a face of the ROAC in their own geographical/disciplinary area. We are keen to have broad geographical coverage from all across the globe, but we are especially interested in representation from Africa and Latin America (where a number of our members are based). Please email Sam and Janneke if you would like to get involved (and we might also nudge some of you who previously indicated you would be interested in this)! Going forward, and once we have an advisory board established, we can discuss whether we want to formalise this structure more.
Related to this, we are still keen to stimulate discussion on the mailing list by having themes set and moderated by different listserv members each month. Please get in touch if you would be interested in moderating discussions related to the future of scholar-led open access. You do not have to be associated with a member press or project, just interested in what we’re trying to achieve. We would ask that you post a question or topic to the list once a week for a month and then moderate the ensuing discussion. Open access week is of course a good time to start the discussion. Our friends at ScholarLed have been posting daily blog posts on the future of scholar-led publishing infrastructures, so perhaps one of us would like to try to drum up responses to these posts or follow them up for further discussion?
Parmi les revues que OpenEdition publie, 21 revues sont africaines. Elles sont localisées dans 5 pays. Seul un pays africain (Kenya) y figure. Ce sont : Nederland (1), Portugal (2), Kenya (1), France (17), Italie (1).
Les universités africaines adoptent les stratégies à suivre pour se développer au numérique. Selon Murray et Clobridge (2014), de plus en plus de revues en ligne sont diffusées sur les plateformes africaines telles AJOL, Sabinet, etc. La plateforme AJOL (African journals online) par exemple, se veut promotrice de la revue africaine en général. Cependant, l’on dénombre sur ce site, 39 revues en français (7%) sur 524 (Ajol, 2019). Ces revues sont reparties entre 12 états sur 24 (voir tableaux ci-dessous) dont le français est une langue officielle ou co-officielle (Université Laval, 2019).
Tableau 1 : Liste en % des pays cités dans Ajol
Tableau 2 : Liste des pays et nombre de revues en % des pays existants et non-existants sur Ajol
18 états anglophones détiennent la majorité absolue des revues avec 465 revues. D’autres pays (arabes (19), portugais (1)) se partage 20 revues. Voir Tableau.
Tableau 3 : Nombre de revues par pays en %
Tableau 4 : Nombre de revues par pays en %
Objectif
Notre objectif est de répertorier les revues africaines sur le Web et principalement sur les plateformes. Dans cette recherche, nous avons sélectionné la plateforme OpenEdition pour connaître les types de publications de revues africaines. Dans un premier temps, nous présentons la plateforme OpenEdition. Dans un deuxième temps, nous indiquons le nombre de documents qui y sont diffusés.
Les quatre plateformes d’OpenEdition
Au sortir de l’analyse de la plateforme Revues.org, nous observons que celle-ci devient: OpenEdition depuis 2017 pour renforcer sa dimension internationale. Elle publie quatre plateformes de publication et d’information sur les sciences humaines et sociales: OpenEdition Journals (les revues), OpenEdition Books (les collections de livres), Hypothèses (les carnets de recherche) et Calenda (les annonces d’événements académiques internationaux) (OpenEdition 1, 2019).
OpenEdition accueille 522 revues sur son portail. Environ plus de 200 000 articles, dont 92% sont accès libre (OpenEdition 2, 2019). Sur la plateforme OpenEdition Books, l’on dénombre près de 7 960 livres en sciences humaines et sociales provenant de 90 éditeurs. L’accès aux ouvrages se fait sur l’espace personnel de chaque éditeur. Ils sont librement accessibles en HTML, et imprimables (OpenEdition 3, 2109).
Quant à Hypothèses, 3 103 carnets de recherches sont recensés sous différents types et tous en accès libre. Ce sont : carnet de chercheur, carnet de terrain, carnet de séminaire, carnet de veille, etc. (OpenEdition 4, 2019).
Enfin, Calenda est le calendrier d’annonces scientifiques en sciences humaines et sociales. Il regroupe, plus de 42 619 annonces en libre accès. De plus, Calenda publie dans les actes de colloque, les programmes complets de journées d’études et de séminaires, les cycles de conférences, les appels à contributions en vue de colloques, etc. (OpenEdition 5, 2019). Voir tableau
Tableau 5 : Les 4 plateformes de OpenEdition en nombre d’articles et en %
OPenEdition offre aux bibliothèques la possibilité de choisir une politique d’acquisition dans la logique de développement du libre accès. Aucun quota de téléchargement ne s’applique à cet accès (OpenEdition 6, 2019). OpenEdition publie 274 581 en accès libre. 17 748 articles sont payant et 4219 articles sous embargo. «L’abonnement donne accès aux fichiers PDF et ePub de manière pérenne» (OpenEdition 6, 2019). Voir tableau
Tableau 6 et 7 : APC dans OpenEdition en nombre d’articles et en %
Fig:6
Fig:7
Conclusion
OpenEdition publie 4 plateformes (Revues, livres, Hypothèses Calanda) soit un total de 253 682 publications. Les revues représentent 200 000 soit 79%. 274 581 (92%) sur 296 548 articles sont disponibles en accès libre. Parmi ces revues OpenEdition diffuse 21 revues africaines. Seul un pays africain y figure: le Kenya. Nous avons observé que OpenEdition est le nouveau nom de Revue.org.
Nous présentons dans cette recherche :Hal archives. Hal est une plateforme d’archives ouvertes. Elle conserve des revues sur sa plateforme Episciences.org sur laquelle l’on trouve une revue africaine Arima. Hal anime sur une seconde plateforme: Sciencesconf.org le programme des organisateurs de colloques ou réunions scientifiques.
Les revues africaines cherchent à se faire une place par la diffusion de leur journal sur les plateformes et les archives en ligne. Les possibilités de conserver et de publier en ligne sont multiples. L’une d’elles est l’archivage électronique. Dans cette recherche nous présentons Hal archive. Quelle est la représentativité des documents africains dans cette plateforme ? Développée et administrée par le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD), la plateforme HAL est une archive ouverte en Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société. Le CCSD entend diffuser et valoriser des publications et des données scientifiques en fournissant des outils pour l’archivage en ligne (CCSD 2, 2019). Dans ce travail, dans un premier temps, nous définissons deux termes épi-comité, épi-revues qui peuvent aider à la compréhension des termes utilisés pour indiquer certains produits. Dans deuxième temps, nous présentons Hal archive et les plateformes qu’elle publie.
Définition
Epi-revue :
Epi-revue est une revue électronique en libre accès. Elle est composée d’articles soumis via un dépôt dans une archive ouverte telle que HAL ou arXiv.
Epi-comité :
Epi-comité désigne le comité scientifique d’experts reconnus dans leur discipline. Les scientifiques sont chargés de stimuler la création des comités de rédaction pour l’organisation de nouvelles épi-revues et de veiller à la qualité de leurs contenus (Episciences 1, 2019).
Activité de Hal archive : Episciences.org – Sciencesconf.org
Hal publie 2 principales plateformes : Episciences.org et Sciencesconf.org. Elle conserve actuellement 9 300 revues, 8 151 images, 3 421 de thèse et 3 103 Chapitre d’ouvrages. En tout 23 975 documents, dont 5 661 (24%) ont été déposés en 2018. Le nombre de 600 000 documents est dépassé depuis sa création. 11 529 de ces dépôts concernent des documents publiés en 2019 parmi lesquels 5 278 sont des articles (CCSD 2, 2019).
A travers ces deux plateformes, Hal conserve et publie 15 revues dont une Africaine : ARIMA. La revue Arima est créée des suites d’une collaboration scientifique Nord/Sud menée depuis plus d’une vingtaine d’années. L’initiative est arrivée au cours des activités de CARI (Colloque africain pour la Recherche en Informatique et mathématiques appliquées). Arima permet de publier les résultats de recherche issus de ces coopérations. Le domaine scientifique recouvre tous les sujets de recherche de l’informatique et des mathématiques appliquées (Hal, 2019). Que sont les plateformes Episciences.org et Sciencesconf.org ?
Episciences.org
Episciences.org héberge des revues en Open Access (épi-revues) et permet la soumission des articles par un dépôt dans une archive ouverte (Episciences 2, 2019). Episciences.org diffuse une bibliothèque numérique ELPUB (ELectronic PUBlishing). Elpub présente les résultats de recherches sur différents aspects de l’édition numérique sur le plan culturel, économique, social, technologique, juridique, etc. ces résultats impliquent une communauté internationale diversifiée de chercheurs œuvrant, entre autres, dans les domaines des sciences et des sciences humaines et sociales, des bibliothécaires, des éditeurs (ELPUB, 2019).
D’ailleurs, l’on trouve une publication intitulée : Global OA APCs (APC) 2010–2017: Major Trends (Morrison, 2019) de Heather Morrison, chercheuse principale de Sustaining knowledge common. Cette diversité d’acteurs montre la diversité des contributions pour Hal archive.
Cette possibilité de faire des dépôts dans Episciences.org est une avancée majeure des publications en français par rapport aux plateformes en anglais qui sont récentes. Kathleen Shearer, al. (2019) présentent dans une récente l’approche Pubfair. En matière de communication scientifique, l’approche facilite le partage et la collaboration en ligne, tout en favorisant la transparence et la confiance dans les résultats de la recherche diffusés par le biais des services.
Pubfair est un cadre de publication ouvert qui permet la soumission, l’évaluation et à l’accès à une variété de résultats de recherche. Elle permet également aux utilisateurs de créer des canaux de diffusion pour divers groupes de parties prenantes (Kathleen Shearer, al., 2019, 6). Pour Heather Morrison, le cadre Pubfair est un excellent début pour une profonde transformation nécessaire dans la manière dont les universitaires travaillent ensemble et diffusent la recherche. C’est le type d’approche le plus susceptible de générer des économies importantes en fonction des dépenses actuelles consacrées à l’édition savante.
Sciencesconf.org.
Sciencesconf.org est une plateforme Web qui s’adresse aux organisateurs de colloques, ou réunions scientifiques. Elle facilite les différentes étapes du déroulement des conférences depuis la réception des communications jusqu’à l’édition des actes en passant par la relecture et la programmation des thématiques (Episciences 2, (2019).
Tableau 1 : Principaux types de documents
Tableau 2 : Principaux types de documents
Conclusion
Hal est une archive ouverte qui conserve des documents d’images, de revues, de thèse, etc. Elle facilite l’organisation de conférences scientifiques. Une revue africaine (Arima) y figure parmi une quinzaine de revues.
Bibliographie
Arima, (2019). Présentation – Revue africaine de la recherche en informatique et mathématiques appliquées. https://arima.episciences.org/
As pundits increasingly speculate about the likelihood and character of another recession, I’m thinking about the one from which we’re still recovering. Specifically, I’m thinking about a certain strain of American pop music—or a certain sentiment within pop music—that it seems to me accelerated and concentrated just after the 2008 financial collapse. This strain, which obviously co-existed with many other developments in popular music at the time, takes party songs and adds to them two interconnected narrative elements: on the one hand, partying is cranked up, escalated in one or multiple ways, moving the music beyond a party anthem and into something new. On the other hand, the rationale for such a move consistently derives from an attitude of compulsory presentism, in which the future is characterized as unknown, irrelevant, or is otherwise disavowed.
In the American context, the popular (and, I argue, misguided) take on the music of the great recession is that we didn’t have any—in other words, because no one was directly singing about the crisis, there was no music that responded to it. But this is an extremely limited way of understanding how music and socio-political life interact. In this post, I consider specifically American notions of mainstream party culture to argue that the strain of party music described above and below is the music of the crash, not because it literally speaks about it but because it reflects a certain attitude expressed and experienced by those at the front of both popular music listening at the time and the collapse itself: the graduating classes of 2008-2012.
By “party music” I do not mean (exclusively) music to which people party; rather, I am trying to trace what happens to music that is about partying during the crash. When I say that these songs transform from being party anthems into “something new,” what I mean is that in their extremeness, both the represented parties and the organizing affect of these parties reflect an urgency, a crisis, or a lack of choice condition. In short, what I’m calling “Post-Crash Party Music” (PCPP) responds to the 2008 financial collapse and the broader context of climate devastation by instituting a compulsory presentism that manifests through a frenetic, extreme, nihilistic celebration, a never-ending party that is also the last party (before the end of the world).
I’ll briefly mention two prime examples, both from what might be the peak year of this trend, 2010. First, Ke$ha’s single “(and #1 on Billboard’s Year-end Hot 100), “TiK ToK” sees Ke$ha brushing her teeth with a bottle of whiskey, while the last line in the chorus reveals why this is happening: Ke$ha sings, “The party don’t stop, no,” implying that the song’s narration picks up in a moment that could be any moment, an eternal present that is non-distinguishable from any other moment.
This line captures both of the defining characteristics of PCPP: 1) the party is extreme because 2) it never ends, or is always presently occurring. Although there are multiple ways of creating the eternal present that the party represents, each song in this category is invested in denying both past and future in a way that makes the presentist attitude of the partygoers a mandatory condition. This requirement is what makes PCPP more extreme, narratively, than party pop of previous eras.
As a second example, take The Black Eyed Peas’ quintessential party anthem “I Gotta Feeling.” Throughout most of the song, listeners are set up to experience what sounds like a fairly typical party jam: although the Black Eyed Peas render this joyous, optimistic track as perhaps more formally ‘perfect’ or effective than many of its competitors, it still follows a standard EDM format and a fairly conventional sentiment.
However, near the end of the track, as if responding to the pop-culture/post-crash landscape by afterthought, the Black Eyed Peas very casually disclose that the night that has all along been referenced as “tonight” is in fact every night: “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday/Friday, Saturday, Saturday to Sunday/Get, get, get, get, get with us, you know what we say, say/Party every day, p-p-p/Party every day, p-p-p [repeat 10x]…”
Party anthems of one kind or another have been with us for a long time. But I would argue that something else is going on here. The traditional ambition to party until the sun comes up or to party all night has been eclipsed by a more extreme goal, which is to never stop partying at all. In this new space, the time of day or the day of the week is irrelevant; time itself evaporates in the indistinguishable space of an everlasting present.
My argument here is that this music–specifically in its insistence on a party’s ceaselessness–represents almost the complete opposite of its expressed sentiments: that is, rather than rapturous or celebratory moods, PCPP reflects widespread existential and economic anxiety that is shared among the entire millennial generation, but which was acutely present for the classes that graduated college between 2008 and 2012. Its insistence on partying forever is indicative of this generation’s awareness that the future is bleak.
I am not arguing that PCPP harbors any ambitions to address any such anxieties; on the contrary, this music is, on its face, also an example of the much broader genre of neoliberal corporate pop music, a commodity that aims to utilize listener sentiments to maximize profit. That is why PCPP cuts across or includes such racial and gender diversity in its performers, and why it also corresponds to broader trends in pop that elevate and glamorize conspicuous, over-the-top consumption, the kinds of caricatured displays of spending-power that are hallmarks of PCPP as well as other mainstream genres. The discourse of an endless party is also a really good one in which to promote consumption―especially consumption that is taken to the extreme, or is justified through the logic of embracing “life” while we can.
No, from the perspective of the music industry, this music is not about anxiety but is, like all corporate music, still about including as many listener-customers as possible in the cross-branded spectacle of neoliberal pop. Instead, my claim is that this music, however inadvertently, resonates with listeners in a particular, affective way, and in the encounter between neoliberal pop music and a group of anxious American listeners, an accelerated sentiment emerges and spins itself out. We are still consuming, but endlessly so; and that very ceaselessness speaks to a deeper existential dread at the heart of our voracious appetites.
Emerging from this resonance between extreme party music and extreme anxiety are several traceable tropes, each expressing the ambition to party forever. For instance, the “don’t stop” imperative is often paired with the seemingly paradoxical sentiment that “we only have tonight”; but insofar as the end of that night heralds a return to reality (the post-crash landscape) one solution is to simply refuse to stop the party. In this way, the night can “last forever” within the space of the music. Taken together, the PCPP ethos can be summarized by the phrase, as a colleague recently put it, “right now forever.”
There is a specific construction at work here that allows PCPP to impose its presentist timespace: the forever-now is not extended out of joy, but rather out of necessity. By acknowledging that our time (out there) is limited, it constructs a space (in here) that resists normative flows of temporality. PCPP simply disallows temporality into its consciousness–it refuses to acknowledge the existence of a past and especially not a future. Here the “compulsory” element of its presentism emerges: it is compulsory both because within the affective space of the music, the rules do not allow temporality to exist, and because, when our futures have been irrevocably damaged, the present is, in effect, all that we will be allowed to experience.
There are many more examples from this period, all riffing on the same nihilistic affect: “Tomorrow doesn’t matter when you’re moving your feet” (Pixie Lott, “All About Tonight”); “This is how we live/every single night/take that bottle to the head and let me see you fly” (Far East Movement, “Like a G6”, 2010); “Still feelin’ myself I’m like outta control/Can’t stop now more shots let’s go” (Flo Rida, “Club Can’t Handle Me”, 2010). In this context, assurances from Lady Gaga that “It’s gonna be ok” if we “Just Dance” seem less hopeful and more ironic, as if born from denial.
Surely, some of these songs take up the “don’t stop” imperative simply by virtue of its ubiquitous circulation through a pop-culture economy (Junior Senior’s 2003 “Move Your Feet” comes to mind here). I am not arguing that any song that expresses such a generic utterance be considered a part of this post-crash formation; what it takes to qualify, it seems to me, is a distortion whereby the generic affect is pumped so full that it breaks something, a process that sometimes introduces a dark subtext into the music, but which no matter what displays elements of excess that go beyond the pale of a celebratory dance tune. Eddie Murphy’s “girl” wants to “Party All the Time”, but this alone doesn’t qualify the tune as an anxiety anthem because it is a source of hurt and stress for the speaker’s character—ceaseless partying here is sublimated into a narrative about a certain romantic relationship. What distinguishes PCPP, on the other hand, is the sense (however vague) that the “don’t stop” imperative is urgent, and meant to protect us from the world that is waiting outside the club.
PCPP differs in this way from other genres that consciously articulate a dissatisfaction (of whatever kind) with contemporary conditions. The millennial nihilism of an everlasting party is not the same as Gen X’s cynical malaise, which had more to do with resistance to meaningless corporate employment than it did the prospects of no employment at all. PCPP is not punk-rock anarchism nor grunge’s serious grappling with the consequences of capitalism on people’s mental health. PCPP is purely affective, a manic/cathartic punishment-therapy that does not need to denotatively speak of what’s happening in the world because that world is always already experienced in an extreme way. PCPP responds by dialing up the party to a degree of fervor that is correspondingly intense, able to drown out the noise, and it achieves this effect by turning parties into a paradox that is both time-limited and never-ending.
It is true that I have mostly focused on lyrics in this argument. But first of all, other factors also contribute to the sense of PCPP as existential: see for instance the music video for Britney Spears’ “Till the World Ends” (2011), which literalizes the argument I’m making by representing people dancing as the planet crumbles. Likewise, the music video for LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” (2011) casts the band’s beat as a contagion that has afflicted the “whole world,” compelling them to dance ceaselessly in a way that resonates appropriately with post-apocalyptic genres.
Second of all, the “music itself” never exists in isolation from the lyrics or indeed from any other element of a tune. What I would argue that the sounds and formal elements of these songs contributes to the PCPP ethos is a sense of tension and paradox: namely, the paradox between the stated dream of an unending party, and the reality that underlies said dream. It is, physically and otherwise, impossible to keep dancing indefinitely, a fact reflected in the form of this music, which still follows EDM rules of build-up and release, those forms that give one’s body time to rest and appropriate places to feel the natural climax of a song. The tension between the music (which corresponds to the body) and the lyrics (which aim into the afterlife) is the central contradiction that makes PCPP so e/affective.
Thus, the PCPP genre or sentiment, which flashes brightly from 2009-2012, meets its death in and through the track that most comprehensively embodies it: Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” (2013). In this deeply melancholic hit, PCPP is followed to its logical conclusion: those who at first refused to stop partying are now entirely incapable of doing so even if they wanted. This is the most extreme version of the PCPP worldview, so extreme that it spread into the music, inverting the entire affect from pumped-up party jam to down-tempo lament, a lament with almost no temporality even in its form.
Although my reading of “We Can’t Stop” differs from Robin James’s, her description perfectly captures the way that song’s form finally achieves the same presentism that PCPP’s lyrics always established, a closed world of “now”. In her 2015 book Resilience and Melancholy, James writes,
Just as the lyrics suggest that the ‘we’ is caught in a feedback loop it can’t stop, the music keeps spuriously cycling through verses and choruses without moving forward or backward…In other words, time isn’t a line, it’s Zeno’s paradox; not a pro- or re-gress but involution (177-178).
If anything, this formal stagnation or inverted affect brings “We Can’t Stop” into the space of the trap music it plays at, and constitutes one of the many ways in which the song cannot sustain its contradictions. As Kemi Adeyemi makes clear, trap music certainly has to do with partying; but its intersections with neoliberal capitalism are particular to Black lives in a way that is wholly different from Cyrus’ attempted deployment. Thus, reaching to trap for a PCPP affect has the devastating effect of exploding the entire sentiment.
In other words, “We Can’t Stop” exposes all the lies that PCPP, in its heyday, furthered: the idea that the party could continue indefinitely, and (by extension) so too could the “fairy tales of eternal economic growth” and the supposed post-racial utopia opened up by neoliberal capitalism. “We Can’t Stop” gives sound to these fictions, through its own form and in various ways: from its well-documented appropriation of Black culture, to the untenable contradiction at the heart of its sentiments. “We can do what we want” but we also “can’t stop.”
Rather than hearing this tune as “painfully dull” (180), this song has always been morbidly fascinating to me, a bleak statement about our inability to move past the moment in which we’re caught. In other words, our presentism is now also compulsory because we’ve gotten so used to it that we can no longer imagine a future at all, or at least not one in which catastrophe doesn’t occur; nor can we imagine the solutions that would help us when it does. Instead, we have the iPhone 11 and self-driving cars. Instead, we have an inverted yield curve and predictions of another (perpetually recurring) market crisis. Instead, we have billionaires doubling down, grabbing every last resource they can from the planet in order to insulate themselves from the effects they have created, a final and pathological shopping spree. Seen from that perspective, while it marked the end of PCPP as a trend, “We Can’t Stop” remains striking as both indictment and prophecy.
Dan DiPiero is a musician and Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio, where he teaches American popular culture and music history. His current book project investigates the relationship between improvisation in music and in everyday life through a series of nested comparisons, including case studies on the music of Eric Dolphy, John Cage, and contemporary Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K. His work has appeared in Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation, the collection Rancière and Music (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press), and boundary 2 online. He plays the drums.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
On October 10/11 2019 I presented our applied science project Make Media Great Again (MMGA) at the Post-Truth Society from Fake News, Datafication and Mass Surveillance to the Death of Trust conference on Malta; an initiative of new media teacher of the University of Malta and founding Director of the Commonwealth Centre for Connected Learning, Alec Grech. The Post-Truth conference included speakers from The Economist, Worldbank and Google.
In my talk I not only summarized how participatory journalism can be a cost-effective and inclusive solution for quality control in online publishing but also indicated how MMGA’s curated process leads to reciprocity and reflection.
The atmosphere on the Malta conference seemed a starting point for higher awareness and consciousness of the roles and responsibility all agents have on the internet when it concerns mis- or disinformation, the two pillars of fake news.
The very real impact of fake news on people lives was evident by at least two situations at the Post-Truth event. First a kaleidoscopic situation occurred when speaker and Iranian blogging pioneer who was imprisoned for 6 years, Hossein Derakhshan, held his talk named “Post-Enlightenment and the Personalization of Public Truths”; he was publically verbally attacked from the audience by co-speaker Maral Karimi who claimed that Derakhshan himself was guilty of spreading fake news that had supported people getting incarcerated or even worse.
Also, a moderator (and journalist) was under police surveillance during the event as he/she had key information concerning the offender(s) on the murdered Maltese Panama-papers journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia; a societal disruptive case due to the various investigations with an abundance of dubious reporting to the public. The social indignation concerning the handling of the Galizia case erupted at several unexpected moments on the event.
Fake news leads to real problems and is tied to social injustice. What can we do as citizens? Read my media-enriched talk below:
Public Rebuttal, Reflection and Responsibility – An Inconvenient Answer to Fake News
I’m co-founder of Make Media Great Again [3], shortened called MMGA, a Dutch non-profit initiative [4] focussed on providing a possible part of the solution concerning fake news. A Dutch project with an (according to some people) funny name [5] but with a serious mission.
And when I talk to my American friends [8] about Make Media Great Again they all agree what a great potential our endeavour has. But also they echo their main remark:
Change the name, change the name, change the name.
And to be fully honest to a large extent I must agree with this. Because for some reason, we keep getting enthusiastic emails with subjects such as: “Yeah let’s build that wall!” [9]
But nonetheless, we are not changing the name, not yet…
My personal realization for the need for MMGA started when I was confronted with “fake news” on the publicly funded national NOS website, the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation. For some of us, it might not be a surprise that a state-funded medium spreads wrong information but in the Netherlands people still put a lot of trust in them.
The case was quite remarkable. During election period the website reported that the frontman of the Labour party was asking questions in Parliament about ethnic profiling by the Dutch police. [11]
figure 1: example of misinformation on the website of the national Dutch Broadcasting Foundation concerning a political party asking Parliamentary questions concerning ethnic profiling by the Police in the Netherlands
After investigating the Parliament website and ultimately asking the Registry what these questions actually were, I got an email that the Labour Party did not at all had asked questions about ethnic profiling. It seemed that a female member of Parliament of the Democratic Party with a migration background had asked the relevant questions.
figure 2: update on Dutch Parliament website concerning the party and person that did ask questions concerning ethnic profiling by the Police in the Netherlands
This information could have impacted voting behaviour, at least it influenced mine. When I confronted the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation and asked if they would at least consider editing the headline of the concerning article the editor-in-chief responded agitated with the remark: “I’m not going to contribute to history falsification!”
How curious…
And how can anyone tell these days what is factually accurate and what isn’t? What is formulated to reveal and what is written to conceal or even to mislead? These are increasingly pressing questions, especially as a new historical round of disinformation is upon us and ‘fake news’ is flourishing in all its glory. Could critical readers help in improving the reliability of “our information”?
Our society would benefit from better news. Yet we don’t have the tools to improve this ourselves. This has changed with our open-source movement MMGA as we offer transparent tools for journalistic reporting. Where everyone can contribute and we invite everyone to join our cause. For a clearer world.
Up to 50,000 readers were involved in our first pilot, with candidates individually selected from the news organization’s readers’ commentary panel (their forum NUJij). From these readers, more than 300 are now registered as an annotator.
figure 3: screening, selection and training process overview
And from this group, we selected, screened, and trained knowledgeable and/or critical thinking readers to actually work on annotation assignments.
How we do it? Improving the quality of media through annotations? Well, we believe people have unique, diverse views and also relevant knowledge that helps the editorial process and quality. With our digital tools, people are able to detect misinformation, biased language and false contextualization. MMGA annotations are practicable suggestions, labelled notes, directly attributed to words, sentences or paragraphs. They are actionable for the editor, avoid debate based on personal preferences and, if correct, directly trigger a correction within articles.
Editors are free to implement or not. Because the annotations are immediately executable and based on the principle of journalistic objectivity, they overcome the known issue of lengthy debate due to subjectivity that arises with regular reader comments. The system differs from the well-known response form, whereby the reaction usually concerns disagreement with the online paper’s opinion or the tenor of the whole article. Annotations focus on specific elements of an article and are structured according to annotation labels. Our tests not only were to test the annotation system itself but also see how those involved respond to and work with it.
Furthermore, provided these annotations are clear, factually accurate and presented with proper transparency, they provide the necessary motivation for their immediate implementation, given that doing so will only improve the quality of the work in question.
Why we do it? To improve the credibility of media and strengthen the bond with their audience. The credibility of the media is being questioned more and more, whereas the media are seen as the first party to protect us from wrong information. This fundamental role of media is essential to enable proper functioning of democracy and constructive social debate, thus fortify social cohesion.
The potential of this idea goes beyond journalism; in fact, any organization or body that provides information as a ‘public service’ could benefit from it, be they governmental institutions or museums. And it is arguably becoming increasingly important to use the openness of the internet to facilitate the representation and participation of diverse and hitherto underrepresented groups in media and society at large.
Editorships, newsrooms and the army of opinion leaders typically reveal a skewed distribution in their composition with respect to gender and place of origin and residence, among other things. Whereas MMGA, with its “diversity panels” geared towards the nuanced use of language in journalism and its emphasis on multiple perspectives in reporting, holds the possibility of genuine balance. True quality is arguably impossible without diversity. We find it important that our group of annotators is as diverse as possible. Men, women, people from various ethnic backgrounds and minorities of all sorts. This minimises the chance of overlooking particular contexts. A more diverse group can, according to scientific research ([12] see pages, 21, 31 and 38), improve the quality of news offerings and build trust in the sources of these offerings. Trust, in particular, is now one of the major issues in mainstream journalism. The study that yielded the findings involved globally recognized names such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC and, last but not least, The Guardian. We, therefore, invite anyone who shares our concerns and wants to help to contact us [13].
The fact that media organizations themselves are beginning to admit the need to fight fake news to maintain their readership’s trust opens the door for collaborations. And this is how we hope to work, too. After all, the idea isn’t to destroy existing organizations but to improve the quality of what they produce.
So there you have it! MMGA is cost-effective (because we mainly work with volunteers) and a value-added layer of contributors who create a safety net against misinformation, thus giving the hardcore fake news no change. We collaborate with universities, well-known investigative journalists and impactful media for a maximum reach [14]. Solution found it’s even politically correct because it’s all-inclusive… Yep, case closed… Couldn’t anybody else come up with this? Oh well. No problem, we got it covered…
At least… we thought. Before the post-truth reality punched me in the face!
An American alternate history television series [16] depicting a parallel universe where the Axis powers (Rome–Berlin–Tokyo-axis) win World War II – so the Nazis and their partners won instead of the Allies. It is produced by Amazon Studios and based on Philip K. Dick‘s 1962 science fiction novel of the same name [17]. Dick is popularly known as the writer of the books behind movies as Blade Runner and Minority report.
So back to me and the series. During the period I’m binge-watching the series I’m using Facebook and there – for some reason – I’m directed to a journalistic looking Facebook-post with the purport that Bill and Melinda Gates are not trying to save the world from malaria or polio but instead actually are testing experimental medicines (on behalf of large pharmaceutical companies) on poor Indian kids…just like the Nazi’s would do!
But then I remembered MMGA’s code of conduct, inspired by the journalistic ethical code the Bordeaux Declaration, multiple Dutch guidelines concerning journalism and prevention of improper influencing by conflicts of interest and last but not least the Five Pillars of Wikipedia. Our first directive states:
“Your annotations are based on facts for which you can indicate a reliable source (which thus are verifiable and can be held accountable), as completely as possible and regardless of the opinions expressed about this source.”
I couldn’t even find one reliable source backing up the claims made in the Facebook-post. Thus even so how much I felt I was obliged to spread this “news” I also did not want to have the responsibility for an unverifiable article.
And this reminded me of the results of one of the first MMGA tests we conducted concerning our Trustmark on 500 random internet users. The Trustmark signifies and guarantees that all articles are under audit of an independent community, sources are easily viewable to the public and any alterations to the article are also tracked and viewable by the public.
figure 5: test results adoption indication MMGA Trustmark
To create more transparency and trust. From our survey with these 500 readers, nine out of ten stated they experience an article with a Trustmark as more trustworthy. Also, more than 6 out of ten were likely to share an article with a trust mark.
figure 6: overall function MMGA Trustmark
So what will happen when people become more aware when such trustmarks are missing in the article they are reading? Would they be more conscious when they are sharing unmarked articles?
Without the network effects of the Internet wrong information would probably have the same damaging effects as simple “false gossip” in the contained context of let’s say a school class. We are keen to look at platforms such as Facebook and news media like the Dutch Broadcasting Foundation as guilty parties for the fake news problem. And reach for all kinds of tech-related solutions to save us.
But based on my own Man in the High Castle experience I suspect we still need to make a leap in our societal consciousness if we are going to survive this post-truth era:
“We are not merely using the technical infrastructure of the internet, as if it is something outside of us. Beyond our own power and responsibility. We are an integral and decisive part, the living nodes, of this global information network.”
figure 7: Quote of Daphne Caruana Galizia at the protest memorial in Valetta on the night before the conference
And therefore the name of our organisation stays as it is. To remind us of the easily overlooked fact, another inconvenient truth, that we all individually have to play our part – as reflective and responsible citizens – to make media great again.
Figure 8: MMGA co-founder Ruben Brave being interviewed at the post-truth conference “From Fake News, Datafication and Mass Surveillance to the Death of Trust” held 10-11 October 2019 in Valetta on Malta. Copyright photo’s by Harry Anthony Patrinos, Practice Manager World Bank for Europe’s and Central Asia’s education global practice.
According to the Asian Network for Scientific Information (ANSInet) website, the article processing charges (APCs) for almost all the listed journals dropped from 625 USD in 2018 to 325 USD in 2019 which is 48 percent decrease. Only the ‘International Journal of Pharmacology’ dropped from 1000 USD to 625 USD, about a 38 percent decrease. On the contrary, two journals experienced a slight increase for their article processing charges (APCs) from 250 USD to 275 USD. This is good news for authors who do not have enough funding but try to publish through Asian Network for Scientific Information (ANSInet). From the journal number perspective, 3 new journals have been added in the Asian Network for Scientific Information (ANSInet).
ANSInet is included in our study as this publisher was formerly in DOAJ. ANSInet no longer listed in DOAJ now; we do not know whether this publisher did not complete the re-application process or if ANSInet applied and was not accepted.
Abstract De Gruyter is a well-known traditional academic publisher with 270 years of experience. We first noted the dramatic expansion of De Gruyter into open access publishing in 2016 (French: Dumais-DesRosiers, M. & Brutus, W. (2016); English: Morrison (2016). In 2014, there were no De Gruyter titles listed in DOAJ; by the end of 2015, De Gruyter was the third largest publisher in DOAJ. In 2019, De Gruyter’s expansion into open access is even more remarkable, primarily through De Gruyter’s new imprint Sciendo, which has added more than 300 OA journals in 2019. The majority of De Gruyter / Sciendo journals (57%) do not charge APCs. In many cases we were not able to ascertain whether or not there is a fee.
Details Both De Gruyter and Sciendo publish journals through either Open Access or Paid access model.
The analysis of Open Access journals for these two publishers reveal that especially Sciendo is expanding its number of open access journals significantly, as almost 300 new journals were added to their database in 2019 alone.
Out of the new journals, 33 titles were published for the first time in 2019.
A deeper glance into the list of Sciendo journals shows that most of them are published through collaboration with different universities and academic societies and institutions in Europe.
There is not a clear pattern for pricing model of open access journals for authors by Sciendo. About 57 percent of the open access journals published by Sciendo are free of charge to publish in for authors, while almost 14 percent charge processing fees to publish articles. We were unable to find information regarding the rest of the journals.
For the open access journals with article processing charge (APC) model, the range of processing fees was approximately 50 Euros to 1000 Euros, depending on the journals in which the authors want to publish their articles (To write this blog post, we converted the cost from local currencies to Euros).
On the other, there were less changes in De Gruyter open access journals, though we found 21 new journals in the list of their journals comparing to the previous year. The data regarding their publishing model could be seen in the following chart.
For the journals with article processing charge model, the range was almost between 500 to 2000 Euros, with the average cost about 1000 Euros.
On a side note, there were some journals that were transferred between De Gruyter and Sciendo as the publisher, so it could be beneficial to authors and people who are interested in finding journals if De Gruyter was more clear in pointing out this on their website.
For a number of semesters, I invited composition students to explore the idea of using the mixtape as a lens for envisioning a writing assignment about themselves. Initially called “The Mixtape Project,” this auto-ethnographical assignment employed philosophies from various scholars, but focused on Jared Ball and his concept of the mixtape as “emancipatory journalism.” In I Mix What I Like!: A Mixtape Manifesto, Ball pushed readers to imagine the mixtape as a counter-systematic soundbombing, circumventing elements of traditional record industry copyright practices (2011).
Essentially, a DJ could use a myriad of songs from different artists and labels to curate a mixtape with a desired theme and overarching message, then distribute the mixtape as a “for promotional use only” artifact. Throughout the 1980s, but predominantly in the 1990s and early 2000s, many DJs used mixtapes as the medium to promote their DJ brands and generate income. It wasn’t long before labels began to give hip-hop DJs record deals to release “album-style” mixtapes where the DJs record original content from artists made specifically for the DJ album (see DJ Clue, Funkmaster Flex, Tony Touch). This idea evolved into producer-based compilation albums, best depicted today by global icon DJ Khalid. Rappers also hopped on the mixtape wave, using the medium to jump-start their careers, create a “street buzz” around their music, and ultimately gauge the success of certain songs to craft and promote upcoming albums.
Image by Flickr User Backpackerz: “K7 mixtape – Exposition Hip Hop, du Bronx aux rues arabes (Institut du monde arabe)” (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The assignment revolved around mixtape framework in the earlier portion of my teaching career. Most recently, I began to realize as my students evolve (and I simultaneously age), that the “mixtape” – a sonic artifact distributed on cassette tape or CD – is becoming more remote to students. This thinking led to revising the assignment with a more contemporary twist. Thus, “The Playlist Project” was born: the first in a set of four major writing projects in a first-year writing classroom. The ultimate goal of the assignment was to immediately disrupt students’ relationships with academic writing, and to help them (re)envision the ways they embrace some of the cultural capital they value in college classrooms. Be clear, this was a particular type of mental break for students, a shift that was welcomed yet also uncomfortable for them.
“I Get It How I Live It”: Framing and Foregrounding the Assignment Set-Up
The course started with readings on plagiarism, intertextuality, and the hip-hop DJ’s use of sampling, curating, and storytelling. Next were readings by hip-hop artists describing their creative process and detailing their artistic choices sonically. These early readings helped pivot students from their stereotypical notions of what college writing courses – and writing assignments – looked like, and how they could enter scholarly discourse around composing. This conversation was foregrounded in students’ knowledge that they bring with them into the new academic space in the college classroom. My goal was to really focus on student-centered learning and culturally relevant pedagogy; ideally, if you are immersed in hip-hop music and culture, I want you to share that knowledge with the class. This sharing begins to create a community of thinking peers instead of a classroom with an English professor and a bunch of students who have to take the course “cuz it’s required in the Gen Ed, so I can’t take anything else ‘til I pass this!”
My research is entrenched in both hip-hop pedagogy and culture, specifically looking at the DJ as 21st century new media reader and writer. I liken my role as instructor to that of the DJ: a tastemaker and curator for the ways we understand sonic sources we know, and couple them with new and necessary soundbites that become critical to the cutting edge of the learning we need. I’ve engaged in the craft of DJing for more than half of my life, and use DJ practices as pedagogical strategies in my classroom environments.
The outcome of this curatorial moment was “the Playlist Project.” Students were asked to create their own playlists, which served as mixtapes that either “described the writer as a person” or “depicted the soundtrack to the writer’s perfect day.” This assignment was due during Week 6 of a 16-week semester, and was the first major writing assignment within the course. The assignment called for two specific parts: an actual playlist of the songs and an essay which served as a meta-text, describing not only the songs, but also the reasons why the songs were chosen and sequenced in a specific order. As an example, the guiding text we used was a DJ mixtape I created called “Heavy Airplay, All Day.”
“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: DJ Mixtape by Todd Craig
My playlist was a DJ-crafted tribute to a family friend who passed away in the summer of 2017: Albert “Prodigy” Johnson, Jr. Hearing the news of his untimely death reverberated through my psyche on that warm June afternoon; I remember meeting Prodigy when I was 15 years old. Many avid hip-hop listeners not only know Prodigy as one of the signature vocalists of the 1990s New York hip-hop sound, but also as one of the premier lyricists responsible for a shift in sonic content from emcees in New York and globally. His voice is one of the most sampled in hip-hop music.
One of the most anticipated moments of the mid 1990’s was the release of Prodigy’s first solo album, H.N.I.C. P was already shaking the industry with his lethal and bone-chilling visuals in his verses. But everyone knew he was on his way to dominance upon hearing the single “Keep it Thoro.” On this Alchemist-produced record, P basically broke industry rules in regards to typical hip-hop song construction; his verses were longer than the traditional 16-bar count, and the song had no chorus.
He returned to hip-hop basics: hard-hitting rhymes with undeniable visuals served atop a sonic landscape that kept everyone’s head nodding. P ends the song with the classic line “and I don’t care about what you sold/ that shit is trash/ bang this – cuz I guarantee that you bought it/ heavy airplay all day with no chorus/ I keep it thoro” (Prodigy 2000).
It was only right for me to create a tribute mixtape for Prodigy. And it felt right to start the Fall 2017 semester with the Playlist Project that used a shared text that celebrated and honored his memory. It highlighted the soundtrack to my perfect day: having my friend back to rewind all the memories that come with every song.
Fan Memorial to Prodigy, Image by Flickr User Nick Normal (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
“I Got a New Flex and I Think I Like It”: (Re)inventing Mixtape Sensibilities in the Comp Classroom
The Playlist Project was aimed at achieving three different outcomes. The first goal was to invite students to use audio sources to envision a soundscape that explains a thread of logic. These sonic sources would hold as much value in our academic space as text-based sources, and would allow them to (re)envision what “evidence-based academic writing” looks like. Thus, students could utilize their own cultural capital to negotiate sound sources of their choosing.
The second was to get students to use DJ framework to think about sorting, sequencing and organization in writing. In our class discussions, one of the critical objectives was to get students to understand the sequencing of divergent sound sources could drastically alter the story one is trying to tell. Overall aspects of mood, tone, and pacing all become critical components of how a message is expressed in writing, but it becomes even more evident when thinking about the sonic sources used by a DJ. Each song – a source in and of itself – is a piece of a puzzle that constructs a picture and tells a story. Starting with one source can create a completely different effect if it is reconfigured to sit in the middle or the end. Explaining these sonic choices in text-based writing would be the second step in the assignment.
Finally, students would engage in editing by joining both sound and text based on a theme they have selected. Again, sequencing becomes a critical DJ tool translated into the comp classroom. Using this pedagogical strategy echoes the ideas of using DJ techniques such as “blends” and “drops” as viable teaching tools (see Jennings and Petchauer 2017). Students would need to critically think through an important question: in creating the playlist, how does one manipulate and (re)configure sound to create a sonic landscape that “writes” its own unique story?
DJ Sai by Flickr User Mixtribe (CC BY 2.0)
“But Does It Go In the Club?”: Outcomes and Initial Findings of The Playlist Project
The first iteration of the Playlist Project bore mixed results. Students found it difficult to think of this project as one whole assignment consisting of three different parts. Instead, they envisioned each of the three different pieces as isolated assignments. So the playlist was one part of the assignment. They picked the songs they liked, however ordering and sequencing to convey a logical theme or argument fell from the forefront of their composing. The essay then became its own piece divorced from the organic creation of the playlist. Thus, students weren’t “engaged in telling the story of the playlist.” Instead, students were making a playlist, then summarizing why their playlists contained certain songs.
For students who were more successful integrating the elements of the assignment, we were able to have rich and fruitful classroom conversations about both selection and sequencing. For example, one student chose the theme of “the Soundtrack to the Perfect Day.” Within that theme, the student chose the song “XO TOUR Llif3” by Lil Uzi Vert.
In the song’s hook, he croons “push me to the edge/ all my friends are dead/ push me to the edge/ all my friends are dead” (Vert 2017). When this song came up in class discussion, we were able to have a formative conversation around the idea that a perfect day entailed all of someone’s friends being “dead.” This also sparked a conversation about the double meaning of the quote; it didn’t stem from traditional print-based sources, but instead arose from a student-generated idea based in the cultural capital of the classroom community. In this moment, I was able to learn more from students about the meteoric rise in relevance of both the artist and the song which seemed to depict an extreme darkness.
“Big Big Tings a Gwaan”: Future Tweaks and Goals for The Playlist Project
Moving forward with this assignment, I have considered breaking the assignment up into three pieces for more introductory composition courses: constructing the playlist, sequencing the playlist, and writing the meta-text. In this configuration, the meta-text would truly become the afterthought (instead of the forethought) of the sonic creation. As well, more in-depth soundwriting could emanate from the playlist construction, manipulation, (re)sequencing and editing. I also plan to use the assignment with a more advanced-level composition course to gauge if the assignment unfolds differently. Using an upper-level course to attain the trajectory of the assignment may be helpful in walking backwards to calibrate the assignment for students in introductory-level classes.
Another objective will be to move away from just a “playlist” and back into a “digital mixtape” format, where the playlist songs and sequencing become the fodder for a one-track, “one-take” DJ-inspired mixtape. While students don’t have to be DJs, creating a singular sonic moment digitally may imbed students in marrying the idea of soundwriting to depicting that sonic work in a meta-text. This work may also engage students in constructing sonic meta-texts, thereby submersing themselves in soundwriting practices. This work can be done in Audacity, GarageBand and any other software students are familiar with and comfortable using.
—
Featured Image: By Flickr User Gemma Zoey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
—
Dr. Todd Craigis a native of Queens, New York: a product of Ravenswood and Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City. He is a writer, educator and DJ whose career meshes his love of writing, teaching and music. Craig’s research examines the hip-hop DJ as twenty-first century new media reader and writer, and investigates the modes and practices of the DJ as creating the discursive elements of DJ rhetoric and literacy. Craig’s publications include the multimodal novel tor’cha, a short story in Staten Island Noir and essays in textbooks and scholarly journals including Across Cultures: A Reader for Writers, Fiction International, Radical Teacher and Modern Language Studies. He was guest editor of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education for the special issue “Straight Outta English” (2017). Craig is currently working on his full-length manuscript entitled “K for the Way”: DJ Literacy and Rhetoric for Comp 2.0 and Beyond. Dr. Craig has taught English Composition within the City University of New York for over fifteen years. Presently, Craig is an Associate Professor of English at Medgar Evers College, where he serves as the Composition Coordinator and City University of New York Writing Discipline Council co-chair.
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
